Ric Flair Says Downing 20 Drinks a Day Nearly Killed Him, But Now He’s Done With Booze Forever

“Ten days on life support, it’ll wake you up, man.”

Earlier this summer, Ric Flair’s legendary drinking habit finally caught up with him. 

The 68-year-old wrestling icon was hospitalized and, as he reveals in a new interview with People, his condition was so bad at one point that doctors told his daughter to say her goodbyes. 

“I had no idea it was that bad,” he said.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BZResOpg-5E

Now that Flair has been given a new lease on life, he’s revealing the incredible details about all the liquor he used to drink. In a recent appearance on ESPN’s Dan Le Batard Show, Flair said his habit had him downing 20 drinks a day. 

“Between 3,700 and 4,000 calories worth of booze — soda or a splash of cranberry — every day. Like 20 drinks a day,” he said.

As Flair explained, this was just a part of being a wrestler in early days of sports entertainment, when wrestlers were constantly traveling, partying and searching for a little self-medication.

That kind of thing will wreck havoc on a man’s body and Flair learned that the hard way. “They told my kids that everything had shut down — kidney failure, congestive heart failure, everything shut down,” Flair said. 

The man once known as The Nature Boy now has a pacemaker and had to have part of his bowel removed to save his life. 

Now Flair is planning to make some changes. “Ten days on life support, it’ll wake you up, man,” Flair told Le Batard.

One possible move for Flair is a new career in motivational speaking, he told People. Asked what kind of message he would bring people walking down the same path he did, Flair said he would say, “You need tot start looking at what’s going on in your life, because you’re just screwing it up.”