Ric Flair threatens lawsuit over a claim he made in his own autobiography

Unsurprisingly, TNA's Ric Flair is mad at Shane Ryan at Grantland.com for his well researched article that laid bare in devastating detail Flair's financial difficulties and impropriety over the last fifteen plus years.  So what do famous people do when they're mad at what journalists have written about them?  They threaten lawsuits hoping people will believe them over some journalist they've probably never heard of before.  That's exactly what Flair has done, claiming to TMZ via a representative that he's considering suing Ryan and the newspaper over a claim in the article that he has heart disease from chronic long-term abuse of alcohol:

While the information gleaned from courthouse records may be credible, Mr. Fliehr is currently evaluating his legal options with respect to falsehoods in the story, specifically the untrue statement that he suffers from alcoholic cardiomyopathy.  

Our client understands that these allegations are part of the territory when you are not only famous, but a living legend.

I think the person who started these scurrilous rumours about Flair should be ashamed of themselves and brought to justice!  I mean, is it really possible that Ric Flair's many decades of hard drinking could have caused him serious health problems?

Unfortunately, this may be the first ever case of the Nefarious Wrestling Book Alterer, the long lost cousin of the Nefarious Wrestling Twitter Hacker whose crimes against the wrestling community have been well documented exclusively here on Cageside Seats.  Because the source for the story about Flair's alcoholic cardiomyopathy is Ric Flair's own autobiography To Be The Man, which was ghost written by Keith Elliot Greenberg and edited by his friend Mark Madden.  Here's a quote from page 304 of that book:

Through my many years of partying, I also developed something called "alcoholic cardiomyopathy," a weakening of the heart muscles.  I first detected that there was something wrong when my heart began skipping beats.  I went to a cardiologist friend who told me that when your heart pumps, it expands like a rubber band.  But mine was doing it too much.  Initially, I thought that steroids might be responsible, but the doctor dismissed this theory.  My heart was fluttering from thirty-five years of hitting it too hard.

It's part of the price I've paid for being Ric Flair.  In exchange for the glory and the good times, I acquired a heart condition, self-asteem issues, and cataracts from tanning beds - and very nearly wrecked my marriage to a great woman.

Hmm, for some reason I don't think a lawsuit by Flair over the article entitled "The Wrestler in Real Life" for it's claim about alcoholic cardiomyopathy would stand up in any court of law.  He should save his money and put it towards paying off his litany of debts.