After hanging up his cricket boots, Andrew Flintoff found himself in unfamiliar territory. He wasn’t sure what direction life would take next. Then came an unexpected opportunity that nearly turned him into a professional wrestler.
WWE Talks Started When Flintoff Was Finding Himself
In the early days of retirement, Flintoff admits he was drifting. Broadcasting offers came his way, but nothing felt planned. That’s when an old childhood love returned to his mind.
“I just hid for a bit and started to wonder, ‘What am I going to do now?’ Some of the TV offers started to come, which was never the plan – I stumbled into that. I nearly joined the WWE, I didn’t want to box, that was never the plan. I would have been called ‘Big Fred,’” he shared while speaking on The Overlap’s Stick to Cricket.
At the time, he was living in Dubai and dealing with health issues. He had put on weight and lost his spark. That’s when he thought about WWE again and came up with an idea to fight The Undertaker in Manchester.
“What happened was, it got to a point in Dubai where I was unfit, I’d put on weight and was just not in a good place. I wanted to get fit again, but I needed motivation. As a kid, I loved WWE, so I came up with this idea, because I was doing League of Their Own with Sky, to fight the Undertaker in Manchester,” he said.
Wrestling Training Begins After WWE Interest Grows
Flintoff wrote down the concept and pitched it to Sky. To his surprise, it didn’t just stop there. His idea made its way to WWE, and before long, he was in contact with none other than Vince McMahon.
“I wrote this treatment up and presented the idea to Sky, it started gathering momentum and next minute it’s being passed onto WWE. I was in contact with the WWE, Vince McMahon,” Flintoff said.
Knowing he needed to get in shape, he turned to a familiar face. Dave Roberts, the England team physio, arranged for a trainer to fly to Dubai and help Flintoff transform his body. The training was intense. After six weeks, Flintoff and his wife traveled to Tampa, where he spent two weeks at the WWE’s wrestling academy.
“They fly us over business class, next morning we get in the car and go to WWE’s academy, two massive units all branded. We’re sitting in the car and these things are walking past me, like 6ft 8in monsters,” he recalled.
Painful Reality Changed His Path Away from WWE
Once inside the ring, Flintoff realized just how brutal wrestling could be. On day one, he ran the ropes and took hard falls. The next morning, he woke up with lashes across his back.
“So I go in and we do the warm-ups, then they put me in the ring for three hours and I just ran the ropes, I’d run into someone and they’d throw me. The second day I went in there, I had lashes all down my back and my missus said, ‘Are you alright with this?’ I was sore and thought something’s not right here. I said to this physio, ‘I think I’m having a back spasm,’ so they’re all like, ‘Oh! The English lad has got a back spasm,’ so they put me on the couch, he’s pushing me and I can feel my ribs separating.”
Despite the toll it took on his body, WWE was ready to sign him. He was told he would be offered a three-year contract, with appearances at Royal Rumble and WrestleMania on the horizon.
“The money was obscene, but we (family) wanted to move back from Dubai. The kids wanted to play cricket and didn’t want to go to America, so I just changed it to boxing and had a fight instead,” he said.
In the end, wrestling didn’t make the cut. Not because of the lights or the crowd, but because home and family felt more important than life in the ring. Flintoff walked away from WWE with no regrets, knowing he gave it a shot.
ALSO READ: RCB Held Responsible For Bengaluru Stampede By Tribunal, Social Media Post Sparks Controversy
