Ric Flair Is Threatening To Sue Grantland Over "Falsehoods" In Their Story, Even Though The "Falsehoods" Came From Flair's Book

WOOOO, boy. TMZ reports that Ric Flair, noted pro wrestler, is weighing his legal options against Grantland, Bill Simmons' sports-prose panacea, after the site published a long piece this week by Shane Ryan on Flair's legal trouble.

A little bit of research indicates that Flair's proposed lawsuit might be frivolous, at least with regard to his explicit objection. The medical condition he says they made up, he wrote about in his autobiography.

Here's the statement Flair's rep gave TMZ:

While the information gleaned from courthouse records may be credible, Mr. Fliehr is currently evaluating his legal options with respect to falsehoods in the story, specifically the untrue statement that he suffers from alcoholic cardiomyopathy.

Grantland didn't give a source for the accusation in the piece, although it might have come from Flair's autobiography, To Be The Man.

In his piece, Ryan wrote, "He's called [Richard Fliehr] on the paychecks from Total Nonstop Action, a second-tier outfit where he's still compelled to perform despite suffering from alcoholic cardiomyopathy, and where almost everything he earns goes toward old debts."

In Flair's autobiography, he wrote,

"Through my many years of partying, I also developed something called "alcoholic cardiomyopathy," a weakening of heart muscles. I first detected that there was something wrong when my heart began skipping beats. I went to a cardiologist friend who told me that when your heart pumps, it expands to a rubber band. But mine was doing it too much.

So, yeah, sloppy attribution doesn't mean libel, Nature Boy. Consider a Dear Grantland instead? They did get the date of your plane crash wrong.

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