Jim Ross dishes on Ric Flair, departure from WWE

Jim Ross was as surprised as anybody that he had heat after the pre-SummerSlam symposium with Ric Flair that got out of control because of Flair’s’ behavior at the symposium. But when it became clear that WWE was intent on punishing Ross for not taking control of the event, he felt an odd sense of relief.

“To be honest with you, and this is not looking back, or trying to cover somebody’s tracks, or cover my own [behind], I was really looking for an opportunity to move on,” said Ross, who sat down for an interview with NewsDay to promote his spoken-word tour that commences on March 1 in New York.

“I wanted to get into the podcast business, I wanted to get into one-man show stuff . . . I wanted to look at other opportunities, like this Fox Sports thing that I’m doing now. And I knew I couldn’t do those things while I was under contract to the WWE. But to be honest, to be totally frank with you, I had such a loyalty to that company, and I still do, that after 20 years I didn’t know how I was going to say goodbye,” Ross said.

So goodbye was said to him. It still was a shock that it all went down the way it did.

“I knew that when it was over, a lot of the top WWE officials were very anxious to get Ric Flair out of the facility,” Ross said. “So I knew there was some concern there, but I didn’t know that the concern involved me. A story started out of misinformation that I had been drinking with Flair all day. And the issue was that if they [WWE officials] had checked their schedule, I had been booked all day with WWE activities and SummerSlam that had nothing to do with Ric Flair.”

More from the interview: Click here.