Ric Flair Doesn’t Think It Was The Right Move To Have Finn Bálor Beat Roman Reigns

Since the advent of the pro wrestling podcast, wrestling personalities have been rubbing fans the wrong way with their hot takes. From Vince Russo to Jim Ross to Jim Cornette, there always seems to be some snippet of podcast takery that leaves fans up in arms. Well, hot on the heels of claiming steroids are no big deal, Ric Flair is back with another tantalizing tidbit on the latest episode of The Ric Flair Show.

Although many fans were delighted about Finn Bálor defeating Roman Reigns on Raw and moving on to challenge Seth Rollins for the new WWE Universal Championship at SummerSlam, Flair didn’t think it was a good move. His main rationale was that as a “smaller” star, there’s no chance for Finn to headline a WrestleMania, so what are we even wasting time for with this? Here’s what Flair had to say about the situation (transcript via Wrestling Inc.):

“If I’m looking at what’s going to draw money, what I would pay to see, I would pay to see Dolph against Ambrose before I’d pay to see Finn Bálor against Seth Rollins, so I think it’s phenomenal. I think Finn Bálor is great too. I just think you’ve got a legitimate heavyweight in Seth Rollins, a legitimate heavyweight in Roman Reigns, and I don’t think we’ll ever see the day, and I could be totally wrong, that a cruiserweight will ever main event a WrestleMania. And that’s what you have to look at, I think, in the total picture of the [professional wrestling] business.” Flair added, “he’s of that [cruiserweight] size. I mean, if you look at the two of them side by side, he [has] got a great physique, gosh, but he’s smaller. Yeah, I don’t think he weighs 200 pounds.”

He’s right! In the sense that Bálor doesn’t weigh 200 pounds, I mean. He is billed at 190. And I mean … correct me if I’m wrong here, but they didn’t really play up any size disparity during the actual match, right? Sure, Reigns tossed Finn around a lot, because he’s a bruiser and he IS a bit bigger (although not significantly so, I don’t feel). And Reigns making Bálor’s (extremely high impact) offense look powerful never seemed silly or unrealistic. See also: the Fatal Four-Way match earlier in the evening on Raw.

I’ve personally never understood the argument that Bálor might be perceived as a cruiserweight, but I guess I’m also not the type of person that would care about that one way or the other. And come on, the guy has an ancient Irish demon inhabiting his body. That’s gotta count for something in the weight department.

No one wants to tell Ric Flair that “smaller” stars like Shawn Michaels and Daniel Bryan have already successfully headlined WrestleMania, right?

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