Why Is WWE Bringing Up Ric Flair's Dead Son?

When Charlotte began sobbing in the middle of the ring on Monday, it became clear something was deeply wrong. As WWE women's champion and daughter of all-time legend Ric Flair, Charlotte is a bit polarizing. She's a talented performer, but not so much better than her peers that she can stave off claims of favoritism. Certainly she's not (yet) good enough at the theatrical part of her job to cry like that on demand.

So let's assume that Charlotte was crying because her feud with the heelish Paige had suddenly come to involve her dead brother, Reid. Until Monday, the feud was pretty standard WWE stuff: former friends, a jealous former champion, and lots of taunts. On Monday, in a promo that could charitably be described as tasteless and which is maybe more accurately described as gratuitously cruel, Charlotte wasn't just Charlotte anymore, or even Ric Flair's daughter. She was Reid Flair's sister. Reid Flair, who struggled to make it as a pro wrestler despite being very well-regarded as an amateur. Reid Flair, who sparked briefly into wrestling's consciousness as a boy when he showed up as WCW's heat death began. Reid Flair, who died of a heroin overdose in 2013. That was the person Paige was talking about, and the reason Charlotte was crying. But, good lord, why?

After she composed herself, Charlotte said that her whole family were fighters, including Reid. To which Paige replied that he wasn't that much of a fighter, since he was dead and all. Punches flew, tackles and kicks were exchanged, and wrestling fans were—well, they were mortified, if social media and wrestling news sites are anything to go by.

Wrestling has a long history of using the dead to further its storylines. This is, after all, a business where the real is used to fuel the unreal, where fans howl for blood while hoping nobody actually gets hurt. Invocations of the deceased accompany any recitation of a title's history. WWE periodically runs videos about its own past, and those clips of ghosts from grainy UHF feeds can read like broadcasts from beyond.

This obsession with death can be shamelessly specific. Big Show was billed as Andre the Giant's son when he debuted, despite Andre's death and a complete lack of any resemblance beyond "these are both big guys." After Paul Bearer's death, CM Punk taunted the Undertaker with an urn of his former manager's ashes; he later spilled them, of course. Most famously, Eddie Guerrero's family and friends were subjected to several tasteless angles involving his death, with Randy Orton at one point telling Rey Mysterio that Guerrero was burning in Hell. All spectacularly tasteless stuff, and all par for the course for pro wrestling.

Monday's Reid Flair incident, however, was on another level of vulgarity. The circumstances of Reid Flair's death remain an open question, and it's doubtful that casual fans even know his name at all. This was not a ratings play, in other words, but it's tough to say what it was at all. References to Reid's death are extremely inside baseball. Beyond the brief, fiery recognition that a dead man was being discussed, WWE had nothing to gain by this unless it plans to go all in on a Reid Flair retrospective, which would probably only compound the disgust.

More to the point, Reid Flair never was a WWE employee. He was only briefly a pro wrestler at all, working primarily for the end-stage NWA and a few NJPW dates. Whatever his aspirations, he was at the edge of the carny atmosphere of big time professional wrestling. Eddie Guerrero may have been dead when Randy Orton talked about his sufferings in hellfire, but Guerrero belonged in a way Reid Flair never did. It's at least plausible that Guerrero wouldn't have minded—that he knew how WWE operated.

By contrast, Ric Flair wasn't even asked about the references to his son beforehand, and he's plainly gutted by it. Reid's mother is furious. Ric thinks Charlotte was pressured into it, that she doesn't have the clout backstage to say no. That implies some truly awful workplace pressures at WWE, which otherwise tries so hard to make certain everyone knows how clean, safe, and corporate it is now.

There's another historical footnote to this. Shortly after Reid Flair's death, his father attended a launch event for WWE 2K14's release, hosted by the makers of the game and the legendary WWE announcer Jim Ross. Ross moderated a panel of luminaries who chatted about the old days.

Flair dominated the proceedings. He'd had too much to drink and he rambled, moving from road stories to Reid's death. He cried. He related that he'd put his WWE Hall of Fame ring on his son's hand before closing the casket. Ric Flair was so tired, so vulnerable, so heartbroken, so old that it burned. He was as close to being broken as a man could be at the time and he let it out in public, as wrestlers so often do.

For not maintaining control of the proceedings and bringing undue scrutiny to WWE, Jim Ross was fired and Ric Flair temporarily banished.

This was infuriating at the time and it's made all the more so by the exchange between Charlotte and Paige on Raw. The message is muddy, but its cruelty is plain: do not spill your emotions uncontrolled in a WWE setting; they belong to us, just like you do, and we will channel them for our ends. Talk about Reid in the hopes of ratings, but don't you dare do it when you're a little too drunk and a little too sad at one of our events.

Monday wasn't about whether you have the stomach for the edgy stuff pro wrestling so often presents, or even really about whether dead men are acceptable fodder for tales of spandex and blood. We're well past the point where the deceased are verboten. Monday was about WWE brass going out of its way to display the opposite of common decency toward people they consider employees and even friends. WWE's antiseptic corporate entertainment brand was shown for what it actually is: an illusion. This is a place still run by carnival barkers and madmen.

It was the kind of night that made you feel what wrestling's critics think you should feel for watching: embarrassed, angry, and wondering if maybe the critics have it right.