Why does Shane Douglas and ric flair not like each other?

Answer 1

Douglas was breaking into the Wrestling business in the late 80's and worked briefly for WCW in 1989, at a time immediately after Ted Turner had purchased the company from the Crockett family, who ran it successfully as the NWA for many years. Turner was not involved in the day to day operations of WCW and named one of his Turner Broadcasting executives, Jim Herd, as head of the company.

Herd had no wrestling background however and utilized a make shift contingent of retired wrestling stars and performers currently under contract to WCW as sort of a "booking committee" to promote matches, script TV shows etc, Ric Flair along with notable stars such as Jim Cornette and Jim Ross were among those involved.

Douglas has stated over the years that he did not feel he received fair treatment from Flair during this time, part of the reason his WCW career was short and relatively unsuccessful. Mick Foley had a similar beef with Flair.

Flair has stated in interviews and his autobiography that his involvement in booking storylines, TV shows, and promoting wrestlers during this time was not significant because he was on the road full time wrestling. To an extent, Ross and Cornette have supported this in separate interviews through the years. Flair also points out that Douglas was not successful in WWE working with Vince McMahon and the vast resources of WWE Entertainment (Foley on the other hand was).

Douglas eventually landed in the Extreme Championship Wrestling organization, known as ECW, and routinely made fun of Flair even though he was under contract to WCW at the time and would never be able to appear on ECW programming. Douglas claimed he did this to generate interest in his bad guy character with fans, picking on superstars in other companies as well as his own.

Flair states in his biography the Douglas basically treated the whole thing as unimportant when the two worked together briefly in WCW in 2000. However, Flair does not often talk about Douglas, though he does admitt that he himself was not a great Booker (the wresting name for a writer) because he was more concerned with in ring wrestling.

In a related note, he and Foley have both stated separately that they did make peace while both worked in WWE in 2006.