Foley Is Good: And the Real World Is Faker Than Wrestling

by Mick Foley

  Now, in all fairness to my wife, I have to say that she's practically a saint. It takes a special type of woman to tolerate a well-known husband on the road, and Colette's trust and understanding make my life a whole lot easier, and her powers of forgiveness far outshine those of mere mortals. Especially with the knowledge that her husband has within the past few years become known as "cuddly, cute," and to a small twisted minority, even sexy." Hey, I know that sounds crazy, but for a few years my favorite sign from a fan was a simple mankind is sexy. Later, at a book signing in Montreal, a fan showed off a sign that was a little less innocent: i want more than mankind's sock in my mouth. I really didn't know what to say, so I gave her an embarrassed "what would your boyfriend say?", at which point the guy behind her said, "It would be cool because it's you; you're our idol." I pretended to be merely amused and was thankful for the table at which I sat, which hid the evidence to the contrary.

  Colette asked me a few years ago if I had "been to one of those places" recently. I had been to one, and only one, in Montreal several months earlier and decided to admit this indiscretion. "Just one," I said. Colette seemed hurt and wanted to know why I would do such a thing. I hoped that honesty really was the best policy, because I was about to hit Colette with a dose of truth that most husbands would never dream of administering. "Well, I heard they were going to have live lesbian sex acts onstage, and I wanted to see what it looked like." My wife's eyes opened wide and her jaw dropped low. She was speechless for close to a minute. When she did speak, her voice was soft and forgiving. "Okay," she said, "just tell me next time."

  I became an instant hero in the dressing room with that story of spousal love and understanding and was often asked to repeat it. "Just tell me next time?" That sounded like a free pass to me. A short while later a wrestler, who knew of my Boogie Nights admiration, told me that adult film legend Nina Hartley was appearing in a club that night about a hundred yards from my hotel. Hartley, besides her ability to ad-lib nonstop dirty talk that would make even D.D.P. blush, is known, believe it or not, for her warmth, humor, and intelligence. She played the insatiable nympho whose cheating ways caused her husband to blow both her and himself away at the pivotal party scene in Boogie Nights. I thought about it for a long while. Nina Hartley, film legend and star of Boogie Nights. I decided to use my free pass.

  The next day I told my loving wife about my Hartley adventure without even a twinge of guilt. Colette was not pleased. "Mickey, last night was our anniversary!" I am now officially out of free passes, and unlike the Montreal lesbian story that made me a locker-room legend, I chose to keep this one to myself.

  Business was business, however, and in Philadelphia, on November 2, 1999, business required me to visit these locales on my quest for Val Venis. Okay, I'll do it, I thought, but inside I knew I had to keep my kid-friendly image from being crushed. Bruce Prichard, the producer of the vignettes, wholeheartedly agreed and assured me that I wouldn't be made to do anything to compromise my image. He later laughed and admitted he knew he wouldn't have to make me do anything because he knew I couldn't help myself.

  "Wouldn't it be a great idea if I looked for Val in a peep booth and pulled out the wrong guy?" Somehow, I managed to talk our production assistant, Warren, into posing as the pervert who actually had his pants down to his ankles during his surreptitious viewing. "Oh, sorry, you're not Val," I explained, after yanking him out of his booth with words like "sicko" and "sinner" to describe his moral character. Then, with Warren out of the way, I saw the video and quickly changed gears. "Hey, is that Kay Parker?" I blurted out with an innocent squeal. "Is she still around?" With that, I shut the door and the camera tilted up and faded out on the word "occupied" above the booth.

  "Hey, Bruce, can you get me about a hundred quarters?" I asked as we prepared to shoot our final vignette, in which I was to run after a truck that was towing my car. "Sure," Bruce said, "but what for?" "That way," I explained, "when I run after the truck, all the quarters will fall out of my pockets and it will seem like I've been in that booth forever." Bruce smiled and got the quarters. Sure, lovable Mankind came across like a stumbling, bumbling sicko with a weakness for pornography, but what the hell—it was fun television. Besides, that same image didn't hurt Jimmy Swaggart all that much, and he's a man of God.

  Even before my "near-slanderous" remarks about Kay Parker were published, word had spread into the adult film community about my past fondness for the fair-skinned British beauty with the naturally big boobs and the one crooked tooth. I ran into porno mainstay Tom Byron at a home-video convention in Los Angeles a year ago and was asked about the subject. "I heard you like Kay Parker," Byron said with just a hint of amusement in his voice. At that moment I remembered Byron's scene with Kay in a video that I had watched at John Imbriani's house back in 1982. That feature had helped make Byron's career. Suddenly I had access to a person who had intimate details of my porn idol's life. "What was she like?" I asked. "Come on, tell me everything. Was she nice? Was she funny? Come on, tell me!" "I don't know!" said Byron, with a shrug. "That was one of my first films. I don't think I've seen her twice since then." Wow, that was kind of disappointing. It would be kind of like running into Larry Hagman or Bill Daily, or Hayden Rorke, and finding out they didn't remember a thing about Barbara Eden. Suddenly Byron's powers of recall seemed to kick in. "Oh yeah," he said, "I remember she smelled like my grandmother."

  Let me get this straight; there's no Easter Bunny, wrestling's not real, and Kay Parker smells like Tom Byron's grandmother? Life isn't fair.

  Unfortunately, when I got back from the bowels of Philadelphia's entertainment district, I had to wrestle. With Al no less. I barely had time to warm up when we were out for the first match of SmackDown! against the team of Hardcore and Crash Holly for the World Wrestling Federation Tag-Team Championship. The vignettes we had just shot would be inserted into the show as if they had transpired after the match.

  The match had its high points. Al insisted that we debut our "pattycake, pattycake, baker's man" double elbow, but I had questioned the move, thinking it a little too dumb. "You don't think a sock puppet is dumb," Al asked, "or a man talking to a mannequin head?" Both valid points. We did the move, and the crowd loved it. We even won the match—and the titles. Al Snow and Mankind, the "Best Friends," as Kevin Kelly phrased it in the greatest exaggeration in sports-entertainment since WCW's claim of having "close to 90,000 fans" in a nearly empty Louisiana Superdome. We even did the jumping-white-guy high five, and the fans cheered that as well.

  The match had its low points as well—me. If I had been a liability with Val Venis, I was a downright embarrassment here. I did a move where I shot Crash into the ropes and went for a kick to the gut. Crash grabbed my foot and spun me around. I was looking to come out of the spin with a big clothesline, which had always elicited an enormous response from the crowd.

  I could legitimately lay claim to inventing the move in 1990, and Diamond Dallas Page could legitimately lay claim to stealing it in 1994, about eleven seconds after my departure from WCW. He's used it so much since then that a lot of people actually think it's his. "Bro," he tried to explain when I called him after viewing a WCW television match that looked like Cactus Jack's Greatest Hits, "you're not on TV anymore"—which, at the time he made the remark, was true. "No," I agreed to the man who claimed to have never had a bad day in his life (his disastrous match with the Big Cat in Fort Myers in '93 notwithstanding), "but I plan to be on TV again someday."

  I have since gotten Page back many times without his knowledge. Every time I wrestle Dewey on the bed, I hit him with Dallas's "Diamond Cutter," and I tell him not to sell it.

  This clothesline didn't elicit quite the same reaction from the crowd. I fell down while attempting it. It wasn't a first for that move, either, as I had suffered a similar fate in recent house-show matches. I fell over one other time in the title win over the Hollys as well when my knees simply could not support my weight. As a result, when the match aired two nig
hts later, much of my part in it was edited out. It wasn't the first time that I had been edited. During the course of my career, my matches had been edited several times for being too long, too violent, or too bloody. In fifteen years of wrestling, however, it was the first time that I had been edited because I sucked.

  We had a locker-room celebration following the victory that included Edge, Christian, and The Blue Meanie. Al had a quart of milk and explained that he was going to dump it over his head as a humorous variation on the victorious champagne tradition. I turned to Edge, who Al liked to refer to as my crony, and spoke disbelievingly. "Is Al Snow really going to dump a white liquid all over his face and not expect me to say anything?" Sure enough, when the cameras rolled, Al poured the milk and I drilled him with an incredibly easy joke, but despite the laughs at Al's expense and Al's "okay, okay, you got me," my heart wasn't really in it.

  My part of the show was over and I was free to go home, but I felt that I needed to talk to Vince. Vince is incredibly busy at these tapings, so I stopped by his office before the taping and asked if I could speak to him about something important afterward. The two hours that followed seemed to last an eternity. When I came back to his office, it was to make the most important decision of my career.

  "Vince, I think it's time that I stopped being an active wrestler." I had been thinking about this moment for a while, and Colette and I had been preparing for it since the physical fallout from "Hell in a Cell," but I had no idea that the words would be so hard to say. Halfway through them my voice cracked with emotion, and upon completing them, my eyes filled up with tears.

  For his part, Vince didn't try to talk me out of it, but merely asked, "Why?" At that moment I felt inside almost as if he'd been expecting this day to come and was surprised that it hadn't come sooner. Critics who have never met Vince have written some terrible things about him, at one point even likening him to Silence of the Lambs' murderous cannibal, Hannibal Lecter. Unlike these critics, I do know Vince, and in four and a half years of working closely beside him have never seen even a hint of these characteristics. Indeed, the Vince McMahon who sat before me on November 2, 1999, thought not of the World Wrestling Federation at this time but only of my personal interests.

  I told Vince of the realization I'd had while playing soccer with my kids and how I felt that my physical quality of life was extremely poor. When I told him of my mental problems, he cut me off in mid-sentence. "Mick, you've just had your last match." I was a little stunned. I had actually been thinking of a Royal Rumble send-off at Madison Square Garden in January, and told him so. "Why risk it?" Vince asked. "If you finish tonight you could go out as a champion—and you deserve that."

  Together, we talked things over for a long while, and after careful consideration of my desire to have one last match, we settled on Survivor Series in Detroit on November 19 as my final date. I had twelve more days to go.

  25: A Change in Plans

  I walked into the Bryce Jordan Center on the Penn State campus, fully expecting to begin my last week as an active wrestler, but was instead met by Jim Ross and some shocking news. Steve Austin's career, it seemed, was over. Austin had suffered a serious neck injury in 1997 that had kept him out of action for several months but he had come back and led the World Wrestling Federation to levels of prosperity that few could have dreamed of. Beneath his "Stone Cold" persona of flipping birds and downing beers, Austin was, at heart, a workhorse of a performer, and therein lay much of the problem. By working so hard night in and out, Austin's neck never got a chance to fully heal. After undergoing a series of tests as a result of recurring pain, Austin's initial prognosis was that he should retire immediately.

  This made my Survivor Series retirement a problem on two levels. From a loyalty standpoint, I would have a tough time bailing out on a company that was losing its biggest star. From an ego standpoint, not a whole lot of people were going to care about Mick Foley's retirement if it coincided with Steve Austin's. Make no mistake about it, I wanted people to care. A year earlier Terry Funk had bestowed one of his great Funker teachings upon me: "The fans do love us, but they sure don't miss us when we're gone." I wanted to go out proving the Funker wrong. The fans definitely did love me in a rugged, platonic type of way. But I wanted to be missed when I was gone. With those two factors in mind, retirement was pushed back until the December Pay-Per-View in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

  Al and I dropped the tag belts to the New Age Outlaws that same night at Penn Stat e and came up short in a rematch at Survivor Series, during which I dislocated my shoulder. The "Best Friends" would never relive their glory day of November 2, when I stunk up the ring and Al Snow was foolish enough to pour white liquid over his head on-camera.

  Word started to leak out concerning my departure from the company, and wrestlers and office personnel alike began stopping by over the next few weeks to wish me well. I've always been flattered by the respect and friendship given to me by the younger wrestlers who, I believe, may have viewed me as some type of really homely bridge between wrestling's "old school" and the new generation of stairs.

  I had put Matt and Jeff Hardy in my Three Faces of Foley video back when winning matches wasn't part of their resume. They had been very appreciative of the screen time, and now that they're big stars my decision to include them looks pretty wise indeed.

  Edge had been my partner in "A. Snow crime" for quite a while before the fans really took to him, so I feel like something of a proud father when I watch him and Christian tear down the house. I told the four of them (Matt, Jeff, Edge and Christian) that I felt like I was watching four stars being born when they stole the show at the No Mercy Pay-Per-View with an unforgettable ladder match.

  Well, maybe I ought to stop patting myself on the back since, after all, I'm the guy who thought The Rock just didn't "have it" back in '97. Speaking of The Rock, it was he who was chosen to be my opponent for my "new" retirement match. Vince wanted a "babyface" match for the Foley finale, a move that would be tough to pull off on several levels. A babyface match was a tough sell in this day and age. The modern wrestling fan is drawn to the fast pace and excitement of sports-entertainment in an "action-adventure" television format. Classic babyface matches of the past usually took a while to unfold, employing a storytelling formula that many modern fans simply don't have the patience for.

  During my World Wrestling Federation career, I had been in many matches that lasted more than twenty minutes and crowds had reacted well, but they were always the result of good guy/bad guy angles that were driven by animosity between the opponents. I considered myself adept at those long matches, but quite honestly didn't feel I had the talent or physical skills left to pull one off and leave Fort Lauderdale and my career on a high note.

  Despite my recent lackluster ring efforts, my popularity had never been greater. Not nearly as great as The Rock's, however, and that posed another problem. Fort Lauderdale was only twenty minutes from The Rock's home of Miami, and I was really not looking forward to being booed on my last night in the business.

  Nonetheless, the wheels for the match went into motion, and I've got to admit the next few weeks of television were among my all-time favorites as The Rock 'n' Sock Connection returned, despite the objections of a bitter and jealous Al Snow. The Rock, it seemed, had not thrown my book out, and his ability to quote passages from it seemed to hint that he had purchased another copy, although his pride wouldn't allow him to admit as much. So if The Rock hadn't thrown out the book, who had? Who had motive to do so? Who in the World Wrestling Federation stood to gain the most from the breakup of The Rock 'n' Sock Connection? A curious nation wanted to know.

  The Rock 'n' Sock Connection got back together, but Al was still my best friend...or was he? An interview for SmackDown! on November 23 was among the best of my career, and not because it was all that good or even memorable in itself. The premise was simple: Al and I could continue to be best friends, but I would no longer team up with him. This premise had Al understa
ndably upset as the cameras rolled. "I can't believe you're doing this," Al said, "turning your back on your best tag-team partner." "Hey, that's not true," I assured my bitter buddy. "I've got a match with The Rock later in this show." Al was forlorn as he said, "I don't even know how you can stand him; he treats you like garbage." At this point I became Al's consoling pal as I gently explained the facts of life to him. "Al, you're still my best friend, but I just seem to get a much better reaction from the crowd when I team up with The Rock."

  That's what I was supposed to say, except I couldn't get the words out. Five times I tried to finish that final sentence, and five times I failed. I couldn't stop laughing. Each time I laughed, Al got a little angrier. "Why do you keep laughing?" he demanded. "It's not even that funny." "I know," I admitted, "it's just that in what other business can a guy get away with telling the truth, crush his friend's feelings, and claim it's just part of the show?"

  I've got to give credit where it's due, and I will give Al credit for one of the classic ribs in wrestling history. While working a program that culminated in the infamous "Kennel from Hell" match, Al's dog Pepper was kidnapped by the sinister Big Boss Man. Before I get to the rib, let me get to the "Kennel from Hell," which turned out to be a rib in itself. During the course of the angle, the Boss Man invited Al to his room, where he would "give Pepper to him," but not before the thoughtful Boss Man insisted on serving Al some Chinese food. After a few bites, the Boss Man revealed that Al had actually eaten "Pepper" steak, which set the stage for the "Kennel from Hell" at the Unforgiven Pay-Per-View in September 1999.