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

by Mick Foley

  "Now, Mankind is an entertaining son of a gun. Mankind is a pretty damn good author. Mankind is one tough SOB, and Mankind is one hell of a fighter." I then continued in a slightly quieter tone. "So it saddens me to say that after the beating you gave me on Monday night, one thing that Mankind is not, is ready to face you in a street fight at the Royal Rumble in Madison Square Garden." Hunter broke into a larger smile, which grew larger still with my next sentiment. "Because you are without a doubt 'the Game,' you are the best in the business right now. And Mankind in some way is just a beaten-up pathetic fool. But I think the World Wrestling Federation fans deserve a substitute in that match." The fans cheered and I knew I had to be careful. Logic and experience told me to milk the anticipation and let their interest peak. Instinct told me that if I waited too long, the crowd would start chanting "Rocky" and would ruin my surprise. So I charged right in. "So what I'm going to do, Triple H, is I'm going to name him right now.

  "I think you know the guy," I said with increasing tempo as I pulled off my mask. The crowd started to stir. I ripped open my Mankind collared shirt to reveal the infamous "Wanted Dead" shirt underneath. "His name is Cactus Jack"—a pop as big as any I've ever been a part of—"and his first official act as part of the World Wrestling Federation is to kick your teeth all over Chicago."

  As I mentioned earlier, the effectiveness of this startling pull-off-a-shirt metamorphosis all hinged on Triple H. If he had laughed it off, our Rumble buy rate would have done Hasselhoff numbers. Instead, Hunter sold the transformation as if he were Pam Ewing and just saw her dead husband Bobby walk out of the shower in the Dallas season cliffhanger.

  I stormed the ring and went after Hunter. The punches were nothing special, but the reaction was. After nineteen forearms, I raised my hand in the air and caught a hard chair to the back courtesy of the Bogus Mankind. A chair to the back is different from a shot to the head in that one has a little more creative freedom in how they choose to sell it. Which is my way of trying not to sound like a hypocrite for choosing not to sell it at all. At least I didn't laugh. The Bogus one went for another shot, but I caught the chair with my hands and threw it angrily to the corner. Too angrily, as it turned out, since when I went to pick it up moments later it was gone. I was convinced that it was a part of some conspiracy as I looked for the missing seating device while cursing audibly in the ring. (In addition to traffic, the bedroom, and The Sopranos, the F word is also appropriate when trying to find a missing chair in the middle of a Cactus Jack angle.)

  It turned out that no one had taken, stolen, or hidden the chair. I had merely thrown it too hard and it had skidded out of the ring. It was finally handed back to me, and after knocking the Bogus Mankind onto the announcer's table with a sliding kick, I picked up the chair and delivered a devastating elbow/chair off the apron to the chest of the impostor.

  Triple H, who had taken a powder (bailed out of the ring) after the first chairshot, continued to sell the vision of Cactus Jack as if he was a monster. Unfortunately, I landed hard on my knee while performing the move and it swelled to grotesque proportions. Two moves and two injuries for Cactus in two days. Maybe Hunter was putting Cactus Jack over as some mythical madman, but in truth, I was getting my ass kicked by my own self.

  In addition to the tremendous execution of the angles, part of the interest that began mounting came from the dramatic departure from the lovable Mankind character. Fans were able to suspend their disbelief and accept Cactus Jack as the darker, pissed-off side of Mick Foley—the ass-kicking side. Vintage clips from Japanese death matches on the following week's Raw further enhanced the public's perception of Cactus Jack, and in a strange way, so did my absence from televised matches.

  "For one show, I can convince the fans that Cactus Jack is something special," I had told Vince when we planned out the idea, "but if I wrestle on TV, they'll know I'm the same broken-down guy they've been watching for years." So with Cactus Jack temporarily relieved of his on-air wrestling duties, I threw all of my thought into this huge Pay-Per-View match.

  I had a lot of thoughts to throw. For hours every day I thought of ideas to incorporate and then made mental notes of what I thought was best. Then, for the first time in my career, I made actual notes and wrote down my ideas. That's right, after years of hearing about wrestlers using scripts in their matches, I actually proved them right.

  For the first time in years I felt like I was in shape when I stepped into the ring in Madison Square Garden for the Royal Rumble. I had been training hard and I knew I was prepared.

  I walked back into the dressing area twenty-seven minutes later with a half-dozen thumbtacks stuck in the temple area of my head, barbed-wire holes in my back and stomach, sweat pouring out of my body, and a feeling of total professional redemption. I wish it had been my last match. It was that good. Triple H was at his absolute best here, and I was only a small step behind. The Rumble match was a brutal, beautiful, emotional affair, and in many ways was like a dream come true.

  Unfortunately, I woke up.

  32: From the Penthouse to the Doghouse

  "Here comes Cactus Jack," yelled a fired-up J.R., "and business is about to pick up. My goodness, he's got a two-by-four, he's got a two-by-four! This is going to be a slobberknocker. He raises that two-by-four over his head, and ooh, that looked kind of crappy. Another shot, and damn, that one sucked too. My goodness, King, he's forgotten how to work, Cactus Jack has forgotten how to work!"

  Wrestlers should be entitled to their day of glory. A day to bask in the glow of appreciation and adulation that follows a triumphant Pay-Per-View match. St. Louis Rams quarterback Kurt Warner got to yell "I'm going to Disney World" after his Super Bowl win. A pro basketball player gets to have sex with one of several willing women who will probably bear him a son that he won't ever see. But wrestlers? Unfortunately, unless you're lucky enough to have surgery scheduled, the most likely answer to "you've just main-evented a Pay-Per-View in one of the greatest matches of your long career" is "I'm driving to Philadelphia for a pressure-filled live television broadcast of Raw!"

  I spent the afternoon in Philadelphia in time-honored fashion: watching the previous night's match sitting side by side with my opponent and hoping for that rare postmatch ovation from the boys. Okay, here's the end of the match, will we . . . yes, they're cheering, we did it!

  The Royal Rumble match was a success on the rarest of levels. The challenger (me) had come away being more over than when he went in, and the champion was a better champion. We were able to help "make" each other.

  Unfortunately, later that night I did some more "making" with my disastrous two-by-four run-in. I "made" people feel sorry for me when I tried to run down the ramp. I "made" fans cringe with some of the worst-looking offense this side of a Posse match, and I "made" the glorious Garden effort look like a distant memory. Man, I wished I had called it quits after the Rumble.

  The Rumble show just about coincided with the release of Beyond the Mat, which was in serious contention for an Academy Award nomination. (It didn't get one but did garner a nomination from the Directors Guild.) Reviews were almost unanimously great, and the film should have helped make this twilight of my career even greater. It didn't. The World Wrestling Federation's decision to not promote the movie was theirs to make, and although I didn't agree with it, I understood it. What I didn't understand and could not tolerate was a Federation executive (who is no longer with the company) telling ABC's 20/20 (my old friends were doing a feature on me) that the footage of my family had been a setup expressly for the movie.

  It takes quite a bit to really make me mad, but this guy managed to do the trick very nicely. Following a phone call in which I used the word "bullshit" seven times in two minutes, 20/20 received a call during which the executive in question apologized deeply.

  I promoted the movie on Good Morning America a few days later—a fact that had me losing favor rapidly with the World Wrestling Federation office. I was halfway in the Federation doghouse. The 20/
20 show pushed me in completely. (On the positive side, Diane Sawyer liked me and thought I was a good father despite letting my kids watch me get pummeled.)

  I had been told by the producer of the piece, a grizzled news veteran named Lenny Borin, that 20/20 wanted to do a "positive" piece. Great. He also told me using a word that would come back to haunt me, that ABC needed some "heat" to go with it. In other words, a happy story wasn't good for ratings.

  My interview with correspondent Chris Cuomo went well, as did a seven-hour day during which the crew followed me around at Disney/MGM Studios (filmed during our fateful December vacation). Following the Disney day, ABC filmed an interview with Colette and me during which Colette talked about the toll that too many headshots had taken while I attempted to provide a little levity to the proceedings. Unfortunately, the levity was cut, while the spousal concern made the air.

  I watched the program from a hotel room in Philadelphia, and I knew I was screwed before my segment ever aired. The "heat" that Lenny had talked about manifested itself in morbid teasers that promised to look at "the dark side of wrestling" and promised to explain "the trouble with Mankind." It wouldn't have mattered if the piece itself was about my relationship with fuzzy bunnies, because the audience was preconditioned to thinking it was a "dark, trouble-filled" segment.

  Lenny was upset when he heard I didn't like it. "Mick," he said over the phone, "I thought we showed you in a very sympathetic light." I agreed. I came off as extremely sympathetic, but I felt 20/20 erred in two important respects. First, they made the extreme punishment I had taken in extreme circumstances seem like it happened much more frequently than, in fact, it had, and second, the show made wrestling itself, and the World Wrestling Federation by inference, the focus of the blame.

  I thought it was going to be a happy story, because, in truth, that's what my story was. Sure, I visited a few emergency rooms in my day, and sure, maybe I'm a veteran of a few too many Norman Bates showers, but the rest of it is happy ... the part about chasing my dreams, overcoming odds, and retiring on top of the business . . . not to mention writing a pretty good book about it.

  If anything, the World Wrestling Federation had taken steps to prolong my career. I had been well compensated for basically being a washed-up sock wearer and had never been forced to do anything. I had almost been forced to work a program with the "Wildman" back in '97, but had somehow managed to dodge that career-threatening bullet.

  My style has been described as "high risk," but I feel it would be more accurate to term it "high impact." Over the years I have certainly done some things that were a little bit risky, but for the most part I have tried to limit the real risks. Instead, I focused on a style in which risks of career-ending injury (neck, back, knees) were low, but probability of lifelong discomfort was high. I mean, it didn't take a genius to look at a twenty-three-year-old guy diving twelve feet off a ring apron onto concrete to say, "Hey, that guy's going to have a little trouble walking when he gets older." Likewise, a genius wasn't required to look at the '99 Rumble and say, "Eleven chairshots can't be all that good for his brain." So I guess you could say from day one that I knew the truth and accepted the consequences.

  On the heels of my Good Morning America appearance, I knew the World Wrestling Federation was not going to be all that happy with the attention the media was giving Mick Foley.

  Fortunately, Eddie Guerrero dislocated his elbow in a manner that placed him right up there with Joe Theismann for most hideous televised sports injury. I guess it wasn't all that fortunate for Eddie, but it created a tremendous opportunity for me. Eddie had come in along with Chris Benoit, Dean Malenko, and Perry Saturn as "The Radicalz," a band of talented but underutilized castaways from WCW. Talent is not actually given high consideration when looking at the WCW hierarchy, and so the Radicalz decided to jump ship and swim over to the World Wrestling Federation. I was supposedly the guy who brought them in.

  As "owners" of the World Wrestling Federation, Triple H and Stephanie had played Wizard to their Dorothy by granting them their wish, on one condition—members of the Radicalz had to defeat members of DX in two out of three matches on the February 1 SmackDown! show in Detroit. It was thought that a controversial finish in the decisive third match would lead to an eight-man matchup at the February 27 No Way Out Pay-Per-View. Guerrero's injury, however, led to the Radicalz dropping three straight falls, but more important, to dropping right out of the No Way Out main-event picture.

  Vince called me on my cellular phone on February 6. I had my kids in the car and wasn't in any mood for a verbal confrontation, so I never mentioned 20/20, but its aura hung heavy in the car, like a White Castle fart, nonetheless. "What do you think we should do about the Pay-Per-View?" Vince said. Now, I consider my relationship with Vince to be a good one and at times to be a close one, but he doesn't make a habit of consulting with me about Pay-Per-View ideas over the phone. I generally give the World Wrestling Federation some good ideas and they always give me a great deal of creative freedom concerning interviews and angles, but this particular call was a little out of the norm.

  Fortunately, I had been giving my potential retirement match a great deal of thought and had an idea on tap. I had regretted not retiring after the Madison Square Garden show and feared hanging around much longer. I had successfully battled my "Joe Frazier on a stool" vision, but didn't want to defeat Frazier just to turn into Leon Spinks.

  I had actually met both of these fighters at separate times. "Smokin"' Joe had showed up at the hotel where the ECW wrestlers stayed in Philadelphia and was in the bar watching the ECW show, and he was loving it. The legendary fighter was laughing out loud at the wild action, and cringing a few times too. My match came on and Joe went absolutely NUT! I decided to take advantage of this unique coincidence and introduced myself. He responded with a blank, uncaring stare followed by the weakest of courtesy smiles.

  Spinks was another story. From the moment he defeated Muhammad Ali, Spinks was a legendary figure in the boxing industry. Sadly, he was not a legend in the financial industry, and he was not in the greatest shape, financial or otherwise, when I met him at the ECW arena in February 1996. Leon was no stranger to wrestling, since he had even main-evented a match at Sumo Hall in Tokyo against Japanese legend Antonio Inoki. The match was so bad that Japanese fans actually rioted afterward. I've been to Japan well over a dozen times, and I think I know the Japanese fans pretty well. They dress well, they're polite, they bow, they take a lot of pictures, they buy a lot of Cactus Jack T-shirts, and they respond to big moves by yelling "oooh." They do not riot. The Spinks/Inoki matchup had to have been extraordinarily bad for rioting to occur, and in truth it was. I rioted when I saw it too, and I was in my own house.

  Despite the Sumo Hall fiasco, Spinks continued to dabble in wrestling. He refereed a few matches in Memphis for Jerry Lawler's CWA and even went on a few tours for Japan's FMW. So certainly the guy would know Cactus Jack, right? Well, yeah, if you count a glassy stare and a little stream of drool as signs of recognition.

  Leon was in ECW to begin a program with Taz, who was still bamboozled as to why he didn't land the Seinfeld gig. Taz was touted as a legitimate tough guy, and part of that touting was based on winning matches with legitimate fighters. Spinks was supposed to be videotaped in the crowd watching Taz's match as step one of a planned feud. The feud never got to step two because the somewhat simple step one was never completed.

  "Get a shot of Spinks," yelled ECW owner/mad scientist Paul E. Dangerously. "We can't show Spinks," Paul E. was informed. "Why not—I need the shot," the scientist yelled. "Because Spinks is puking" was the answer. Indeed he was, and Taz and Leon never got a chance to get it on. Which in retrospect is probably a good thing. If Japanese fans had rioted because of Spinks, there was a pretty good chance he wouldn't have made it out of the ECW Arena alive.

  By the time the phone call was done, we had booked the No Way Out main event. Cactus Jack against Triple H in a "Hell in a Cell" match with the lose
r being forced to retire. I had intended to go out at the WrestleMania with a nice send-off, but I actually liked this idea better, wrestling my kind of match in a Pay-Per-View main event.

  The waters were again calm in the Foley/McMahon ocean, but a mere five days later storm clouds arose that threatened to sink our relationship for good. But hey, I had six good days to enjoy, which included an innocent little incident that in all likelihood the world of sports-entertainment will never again see. Before the Rumble, I had not wrestled on television or in house shows. Now, with No Way Out on the horizon and with my body finally recovering after our brutal MSG battle, I began to wrestle a little more. Royal Rumble had been built on good promos and the Cactus Jack mystique, but another big show would require some in-ring wrestling angles to keep the momentum rolling. In addition, I agreed to wrestle a few shows within driving distance of my Pensacola home.

  Mobile, Alabama, was the host of a Cactus Jack and Kane vs. New Age Outlaws main event. I was actually quite nervous before this showdown because of the mythical Cactus Jack buildup. I had been able to pull it off at the Rumble, and had even followed it up with a few good television matches, but this house-show thing had me worried. What was I going to do?

  I came out to the ring to a great reaction. The people in Mobile sure loved the hardcore legend. Boy, were they going to be disappointed. I looked out into the crowd and I saw Pam Johnson, who was both Dewey's former and Noelle's present kindergarten teacher. I smiled and waved, and tried to look like what I thought a hardcore legend should. The New Age Outlaws music played and the Road Dogg and Billy Gunn entered the ring and did their "ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, D-Generation X is proud to bring you its World Wrestling Federation Tag-Team Champions of the Woooorldd!" routine that they did whether they held the belts or not.