Report: Ric Flair Went Off-Script During WWE Hall Of Fame 2023

At the 2023 WWE Hall Of Fame ceremony, Ric Flair was in attendance to induct The Great Muta. His speech beforehand was supposed to introduce Muta, but it ended up being more about great Japanese wrestlers that Flair wrestled, in addition to stories where he was the main focus. It was certainly an odd speech, and that is because it reportedly wasn’t the plan.

In the recent Wrestling Observer Newsletter, Dave Meltzer explained that Flair ignored the teleprompter and went off on tangents;

“For the Hall of Fame, there was a teleprompter where the planned speeches were written and pretty much everyone except Ric Flair read them so what was said was planned out and approved. Flair called Great Muta the best Japanese wrestler ever (he said the same when he inducted Tatsumi Fujinami) and talked about showing him around Atlanta when he first came to WCW. He really put over Japanese wrestlers and Japanese wrestling for how serious it was, how great condition they were and how tough they were. He pushed that he was an entertainer but those guys were serious, and put over the Steiners (who were there) for having great matches with Hiroshi Hase & Kensuke Sasaki, and talked about Jumbo Tsuruta suplexing him 40 times in a match (very exaggerated) and how tough those guys were. He called attention to the Hase & Sasaki vs. Steiners match that was a match of the year winner from the Tokyo Dome and they showed the Steiner brothers in the audience even though it was after the incident with Gisele Shaw that afternoon. The thing is that Flair didn’t read the teleprompter at all and just gave a speech having nothing to do with the script until the very end when he got back on script.”

WWE were apparently unhappy with Flair for doing this, and it isn’t known if he will be back in any form of capacity like this again if he cannot be trusted.