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

by Mick Foley

  4. twenty-foot face-first fall on concrete—death. High likelihood of multiple skeletal extremity fractures, organ contusions, and possible ruptures, intra-abdominal bleeds, cranial injuries and bleeds

  5. sixteen-second electrocution—cardiac arrest, possible death

  6. blowtorch to head—flames would engulf head, definite third-degree burns, skin meltdown

  7. hundred-pound sandbag—skull fracture, vertebral fracture, intracranial bleeds, paralysis, death

  8. steel object to face followed by twenty-five-foot fall onto concrete—blow-out fractures of orbit, dental fractures, intracranial bleeds

  9. tool cart—possible death, rib fractures, pneumothorax, organ puncture

  10. thirty-foot falls—see #1, followed by contusions, facial fractures, broken bones

  Pretty devastating stuff, huh? It kind of makes you wonder why Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern, the victims of all this deadly abuse, aren't kicking ass and taking names in the World Wrestling Federation. After all, they withstood all of that abuse and were still on their feet at each movie's end. For crying out loud, guys, would you sell the moves a little bit? Even Al Snow would have stayed down after a thirty-foot fall.

  I know some of these examples are ridiculous. They're meant to be. But are they really any more ridiculous than the misleading interpretations of Dr. Ganz's study? I don't think so.

  Unfortunately, there is a major difference between our two studies. Mine was meant to be fun (with the exception of General Hospital, which I really did find shocking), whereas the Indiana University study was accepted as hard facts by a media either too apathetic or too reckless to seek the truth. And in some ways, our (World Wrestling Federation) survival, or at least our prosperity, depends on the public being able to differentiate facts from smears and truths from half-truths. For the truth is out there, and like I told you earlier, it's not as bad as we've been led to believe.

  I do feel a little sad for Dr. Ganz. After all, he dedicated a great deal of time and energy to this project, while a much easier alternative was so close at hand. I mean, if the professor had really wanted to study vulgar language, obscene gestures, and inappropriate behavior, he could have simply walked down to Assembly Hall, where Indiana coach Bobby Knight (who was still very much employed by the university at the time of the study) would have put the World Wrestling Federation's collection of middle-finger givers, crotch choppers, "suck-it" sayers, simulated drug users, simulated sex receivers, and garbage-can hitters all to shame.

  The PTC

  I was in Albany, New York, in late 1999 when a pre-taped interview was suddenly halted. "Wait," the producer of the segment said, "let's do it again; there's a Coke machine in the background." So I did the interview and proceeded with the day. On the following afternoon, I noticed our usual supply of Cokes and Diet Cokes had been replaced with Pepsi. It didn't seem like the biggest of deals, but a Tuesday afternoon of SmackDown! preparation can be quite a drag, so I decided to do a little investigation. "Hey, what's the deal with all the Pepsis?" I asked one of our cameramen. "Coke pulled their sponsorship," he replied. "Some group has been complaining about our show." The answer was surprising, but not too much so, as the World Wrestling Federation periodically experiences sponsor changes, which are considered a normal part of doing business. Besides, Pepsi had been there to snap up the commercial spots, business had never been better, and there seemed to be no end in sight for the World Wrestling Federation's fortunes.

  Sponsors, however, began departing in greater frequency, including the much-publicized June 2000 withdrawal of MCI WorldCom, which had been a mainstay since SmackDown’s inception. Ten weeks after my April 2, 2000, retirement match, I returned to wrestling as the new World Wrestling Federation Commissioner. There was, I sensed, a genuine concern in the air.

  A group called the PTC (Parents Television Council), a self-described "conservative media watchdog organization," was taking credit for these withdrawals. The PTC was headed by a man named L. Brent Bozell III, and used veteran entertainer Steve Allen as their honorary national chairperson. The PTC had deemed SmackDown! "the sleaziest show on broadcast TV." The PTC had limited its wrath to broadcast television "because broadcasters, which use public airwaves to transmit programs, must be licensed by the federal government,although Bozell has since inexplicably talked of looking into cable as well.

  In addition, the PTC was blaming the World Wrestling Federation for the deaths of four children. "Four children have been killed by peers who are emulating wrestling moves they learned by watching programs such as World Wrestling Federation SmackDown! " said Steve Allen at the MCI WorldCom shareholders' meeting on June 1, 2000.Despite the fact that three of the incidents seemed to point to poor adult supervision, and three of the deaths occurring before SmackDown! even premiered (with the fourth death occurring only two days after the show's debut), the accusation seemed to feed the growing paranoia that was becoming prevalent among our sponsors.

  Following my analysis of the Indiana University study of 1999,1 had reason to doubt the veracity of the PTC's own study, which had found that "SmackDown! alone was responsible for more than 11 percent of the sex, cursing and violence in the 1999 study." At that point, with the memory of IU professor Walter Ganz's willingness to cooperate still fresh in my mind, I attempted to contact the PTC to discuss their study. My calls were not returned.

  I found the accusations of the PTC study hard to fathom. Unlike the IU study, which had been done at a time when the World Wrestling Federation content was at its most risque, the 2000 version of the World Wrestling Federation was somewhat toned down, especially SmackDown! It was common knowledge among wrestlers that the rougher language and more offensive gestures should be kept from broadcast television. Personally, I found the 2000 product to be fast-paced, exciting, and with the rise of Kurt Angle, the metamorphosis of Edge & Christian, and the return of Mick Foley, often downright nerdy.

  You couldn't have guessed that from the actions of the PTC, which were relentless, and especially from the words of its founder, Mr. Bozell, who said, "It is sickening to me being a father of five, four of them boys, to turn on the television and see an arena filled with youngsters ... swearing at wrestlers, calling for blood and violence while worked into a frenzy." From my vantage point, which I believe was a great deal more accurate and intimate than Mr. BozelPs, I saw some other things that he perhaps wouldn't take note of. Often I would look at the crowd from behind the curtain, and view families laughing together, high-fiving each other, and on several occasions that always made me smile, dads putting an arm around their sons.

  Something, somehow, just didn't add up. It was while sharing my Indiana University findings with Linda McMahon that I found out what that something was, although in retrospect, it was just the tip of the iceberg. I was beginning to realize that the PTC wasn't going to volunteer to me any information on their study, so I wanted to be careful about criticizing it or them without proof. Having just come off my six days in court in May, I was in no hurry to be sued again, so I posed my question to Linda very delicately. "Can I legally say that the paranoia concerning our sponsors reminds me of the hysteria that led to McCarthyism in the fifties?" Linda's eyes lit up, and she smiled as she said, "Mick, Brent Bozell's father was a speechwriter for Joe McCarthy."

  I know a lot of people find U.S. history boring, but I think that a certain amount of background is essential in learning to understand Senator Joe McCarthy, McCarthyism, the Big Lie, and how aspects of all of them are very much alive in the strange case of the World Wrestling Federation vs. the PTC and L. Brent Bozell III.

  First, a couple of definitions that will be helpful to keep in the back of your mind as we chart our course.

  McCarthyism: Kenneth C. Davis's Don't Know Much About History defines McCarthyism as "a smear campaign of groundless accusations from which the accused cannot escape, because professions of innocence become admissions of guilt and only confessions are accepted."

  The Big Lie: Comedian
/actor Richard Belzer's definition in "UFOs, JFK and Elvis" is as good as any I've heard, and a lot simpler to remember. "If you tell a lie that's big enough, and you tell it often enough, people will believe you are telling the truth, even when what you are saying is total crap."

  Joe McCarthy

  Joseph McCarthy was a senator from Wisconsin whose career was floundering—until he played on America's anticommunist fears to become one of the most powerful men in the world in the early 1950s. With communism spreading quickly throughout Europe and Asia following the end of World War II, many Americans feared communist infiltration of the United States. McCarthy fanned the flames of this fear in an infamous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he claimed to have a list of 205 members of the Communist party who were employed in the U.S. State Department.

  Over the next four years, McCarthy's baseless accusations ruined countless lives. He was finally exposed on Edward R. Murrow's nationally broadcast television show See It Now, and in 1954 the televised Army-McCarthy hearings gave the public a chance to witness his crude ways and remorseless destruction of decency.

  Following the hearings, McCarthy saw his public support slip away and was censured by the Senate, a combination that sent him into a tailspin. It was during this final, pathetic chapter of his life that Brent Bozell entered the picture. McCarthy eventually drank himself to death and died in 1957.

  The Bozell-McCarthy Connection

  Brent Bozell II attended Yale in the 1940s, where he became best friends and political allies with William E Buckley Jr. Buckley would go on to become the United States' best-known conservative political figure all the way through the 1970s. Together, Buckley and Bozell became a formidable debating team, with Bozell standing out as both the better speaker and the brighter student. Indeed, Mr. Bozell’s intellect was so impressive that he had won the National American Legion prize as foremost high school orator in the nation in 1943.

  In 1954, Bozell and Buckley published McCarthy and His Enemies, which was described as "the first book about McCarthy not written by an enemy or by McCarthy himself." The authors seemed to summarize their feelings on McCarthyism, and their acceptance of his unfair tactics, with the telling sentence, "Justice, we are saying, is not the major objective here."

  In the book, the two authors do question McCarthy's methods but continually excuse these methods and even agreed to "rewrite" several passages that the senator thought were "too stridently" anti-McCarthy.

  McCarthy took a liking to Bozell, and brought him aboard his staff following the disastrous Army-McCarthy hearings. At the same time Bozell and Buckley formed the conservative periodical National Review. During this time Bozell, by all accounts, wrote tremendous speeches for the censured senator, but unfortunately, they fell on deaf ears, as McCarthy had outlived the public's and the Senate's interest in him.

  Following McCarthy's death, Bozell went to work as a speechwriter for Arizona senator Barry Gold-water, who was attempting to bring the conservative movement into the mainstream. He even ghostwrote Conscience of a Conservative for Goldwater, which was a bestseller in I960. According to one report, Goldwater's confidence was such that he never even read Bozell’s work before sending it off to the publisher.

  About that time some people began questioning Bozell's conscience and his sanity. "He was my first realization that you could look wonderful and be bright and intelligent, clear-eyed and be totally bananas," recalled John Leonard, who had worked with Bozell on the National Review. Bozell, you see, was a strong proponent of a preemptive nuclear strike on Moscow, and didn't seem to care a whole lot about the consequence of that action. Said Leonard, "I just had this sense of a red-haired guy who could wipe out a city without really being able to imagine that there were people in the city."

  In 1963, Bozell took his family (including future PTC head Brent, who would have been around eight at the time) to Spain, where he became involved in an ultraconservative movement whose primary goal was restoring the Spanish monarchical succession that had been interrupted in the 1830s. Upon returning, he resigned as senior editor of National Review in an attempt to forge an identity distinct from Buckley and National Review. Despite Bozell's fine reputation as a writer and orator, it was Buckley who had captured most of the public's attention, a fact that troubled Bozell deeply.

  Another reason for the split is that Buckley simply wasn't conservative enough for Bozell. Just how conservative was this Bozell guy? Well, as David M. Oshinsky, the man who wrote A Conspiracy So Immense, the definitive book on the life of Joe McCarthy, told me, "Brent Bozell was about as far to the right as you could possibly get."

  Following the split with Buckley, Bozell attempted to run for Congress on the Republican ticket in Montgomery County, Maryland, but was crushed by the incumbent in a campaign that "was marked by his (Bozell's) looming eccentricity."

  Those eccentricities started coming to the forefront in the following years, first when he tried to form his own political party (which was immediately rejected) and then with the formation of his own right-wing Catholic journal, Triumph. In his book, William E Buckley Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives, John Judis wrote of Triumph that its "politics became theocratic rather than conservative with Bozell denouncing America and its constitutional tradition of religious tolerance." Buckley himself put it as gently as possible when he wrote, "Brent went further than I would do in pressing the demand of our Church in the secular realm."Apparently so.

  Mr. Bozell, you see, had a 1970 arrest and conviction when, while swinging a huge wooden cross, he smashed his way into the Student Health Service at George Washington University, which he claimed was counseling abortions. Young Brent III would have been fifteen at the time of his father's criminal activity. Not to be outdone, however, Brent Ill's mom was arrested for storming the stage at the Catholic University auditorium and attempting to assault feminist speaker Ti-Grace Atkinson.

  Oh, there was more, much more, but I'm not attempting to inflict injury on the Bozell name. I'm merely trying to show that L. Brent Bozell III, the man who claims to stand for traditional family values, didn't exactly have Ozzie and Harriet for a mom and dad and he didn't exactly grow up with the most traditional of family values to learn from.

  L. Brent Bozell III

  I would like to point out that the historians I spoke to about L. Brent Bozell Hi's dad were adamant in telling me that by all accounts the elder Bozell had never anything but the best intentions. He was a true believer in his cause, and in the Catholic Church. I can respect and even admire that, being a person who has found great comfort in the Catholic Church, at one point even seriously contemplating joining the priesthood. Hey, Brent's brother Michael was enough of a believer to become a Benedictine monk, in which capacity, from the tone of his writings, he seems very happy. Great. Another of Brent's brothers, Chris, was enough of a believer to form his own religious group, Los Hiyas de Tor-menta, or Sons of Thunder, which Brent's father was leading when he broke into George Washington University. Not so great. But at least he was a believer.

  So based on his family's history, who am I to doubt Mr. Bozell's PTC intentions? Maybe he is a true believer. Maybe he truly believes that he is worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars that he pays himself as the head of his charitable organization. Money that is sent in the form of donations from worried parents who he has urged to "clean up TV now." Maybe he truly believes his own bullshit. And there certainly is a lot of that to sift through.

  I have never met L. Brent Bozell III, nor have we ever spoken. This was not for a lack of effort, however, as I made over a dozen attempts to interview him. I would have been glad to travel anywhere for a face-to-face visit, but unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, my calls were never returned.

  As a result, much of what I know about Mr. Bozell's PTC has come from reading newspaper quotes, which follow a McCarthy-like pattern of exaggeration, half-truths, and lies. I have not been impressed with the little I have seen of him, which is limited to CNN's post-R
epublican Party convention coverage and his own The National Campaign to Clean Up TV Now videocassette. I am told that he is physically a dead ringer for his father, although unfortunately, the vaunted Bozell oratory skills seem to have bypassed the younger Brent. Indeed, Mr. Bozell seems to be engaged in a neck-and-neck struggle with a small soapdish in my shower for charismatic supremacy . . . and I think the soapdish is winning. Mr. Bozell's pattern of speech is so singsongy, his mannerisms so robotic, and his inflection so void of any real human emotion that I find him downright spooky. Even more frightening is the fact that people actually send this guy money, and that they swallow the crap he feeds them.

  Maybe, as I mentioned earlier, Mr. Bozell has our best interests at heart. Then again, his dad had our best interests at heart when he advocated initiating a nuclear war, a war that would have killed millions and devastated the entire world.

  Until recently, I never quite realized just how extreme Mr. Bozell's views were. Oddly, it was, of all things, his review of my Christmas book, Mick Foley's Christmas Chaos, that I read in the December 12 edition of the Daily Oklahoman that really opened my eyes. Chaos was a source of great pride for me, and its message of a special young boy who puts the spirit of Christmas back into a downhearted Santa Claus has touched many people.

  Jeff Guinn, a respected book critic with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram whose reviews are syndicated in dozens of newspapers across the country, voted it as the best children's book of the year.

  Mr. Bozell didn't see it that way. He lambasted the book as being "wretched" and wondered what kind of parents would purchase such "garbage." Jeez, don't you think this guy was going a little overboard?

  Mr. Bozell didn't stop there. He delved into Chaos as if he was looking into the Kennedy conspiracy, making meaningless observations and creating ludicrous theories along the way. He criticized artist Jerry "The King" Lawler's drawing of The Godfather and X-Pac on the back cover, even though neither person is mentioned in the story. He derided the depiction of a child wearing a "Stone Cold" Steve Austin shirt, and perhaps most shocking of all, hated that a child has on her toy list a "Chyna action figure," because Chyna, you see, had posed for Playboy.