Like a lot of people I am excited about the forthcoming Ric Flair DVD volume 1. I say “volume 1” because there is too much good stuff left out for them not to have a second release planned. Unlike the Hogan DVD’s unforgivable decision to dismiss his six year WCW spell in five minutes, this disc doesn’t try to pretend that Ric Flair was anything other than an NWA / WCW legend. The complete line-up is available elsewhere on the net and probably doesn’t do the disc justice anyway. A list of a dozen matches which are probably very good for their time (and have probably aged a lot better than 95% of that decade’s stuff) but which don’t quite get me excited. No, it’s a little bit in the small print which interests me. It promises the build up to those matches. The angles, the interviews and the hype. In those days, television was all hype. It wasn’t “action adventure sports entertainment” and a product in its own right. It existed to sell tickets and entertain the viewers. In that order. To see how the original Starrcade was sold to the good burgers of the Carolinas is what interests me. To hear the commentary (assuming they don’t get Michael Cole and Tazz to re-voice the footage as a sleight on Tony Shiavone) and really get a feel for an era long since gone.

Some years ago I found some tapes called “Superstar USA Championship Wrestling” in one of those cheap video shops that popped up (I think it was called 4-Play or 4-Front or something like that). Each tape was about a fiver and featured one Mid Atlantic tv show from 1983. Whoever edited the shows used a rusty razor blade and removed the interviews but even the squash matches – with the likes of Bob (father of Randy) Orton, Dick Slater, the Assassins and many others – with their period commentary fascinated me. It is one thing to be aware that the main event of Starrcade 83 was Ric Flair vs Harley Race for the NWA World Title. It is quite another to understand why that was the match that everyone wanted to see. It is a fact that I am more interested in wrestling past than wrestling present. Not because I am a snob who thinks that old is perfect and new is trash. It’s more because I want to understand old time wrestling. What made it tick in an age before high spots, scripted comedy and PPV calibre weekly TV shows. I understand wrestling present – I know how it works and why it works (or at least I think I do which is more or less the same thing for purposes of this column) while the past remains a tantalising mystery.

Back to the Flair set and its choice of matches. One that leaps out is Ric Flair vs. Sting. Now, it wouldn’t be a Ric Flair DVD set if it didn’t have Flair vs Sting. A feud which ran off and on for thirteen years (first match March 1988, final match March 2001) and which is represented here by Flair vs Sting in the WCW vs International title unification match from 1994. Arguably the least memorable Flair vs Sting match, its inclusion can only be because it is just about the only time Sting put Flair over (and that was only because Hogan wanted to beat Flair for the old NWA/WCW belt which had become the International title rather than the rather generic WCW title belt which was around in 91-94). In those days Flair was reliant on Sherri Martel to run interference for him. What the modern fans will make of this we can only guess. The 1988 match would’ve been a better choice (although there is a rumour that this match is missing from the archives for unknown reasons). But this is a minor quibble – the chosen match is important in its own way and will be an interesting spectacle (especially to see how the announcers promoted Hogan’s imminent WCW arrival).

We get two Flair vs Steamboat matches. Their legendary trilogy is etched on wrestling folklore. The greatest series of matches of all time. It is a little disappointing that we don’t get all three just to follow the rivalry from start to finish. Hopefully we’ll get highlights just to get us in the mood.

The Terry Funk feud is covered too with the I Quit blow off match from Clash of the Champions. It is hard to comprehend that the Funk feud and the Steamboat feud took place in the same year. That would be like the entire Austin vs McMahon and Austin vs Rock feud both taking place in 1998. The sweet technical science of Steamboat, the wild brawling of Funk and the intense emotion of the NWA fans. It doesn’t get much better than 1989. WWF meanwhile were giving us No Holds Barred hype and the total annihilation of Randy Savage. Imagine if Savage had been in the NWA in 1989…

The danger of a set like this is that modern fans will get their first chance to see what made Ric Flair a legend. They will get to see – for themselves – the realities of Flair as a performer and the relatively spartan wrestling world that he dominated. No ladders, no 20,000 seater arenas, no pyro or Titantrons. No Jim Ross barking clichés. This was an age where things were slower, things were done for logical reasons rather than just to pop a momentary rating and things were done in such a way that wrestling remained a sport (at least within its own bubble). Will mark fans come away thinking that Flair isn’t the all time great that they are lead to believe? Will they be disappointed by what they see? Or will he give them a new respect for wrestling the pseudo-sport rather than the sports entertainment they have grown up with?

I’ll be buying it the moment I can get my badly nibbled fingers on it (ditto the Steel Cage DVD set coming out this month) and I hope that I’m not disappointed. Because at the end of the day I’m not worried that the modern mark fans will be let down by seeing Ric Flair in his prime, I’m worried that I will be disillusioned.