Charlotte Flair got booed in her hometown last night. But did she really have to lose?
I would love to have been inside of Charlotte Flair’s head on Tuesday night.
It’s just ... I wonder.
I mean, I realize that professional wrestling, as staged by the WWE, is basically a combination of exhibitionist athleticism and Broadway theater, part circus performance and part daytime soap opera. No one really believes it’s real anymore; it’s all in good fun.
But I’ve spoken with Charlotte Flair (neé Ashley Flier) before; I’ve read her memoir (“Second Nature”); I know there’s a human being underneath all of that bluster and bravado, one who has insecurities and sensitivities and emotions and who, as much as anything else, has a deep love and respect for her hometown. (So much so that, despite her global superstardom, she shunned bigger and glitzier metropolises to move back to south Charlotte a year and a half ago.)
Which begs the question: What must it have felt like Tuesday night, during WWE’s live broadcast of “SmackDown Live” on the USA network, for Charlotte Flair to get booed by a Spectrum Center crowd that would have — under other circumstances — been wholly friendly?
Just 15 months ago, Flair was at the same venue when she won her first WWE SmackDown Live women’s championship under those “other circumstances.” Then a card-carrying “good guy,” the city that inspired her stage name was behind her 100 percent. And just when you didn’t think the crowd could get any more electric, her father showed up to help her celebrate.
She ran to “Nature Boy” Ric Flair, locking him in a powerful embrace as they both wept. The crowd roared.
In recent months, however, the WWE has manufactured storylines that have gradually turned Charlotte Flair into a heel. That’s pro-wrestling-speak for a “bad guy.” A villain. Someone you’re supposed to boo.
So boo fans did on Tuesday night, when Flair climbed into the ring midway through the telecast and went full heel while doing a promo for next week’s episode of “Monday Night Raw.” I don’t want to get too far into the weeds on this (or, should I say, the WWEeds), but the long and short of it is that Flair mocked rival Becky Lynch for a recent “arrest” that led to her being “suspended” by the WWE, and then Flair mocked rival Ronda Rousey for appearing to relinquish her title belt to protest Lynch’s “arrest.”
At one point, the crowd — and again, remember, this is a crowd that should be predisposed to love Charlotte Flair — chanted “Beh-KEE, Beh-KEE, Beh-KEE, Beh-KEE” as a snub to Flair. She sneered. “Are you finished?”
Booooooooooooo.
She doubled down: “They fear me. And fear makes you do irrational things. ... I fear nothing. And a true champion fears no one.”
BOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. But beneath the sneer and that evil grin and that “Are you finished?,” I wondered if Flair might have been at least a tiny little bit disappointed or sad. After all, it’s one thing to get booed in Des Moines, Iowa, or Worcester, Mass., or Fresno, Calif. ... but, I mean, she named herself after this city. Getting booed here probably isn’t a dream come true for her.
She’d certainly rather hear WOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooo!’s than boos.
And while there were plenty of woooos to go around Tuesday — the utterances of her father’s famous catchphrase could be heard bouncing off the arena walls throughout the night — I suspect Flair wishes there had been more by the time she re-entered the ring for her SmackDown women’s championship challenge against Asuka in the final match of the event.
Yes, for the record, Flair did fight in Charlotte. If you watched “SmackDown Live” on television, you might not know this, because it took place nearly 45 minutes after USA had rolled the credits for the WWE show and moved on to “Temptation Island.”
It was kind of weird. Personally, I was waiting for it: Promotional materials for “SmackDown” clearly indicated that Flair would see action on Tuesday night. (An email I got from the WWE placed Flair-Asuka at the top of the card.) But fans either didn’t get the same message or didn’t care, because — after the live broadcast ended at 10 p.m. with Kevin Owens and Kofi Kingston defeating Daniel Bryan and Rowan by pinfall in a dramatic tag-team showdown — a few thousand of them took off before Flair’s match.
Drew Gulax then edged out Brian Kendrick by submission in a face-off that seemed to last several hours (at one point, the crowd chanted, “This is boring,” to no avail), and then FINALLY, at 10:45 p.m., Flair strutted out from the wings.
And there’s no way she didn’t notice all the empty seats.
I was sitting at the bottom of Section 104 in the lower level, maybe 50 feet from ringside, and the closest person in to me and my co-worker was more than a dozen seats away at this point. Same with the row behind me. Right before Flair came out, a guy who had self-upgraded his seat settled in behind me.
“Why wouldn’t they televise her match?,” we asked him.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Usually there’s always a female match on ‘SmackDown.’”
So I emailed WWE’s live events marketing manager, Daniel Webb, after it was all over.
“We call it a dark match,” he wrote. “Meaning that isn’t not on TV. It gives us the opportunity to advertise a match for the fans to see that isn’t dependent on the SmackDown storyline. We run them after all of our televised events so the fans can see marquee talent perform that might not have worked during the TV broadcast.”
It was great (and appropriate) to see Flair. But funny thing is, she lost. Kind of unceremoniously, too.
She hit all the key marks in the match — her dad’s strut, the Figure 8 leg lock, the knife edge chop, the somersault cutter, the cartwheel evasion, the “Wooooooooooo!” in the ref’s face after he tried to give her a warning — but she went out on a submission hold by Asuka that happened so quickly that if you blinked, you missed it.
So to recap: Charlotte Flair, who has generally been a hometown hero since breaking through with the WWE in July 2015, was booed by a hometown crowd because she’s now a “bad guy.” Then the WWE, which has done such a great job lately of featuring its female Superstars, aired a two-hour episode of “SmackDown Live” that featured zero female Superstars (even though they had Flair in the house).
Then a few thousand people went home to go to bed. Then, on the day that would have been her late brother Reid’s 31st birthday — an occasion that would have provided an opportunity for some genuine emotion — Flair participated in what amounted to an exhibition that 1) she lost, and therefore felt off-key because 2) seemed to fly in the face of all the bold “I am the true champion” boasts she had made earlier in the night.
After the decision was rendered and Asuka raised the title belt over her head, Flair practically acted as if nothing had happened as she made her way to ringside to hug two unidentified younger children before making her way to the wings.
She disappeared around the corner, and then fans shrugged and headed for the exits.
I’m no expert. But I’ll tell you: That’s not the way I would have scripted it.
Théoden Janes: 704-358-5897, @theodenjanes
This story was originally published February 27, 2019 at 2:44 AM.
