I would say that the all-time most Charlotte Flair moment came on July 31, 2018, when she shockingly returned from injury to save her friend Becky Lynch from a beatdown at the hands of SmackDown Women’s champion (and Lynch’s opponent at the upcoming SummerSlam show) Carmella, only for Charlotte to defeat Carmella later that night and weasel her way into the SummerSlam match—which she won, of course, regaining the title and squashing her friend’s dreams. I’d say that was the most Charlotte moment of all time, but factually, that’s the most Hulk Hogan moment of all time, since it was a straight replay of Hulk Hogan’s WrestleMania IX saga, with Lynch in the Bret Hart role and Carmella playing Yokozuna.
The main difference is that at SummerSlam ’18, Flair straight-up assaulted and pinned her “friend” to get the win. At least Hogan, in all his abstract sliminess, had plausible deniability. At least, in 1993, it was reasonable to assume that the crowd would go along with the booking. In 2018, WWE had to know better.
They didn’t. After the match, Charlotte embraced Lynch, talking to her with her hand covering their faces, seemingly apologizing for not just assaulting her to win the title—a bit rough, but standard fare for pro wrestling friendships—but also for snagging her spotlight. After the hug, Lynch turned heel on Flair, except the crowd wasn’t having it. They cheered Lynch lustily for putting the boots to Flair, even as the script was screaming out that this was a villanous move by Lynch and deserved our most Pavlovian boos.
It must be said that Lynch was hugely popular—this was at the cusp of her run as “The Man,” the defining period in which she was the top star in the entire company, male or female. Maybe nobody could have seen that explosion coming. Maybe it wouldn’t have worked at all without Charlotte being inadvertently positioned in her way. But trying to position Flair as the hero, after filching her chance at the title and her moment in the sun, was so wrongheaded it beggars belief. (For her part, Charlotte stood back for Lynch’s ascendence and took her resentment out on Ronda Rousey, who she beat uncomfortably with a kendo stick at Survivor Series.) This is what makes it such an iconic Charlotte Flair moment: she’s put on top, and portrayed as the hero with such insistence that one senses the WWE decision makers see it as an act of absolute necessity.
This isn’t a mode exclusive to Flair. There was John Cena before her; Roman Reigns, her contemporary; and even on the women’s side you could make the case for Rousey or Nia Jax. But Flair is unique amongst these names in that she is a singularly compelling personality, one of the best in-ring performers of her generation of any gender, and arguably (very arguably, OK—I’m not trying to start a fight here) the greatest female wrestler of all time. Which is to say she deserves the spotlight. She deserves borderline monomaniacal attention from WWE’s creative team. But time and again, WWE seems to miss the mark with her. To miss the point of her entirely.
On the February 3 episode of Raw, Flair made her first public statement after returning to win this year’s Royal Rumble after a knee injury had put her on the sideline for over a year. She entered to her usual fanfare and stood in the ring, soaking in the reaction from the fans. She was smiling, genuinely it seemed, as a respectful cheer washed over the crowd—before the boos overtook the moment. “A year and a half ago, you guys booing me would have bothered me,” she said on Raw. “But here’s the thing: I missed you guys.” She reacts as she often does, with a sort of disarming humanity. It’s unclear whether she’s acting or genuinely affected. Underneath all the glamour, there’s a roughness to her presentation that’s impossible to define.
“Up until last year I really thought I was unbreakable but last year broke me mentally and physically.” And here she takes a minute to pause, her mouth trembling. It’s unclear if she’s expecting the crowd to rally behind the story of her recovery, of her love of the sport. It’s unclear if she’s reading the crowd and adjusting, or if she’s genuinely hurt by the moment. It’s unclear whether this is real and we’re messing up a beautiful moment, or if it’s real and the ruined moment is exactly the point.
Compared to her famous father, “The Nature Boy” Ric Flair, who even in his more magnanimous moments would point across the Crockett studio and refer to the fans as “these idiots over here,” Charlotte strikes a rather zen tone. “Whether you’re wooing or booing, love to hate me, hate to love me, it doesn’t change the fact that I am the greatest WWE superstar in the history of the industry. So boo me now.” It’s a perfect line, a haltingly human delivery, and, as with all things Charlotte, nearly impossible to read. The closing was, it must be said, a deliberate (if postmodern) homage to her father’s self-references in his prime. “If you don't like it, learn to love it!” he would yell into the microphone.
In fact, the entire script is a variation on various Ric-isms. “You … tried to take the greatest sport in the world from me. It’s mine.” “You gotta be born a champion. You gotta have it inside. You gotta feel it, live it, breathe it, and be prepared to die for it. You’ve got to make the assault on life itself.” “I can’t help that I’m the greatest wrestler alive today.” Of course, Ric would usually wander backward into profundity at the tail-end of a rant on how “Rugged” Ronnie Garvin or whoever he was beefing with was too much of a low-class, blue-jeans-wearing average Joe to deserve to share the ring with him, but you take gospel where you can get it. The tension with Ric was that he did love the sport of pro wrestling, and he was for all intents and purposes the best in the world at it, but he was just such an insufferable jerk about that fact. (He was also the world’s most entertaining insufferable jerk, so we weren’t necessarily complaining.) With Charlotte, her greatness is undermined by the insufferability of her positioning. Ric’s immutability was a product of its era and also of necessity—if a better option had come along, he would have passed the torch. And regardless, there was an electricity to it. We couldn’t wait for someone to finally take him down a notch. Charlotte’s permanence feels preordained. We know no matter how many times she loses, everything will be the same. That’s not a knock on her. It’s a statement of fact in the modern era of wrestling. And facts aren’t particularly electric.
It wasn’t always this way. When she debuted in NXT, she was part of a new crop of female wrestlers that would redefine the sport entirely. When she and Sasha Banks (now Mercedes Moné in All Elite Wrestling) and Lynch were called up to the WWE main roster in 2015, it was billed as the start of the “Women’s Revolution,” a new era for female representation in the company. But the real revolution had already begun in NXT, with Paige’s championship reign and, most significantly, the clash of the “Four Horsewomen”—Flair, Banks, Lynch, and Bayley—at NXT TakeOver: Rival on February 11, 2015. In her early days, Charlotte eschewed the Flair name entirely, going by simply “Charlotte,” but during her NXT heel run, she embraced her father and took to calling herself “genetically superior”—a double entendre both referencing her lineage and her obvious physical gifts. If there’s another central tension to Charlotte Flair, it’s here: She has both the hereditary advantage of her name and the athletic genes that outstrip her father. She comes to the ring in a feathered robe inspired by her dad and yet performs like prime Big Van Vader in Sting’s body. She has her father’s wiles, coupled with every physical freak that ever stood in his way. She was everything you could ever want in a pro wrestling prospect—maybe too much. Once she started coming into her own, there was too much to point at, too much standing out all at once. Somehow, with all the skill and athleticism and charisma and prepackaged history that you could possibly imagine, it somehow all got distilled down to “nepo baby.”
She was the face of the Women’s Revolution in WWE, broadly defined, which is to say she is the face of modern women’s wrestling. She won the Divas Championship two months after debuting on the main roster. She was the inaugural Women’s champion after WWE formally shifted away from the “Divas” moniker. She’s a 14-time world champion, with two NXT Women’s Championship reigns, and a one-time WWE Women's Tag Team title holder alongside Asuka, making her the fourth women’s Grand Slam champion—though the recent debuts of the women’s Intercontinental and United States titles have since redefined the metric. She’s had more than 60 PPV/PLE matches, was part of the first-ever women’s match that main-evented a WWE PPV (against Banks at Hell In a Cell in 2016, also the first women’s Hell In a Cell match), and was part of the first-ever women’s match that main-evented at WrestleMania (a Triple Threat against Lynch and Rousey at WrestleMania 35).
The only wrestler with an argument against her is Moné, née Banks, who is currently revitalizing her career at the absolute highest level in AEW. Some of Flair’s most memorable matches are against Moné, and there is certainly a degree to which Banks’s absence has hurt Flair’s ongoing legacy. Without a doubt, the comparison of the two while both were in WWE is noteworthy—Flair was constantly presented as a top draw while Banks was often subjugated to lesser feuds and presented as a lesser star, none of which is Flair’s fault but which still rebounds to a knock on Charlotte. She lost and won the world championship so many times in her early years, seemingly in an attempt to get close to her father’s record of 16 world title reigns, that it was impossible to look at Charlotte and not see the hand of God (a.k.a. Vince McMahon) putting his thumb on the scale in her favor. It’s not that she wasn’t a deserving champion, it’s that the whole thing felt a little rigged.
It’s a similar complaint that we have heard about front-office favorites like Cena and Reigns, though she was in many ways a more complete, impressive performer than either of those men were when they were getting boos really meant for the front office. And she’s arguably less of a case of nepotism than Cody Rhodes, Randy Orton, or the Rock were early on, if only because she was more revelatory in the ring, and more fully-formed from her debut. The difference between Charlotte and the other “chosen ones” is that when we see Charlotte inserted into matches, many fans assume she is acting with some volition on her part. She wouldn’t be the first star wrestler to insist on certain matches or outcomes (her father was notorious for this sort of thing, and he wasn’t alone), but we really have no proof of it for Charlotte. There’s a degree to which it’s inevitable. Ric once famously said, “I was born with a golden spoon in my mouth… I inherited the ability, I inherited the money." He was saying this in character, to rile up the crowd, but for his daughter the statement is basically an unspoken fact. And sure, there are promos and stray moments in the ring where she seems legitimately upset. Her interrupting Asuka’s belt presentation ceremony. There was the bizarrely adversarial belt exchange with Lynch when the two reigning champions switched brands and were brought to the ring to swap title belts. There’s a rawness, a roughness, to every emotional moment with Flair that the line between kayfabe and reality is frequently hazy. For many performers, this is an asset, because it brings us closer to believing the act. For Flair there’s a perception that it’s somehow proof of a diabolical streak. Maybe it’s her disarming humanity. Maybe it’s plain old-fashioned sexism. But we look at her positioning and her presentation, and see a demanding, undermining star, whereas when we look at Reigns or Cena we see misguided storytelling.
Here’s the real question: Is it possible that Charlotte Flair has too much going for her? Is she too good in the ring, too well-formed a character? Booking decisions aside, it’s easy to make the case that, lined up against anybody in the WWE locker room, Flair should win. When Ric boasted, talking himself up as the greatest and most successful wrestler ever, it was 50 percent bravado. When Charlotte says it, it’s true.
On the February 7 episode of SmackDown, four days after her halting promo on Raw, Flair found her heelish groove. “So what’s it gonna be tonight? Do you love me, or do you hate me? See, when you boo, do you know what I hear? Money. I live rent-free in everyone’s minds. I am wrestling’s obsession.”
She called out WWE Women’s champion Tiffany Stratton, a young, future superstar who was so inspired by watching Charlotte that she entered the business herself. Stratton is an elite athlete, a great character, and clearly a permanent future in the company despite being on the main roster for only a year. They lean into the parallels between the two in an exchange, much of which Charlotte seemed convincingly disinterested in. “When I was in the ring with Rhea (Ripley), I saw a kid. When I'm standing here with you, I see a child, begging me to make her a star at WrestleMania." Once the match was set, the tensions were at a fever pitch. On the March 14 edition of SmackDown, the two women brawled throughout the arena with a ferocity that echoed the parking-lot brutality of Ric Flair’s era. Last week on SmackDown, they had a promo battle via closed circuit, a rough exchange in which Charlotte continually talked over Stratton and seemed to have a conversation-ending answer for all of Tiffany’s quips. It was a presidential debate where only one nominee did prep. Once again, it was impossible to read Flair, to know whether she was deeply in character or simply upset that she had to be there at all.
That core inscrutability is what makes Charlotte such a compelling performer. It also makes her easy to dislike. In the promo video that announced her return to action this year, the voiceover was straight out of the Flair playbook: “There is a difference between confidence and arrogance. Arrogance is insecurity, it’s convincing someone of who you are. Confidence is knowing, it’s walking into a room and everyone sits up straight because they know the GOAT doesn’t have to call themselves the GOAT” felt similar to a statement she made to Asuka back in 2023: “I don’t wait in line. I made the line.” Charlotte Flair is not her father, but in the modern era, Ric would have been widely beloved despite—or because of—his loudmouth antics. Charlotte is a perfect modern heel not because she tells us she’s the best, but because she is. If any of her detractors were running WWE, they would position her at the top, too. Sometimes inevitability is boring, but it’s also undeniable. When Ric was champion, title changes were rare and technically difficult—in the old NWA days, title changes had to be approved by a vote of the promoters who made up the organization. These days, championship reigns come and go purely at the discretion of the person in charge of creative at WWE. To be a multi-time champion in modern wrestling is governed not by politics, but by fan exhaustion. Charlotte’s biggest rival is longevity in the face of her own monotonous greatness.
It’s in this way that Charlotte is again more like Hogan than like her father. She’s the golden child, the chosen one. Fans look back on Ric’s prime as a supercut of hilarious promos and five-star matches; they look at Hogan’s as a slow, plodding cycle of inevitability. But Hogan—setting aside all we’ve experienced with him in his post-wrestling turmoil—was a legend, a star, a guy who sold tickets and inspired a generation of kids to be wrestlers. He was larger than life. The biggest knock on his WWF run is that the WWF never seemed particularly interested in messing with a tired formula. Likewise, every Charlotte Flair victory seems dull and preordained, and every loss is a credit to her opponent or a statement about the state of the industry. If she wins, it’s because the office made the call; if she loses, the fans demanded it and the office didn’t have a choice. But the truth is deeper than that. Charlotte is undeniable because, unlike Hogan, she actually deserves to be.
You can quibble with the outcomes of any of her victories, but you can’t deny the match quality of her WrestleMania bouts against Rhea Ripley and Asuka, and, presumably, the one to come against Stratton, or her big matches with Moné, Bayley, and Lynch. And what of Lynch, her longtime rival, the crux of the moment where she was most loudly rejected by the audience? The old friend who toppled Flair when it came to crowd love? When she was at her apex, Lynch called herself “The Man,” a name which Ric Flair took exception to since he had been calling himself that for decades, most iconically in his catchphrase "To be the man, you’ve got to beat the man.” (Insert “Wooooo!”) There was even a brief legal battle and settlement between Flair and WWE. But there’s another “man” line that resonates here. “If you're a man you don't cry about it. You take life, and its ups and downs. If you're a real man, you never go down—you just stay up. “
Charlotte Flair has stayed up. Being the daughter of an all-time great has helped her, but it’s also a burden carrying the mantle of one of the greatest to ever do it. There’s the burden of her late brother, Reid, the Flair child who always dreamed of being a wrestler, and to whom Charlotte dedicated her career after he died. The legacy is a burden, the memories are a burden, and, to be frank, greatness is a burden. Charlotte was born with the golden spoon in an era not prone to appreciate traditional greatness. Fans boo her because they know she’s everything her father ever lied about being: she’s the best. And maybe that’s boring. Maybe that makes you want to boo. Maybe that’s what she wants you to do.
