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

by Mick Foley

  My wife loved Chaos, and upon hearing it came to an immediate conclusion that had completely escaped me. "You know you were writing about yourself, Mick, don't you?" she said. I didn't have a clue of my own, so Colette explained. "Santa Claus is you, Mick, the North Pole is your world, and you feel like you need to save it." I thought about her hypothesis and then about the cold night in Somerville. I then read the book again and realized the wisdom in her words. Let me try to explain with my own crude attempt at self-analysis. Happy Mick is the predominant author of the book you are reading. Sad, unloved, underappreciated Mick is Santa Claus in Christmas Chaos.

  30: Here Comes Santa Claus

  Oh my goodness! Al Snow turned out to be the culprit. Like a jilted suitor, envious Al had stolen the book from The Rock, thrown it out, and then "found" it, in an attempt to throw a monkey wrench into The Rock 'n' Sock machine. Al's confession to the crime was eerie in its delivery, and was without a doubt the best interview he had done in some time.

  I don't want to sound like a broken record, but. . . wait a second, does anyone even know what a broken record sounds like anymore? Let me try again. At the risk of sounding repetitive, I am a big believer in some semblance of legitimacy in an interview. No, I'm not talking about WCW's repeated use of "shoot" interviews that 98 percent of the audience don't understand, but a foundation of genuine emotion upon which to build up story lines. Therein lay the strength of Al's interview. He had no problem sounding bitter, jealous, and resentful of me, because he, um, well, he is bitter, jealous, and resentful of me.

  Actually, I was happy for Al, as the interview not only helped him but me as well, as our "Falls Count Anywhere" match on December 14 in Tallahassee was my best outing in a while and gave me a shot of well-needed confidence. Colette and the kids were with me, and I was able to run straight from the ring into our car and didn't slow down until Disney's Magic Kingdom was in sight.

  As I mentioned earlier, I do my homework before these trips, and as a result am able to get a little more bang for my Disney dollar. I even take advantage of "early entry," which is available to all Disney resort guests, and as a result was able to get on the new Winnie-the-Pooh ride without a wait. The ride included a depiction of a happy Pooh smiling joyfully, with his face covered with his beloved honey. I snapped a picture of the touching scene, which I then used as a visual aid for an Al Snow joke.

  My kids are at a wonderful age for Disney theme parks. They love the big rides but are still young enough to enjoy the simple pleasures that Walt's vision offers. Colette and I spoke at length about our growing children on this trip, and about Christmas, Santa Claus, and the inevitable conclusion that each child eventually comes to about Father Christmas. I dreaded that thought. No Santa would be a disaster. No Santa would mean no Santa's Village, and who knows what that could lead to?

  Every year I find it harder and harder to be a good liar. The kids are getting smarter, and the holes in the entire Santa Claus theory make the psychology of a Posse match seem airtight by comparison. The blame for this lies squarely on the deceased literary shoulders of Clement C. Moore, the author of "A Visit from St. Nicholas," which is more widely known as "The Night Before Christmas." No, this is not going to be a rant against the poem just because I've written one of my own, but just a wish that Moore's vision of Santa Claus hadn't been so preposterous.

  Moore's poem, you see, is the basis for the modern-day Santa Claus. Before that, Santa Claus, originally known as Saint Nicholas, which turned to Saint Nicklause and then to Santa Claus, had been a kindly old gift-giver clothed in long robes. Moore's story gave rise to the vision of Santa as a "ripe and jolly old elf," a vision that was made even more popular by Coca-Cola's ad campaigns featuring Santa. Unfortunately, "A Visit from St. Nicholas," which in all fairness to Moore was originally written just for his children, has also taken the art of parental lies to new heights because of the vast implausibility of the story. Moore, you see, invented the theory of flying reindeer and Santa coming down the chimney, not to mention the eyes that twinkled and the dimples so merry. Look, I don't blame Moore completely, because other whoppers concerning Rudolph and the North Pole made things even worse, but he's the guy who started the whole thing.

  With that in mind, here is my top-ten list of reasons that the legend of Santa Claus is completely at odds with any logical thought process:

  1. What does Santa have against Jewish kids?

  2. If Santa "doesn't care if you're rich or poor, 'cause he loves you just the same," how come the rich kids get more presents?

  3. Doesn't Mrs. Claus get angry when Santa comes home with an empty sack?

  4. What kind of a reindeer coach can Santa be when a new reindeer hasn't cracked the starting lineup in over a hundred years? Even WCW gives young guys more breaks than that.

  5. How come no child I know has gotten a wooden train, when that is all the elves seem to know how to make?

  6. What if you don't have a chimney?

  7. How does Santa get his fat butt down the chimney?

  8. Do Santa's reindeer jump, as "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" claims, or fly via magic feed corn, as "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" would lead us to believe?

  9. If each kid gets an average of twenty-five toys a year, and each home has an average of 2.2 kids, how does Santa fit 110 billion toys into his one sack?

  10. How does Santa find the time to visit two billion kids in one night?

  Two Christmases ago Dewey recognized that Santa's handwriting was the same as Mommy's. "Santa is awfully busy delivering toys," Mommy explained, "so he counts on us to help him write the name tags." Last year he woke up at midnight and said, "If Santa hasn't come yet, how did my stocking get filled?" We covered that with "Grandpa Jack is Santa's stocking helper." I covered his "How does Santa travel to every house in the world in one night?" question with some bull story about how traveling through the time zones actually gives Santa more than twenty-four hours to do his thing.

  In addition to the growing number of their questions, Noelle seemed intent on "catching" Santa in the act. Dewey insisted that he had seen Santa three years ago and had actually hugged him, and Noelle was desperate to do the same. Colette told me of Noelle's strategy of drinking Sleepy Time tea in the afternoon so she could take a nap and thereby stay awake all night in order to nab Saint Nick.

  The dwindling threads of reason that held the Yuletide fib in place had me nervous as hell on Christmas Eve 2000. To make things even worse (for a reason I'll get to later), I was exhausted, but still kept pushing the delivery hour back so as to better my odds of successful present presentation. I kid you not when I say my heart was pounding harder during Christmas Eve toy distribution than it was before I was thrown off the cell in '98.

  When I finally went to bed, somewhere around 4 A.M., or to put it another way, twenty minutes before I woke up, Dewey's pile of toys had a stuffed Tigger on top of it, and Noelle's had a stuffed Pooh on top of hers. Magically, the stuffed animals had switched places when I came out to the living room, and I listened to my son serve up more whoppers than a pimply-faced Burger King employee as he insisted that "Santa had left them this way."

  The Santa Claus dilemma had me worried during that Disney trip. "Colette, if the kids want to know the truth about Santa, do what you've got to do, but don't tell me that they know." Colette tolerates my year-round Christmas fascination and even thinks it's kind of cute sometimes, but my very real obsession was starting to worry her. "Mick, someday the kids won't believe in Santa anymore. There's nothing you can do about it."

  Maybe she was right. Maybe it was inevitable that Dewey would reach the dreaded conclusion first and then, sadly, my little one, my tiny creature, the child whose very name means "Christmas" would find out too. That would be it. No more children to share the magic of Christmas morning. No more children to tell Christmas Eve stories to as their eyes danced and gleamed with the wonder of holiday surprises. No more children ...no more children . . . no more ... That's it. The an
swer. It had been so simple and made such sense. Why hadn't I thought of it before?

  "Honey, my love, Colette," I said with as much charm as I could muster after a ten-hour day of rides, walking, and mice with heads the size of Maytag washers. "Would you like to have a baby?"

  Colette absolutely loved the idea, and we made plans, big plans, for her time of ovulation, which, as luck would have it, fell on Christmas Eve and Christmas. There were two ways that this coincidence could be looked at. We could take it as an omen that our beautiful child was to be conceived at the holiest time of the year. Or we could try to figure out how we were going to nail each other six times in two days with my parents in the house.

  It wasn't easy, and in truth, our "I need to talk to you" and "let's watch a movie" and "my back hurts, I need to lay down" probably fooled nobody. By the end of day one, I was running out of steam, and running into another problem that I had not foreseen. Just as a person who runs a lot can become a marathon runner, I was becoming a marathon man in the game of love. Which is great if you're on your honeymoon but not so great on Christmas Eve with the threat of kids walking in, the knowledge of parents hearing the effects of their little boy's athletic prowess, and the haunting specter of a Santa Claus expose coming soon in the Foley living room.

  By Christmas day I was begging for mercy, and Colette responded by wearing outfits that The Godfather's Hos might find offensive. Still, I found the testicular fortitude to get both a post-present opening and a pre-Christmas-dinner rendezvous into our Yuletide agenda. By eleven, I was a beaten man. I had officially had more sex in two days than I had managed in my first twenty-four years. At least I was safe. Colette hadn't stayed up past eleven in two years, including New Year's Eve. I slipped into bed, as quiet as a 300-pound one-eared mouse, and tried to drift off to sleep. Colette began to stir. Oh no, please don't wake up. She started to move toward me. Say it isn't so. Suddenly she placed her hand on my minuscule member and breathed a sexy "one more time, big boy." The woman was insane. Not only was I officially out of ammunition, but my penis was showing less signs of life than a Garden crowd during a Test comeback.

  Hey, I wasn't embarrassed. I had proven my manhood over the last two days, and my wife deserved the truth. "Colette, I'm sorry, but I've got nothing left. I am tired, I am sore, and I just want to get some sleep." My wife wasn't sad; it wasn't as if she had even a thimbleful of desire left for me at this point, but she had her reasons. "Please," she begged, "just one more to make sure." I told her as gently as I could that nothing she could do would make me change my mind. Her next five words proved me wrong.

  "Want to watch a porno?"

  A porno? Was she serious? "Yes," she assured me, she was serious. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a porno connoisseur, but these unexpected words had awakened my sleeping giant. Okay, so it's not a giant, but that's how the damn phrase goes, so I'm sticking with it. Colette hated porno. I would never get a chance like this again. My wife agreeing to porno was like Gandhi agreeing to a Big Mac. It was like the pope agreeing to join the Ho Train, it was like The Rock agreeing to put Pete Gas over for the title.

  There was only one problem. "I can't watch a porno on Christmas," I whined, and despite her objections, I stood my moral ground. I had faced the same problem on the night of Christmas in 1978, when I had run into stacks of my father's old magazines. No, my dad didn't have smut in his house, he had Sports Illustrated. About ten years' worth. Now if the year 1978 and the words Sports Illustrated don't ring a bell, it's obvious that you don't remember that year's scandalous Swimsuit Issue that featured Cheryl Tiegs in a fishnet bikini that showcased nipples that were roughly the size of a good pair of buckwheat pancakes.

  Sure, the current issue was the phenomenon, but my dad's innocent cache was to a horny teenager what finding a Mickey Mantle rookie card would be to good old J.R.—nirvana!

  No one else had access to a young, pre-nipple-exposed Tiegs in exotic locales wearing skimpy bikinis. I looked at the clock on that Christmas night so long ago. Ten-thirty p.m., an hour and a half left until the official onset of December 26. An hour and a half until I could do what my thirteen-year-old hormones were truly telling me needed to be done. I had lasted in 1978, and by golly I could last in 1999.

  The minutes seemed to pass like hours, until finally, midnight. Yes! Let the games begin. I don't remember even thinking about a baby as I watched Christy Canyon's bouncing boobs and used verbiage in that bedroom usually reserved for the Cross Bronx Expressway during rush hour.

  31: Anatomy of an Angle

  AN ANGLE IS THE CORNERSTONE of sports entertainment. Wrestlers need good angles and angles need good wrestlers. It's a true relationship. In truth, the angles might be more important than the wrestlers because a bad wrestler can get by on good angles a lot better than a good wrestler can get by on bad ones. I should know since I've been a part of some bad ones ("Lost in Cleveland") that nearly led to a career in pool cleaning, and I've been involved in some good ones (Mankind vs. Undertaker, Dude Love vs. Steve Austin) that led to an increase of human asses in cushioned seats. In my fifteen years in the business, I do believe that the buildup to and the execution of the Royal Rumble 2000 was the best angle that I've ever been a part of.

  First, a little background. Triple H took the World Wrestling Federation title from the Big Show and raised the stakes in his feud with Federation boss (and at this time babyface) Vince McMahon by, of all things, marrying Vince's daughter Stephanie the night before her nationally televised wedding to Test. It seems that Stephanie had been slipped a Mickey (no, not me, a sleeping pill) during her bach-elorette party in Vegas, and the despicable Hunter had married the unconscious girl at the drive-thru lane at a local wedding chapel. (The wedding was part of the story, but the drive-thru lane really does exist.) Then, at the Test/Stephanie wedding service, Triple H unveiled a videotape in front of a distraught Stephanie, a furious Vince, and a really dumb-looking Test.

  Usually, I'm a big fan of World Wrestling Federation stories, but this wedding thing (and unfortunately for Test, his part in particular) was a little ridiculous. First, as a wedding present to his future son-in-law Test, Vince was generous enough to "give" him a match with Hunter about an hour before his nuptials took place. As a result, poor Test showed up sweating to a degree that not even Richard Nixon approached in the famed Kennedy debate. Not only that, but he was actually announced coming down the aisle to his wedding ceremony as "Test"; not Andrew Martin, as Stephanie called him several times on TV, but Test. To raise the ludicrousness level even higher, he came down the aisle to his ring music. It was hideous. After seeing him destroy the nuptials of the sweating, wedding-day-ring-music-playing, gimmick-wrestling-name-using Test, I'm surprised Triple H wasn't an instant babyface. I know the boys in the back were cheering him.

  I realize now that while I have previously explained my use of both the Mean Street Posse and Al Snow in oft-repeated punch lines, the origin of Test's role in this same respect has been untold. Probably because I don't know why I pick on him. I just like it. Actually I like him too, and I think his ring work is impressive. His "Love Her or Leave Her" match with Shane McMahon at the 1999 SummerSlam in particular was excellent. But Test is an easy target, a man virtually void of any and all quick comebacks. He gets no mike time, so I don't have to worry about on-air retaliation, and his chances of writing a book are right up there with England's Queen Mother getting a nipple ring. Once in a while he tries to make a verbal comeback in the locker room, but him trying to get over on me is like shooting spitballs at a battleship.

  Recently, as Commissioner of the World Wrestling Federation, I had a chance to pull a good one on Test. He and his partner, Albert (together known as T&A), were set to come into my office for a taped preshow interview. Before they arrived, I told the producer and cameraman that I was going to play a joke on Test and to go along with it. Test had some scripted lines, but because I am generally given the freedom to say whatever I want, none were written for me. Test came into the of
fice, asking for a match with the huge Samoan wrestler Rikishi, and showing some of the worst acting skills this side of Richard Grieco. When he was done with his request, I picked up my official Commissioner's gavel and began to speak.

  "You see what this is? It's a gavel, right? And do you know what this gavel means? It means I'm the Commissioner. Which means I make the rules. So I guess you could call me a ruler, right? And you know what they say about rulers, don't you? They've all got twelve inches. So why don't you bend over my desk so I can rule your ass. Now be off with you!"

  I fully expected Test to break out in laughter and say, "Okay, good rib, now let's do it for real," but he didn't. Instead, he simply yelled "thank you" and left the room. The second he heard "cut," I heard him ask, "Were those his lines?" to Albert. "All right," the producer said, "that was good. Let's take a look." A bunch of the boys who were in on the joke gathered around to watch the playback. I was holding in my laugh much as I'd done in the D.D.P. cookie incident, but Test didn't seem to notice. After we saw it, he still didn't realize it was a joke. To his credit he took it well, but even after the real interview was taped, he maintained he liked the first one better.

  Enough about Test. Back to the Rumble angle. In a valiant attempt to defend his daughter's honor, overmatched fifty-four-year-old Vince took on the World Wrestling Federation Champion at the December 12 Armageddon show. After taking more punishment than any CEO of a major corporation has in a long time (at least since Bill Gates's last visit to the barber), Vince was defeated when his own daughter turned on him.