by Mick Foley
Troy Martin would go on to greater fame as Shane Douglas, the Franchise of ECW fame and the Dean of World Wrestling Federation nonfame. He was intelligent, athletic, and handsome, and if anyone from DeNucci’s school looked like a surefire prospect, it was him. Shane has been his own worst enemy sometimes, has burned bridges that he shouldn’t have even bothered looking back at, and has had more retirements than both Funk brothers put together. Without him, though, I wouldn’t be where I am today, and might not have graduated from DeNucci’s gym.
John Pamphilles was a talented guy, but he was small, kind of plain, and moved away soon after my training began.
After my hellos: DeNucci brought me into the ring. “This isa Mickey, he’s froma New York. He’s green, but he takea decent bump.” That last part of the quote did me in-the part about “takea decent bump.” He might as well have put meat loaf underwear on me and walked me past a pack of wild dogs. The four of them proceeded to bump me without mercy for most of the next three hours. I was slammed, hip tossed, suplexed, and back body dropped so many times that I couldn’t even afford to guess how many. To make matters worse, I didn’t have experience hitting the ropes, and as a result, took the force of the cable on my liver instead of my latissimus muscle. By the next morning, I was peeing blood, but I went through it all again the next day. I was so banged up that I could hardly move.
Dinner following my first session in Freedom stands out as a particularly memorable occasion. There was a Bonanza steakhouse about seventy-five yards from the Admiral Perry, and despite the sure eight dollars I would have to spend, I decided I deserved it and headed out the door. I was so weak that I could hardly hold the heavy oak door, and nearly tripped and fell onto the marble-tiled floor. Actually, it was a cheap pressboard door and a dirty rug, but it was difficult nonetheless. Without exaggeration, the seventy-five-yard walk took me at least ten minutes, as every fiber in my being throbbed with pain. The porterhouse on my plate did nothing to soothe me, as “What the hell am I doing here?” became my question of the day. Actually, I would ask myself that same question every day for the next several weeks, whenever I wrestled in Western Pennsylvania.
I was both physically and mentally exhausted when Dominic asked to speak to me after my Sunday workout. “Kid, we need to talk about money,” he said flatly. “How much ya think you should pay?” This was uncomfortable to me, especially the part about me suggesting a price. Even today, I hate to be asked how much money I want. I would rather shoot down an offer and make a counter offer for much more than flat-out request the same amount. I had heard that DeNucci’s school was $100 a day. I didn’t even have $100 period, let alone per day, so I decided to shoot low with the veteran and said, “How about fifty?”
He thought it over and shook his head. “No,” he said, “I can’t do that.” My heart sank, before he continued his dismissal. “It’s too high-how about $25?” I couldn’t believe it. Next he said, “You gonna need some boots, these are brand-new-you want them, give me $25, okay?”
“Yes sir,” I quickly answered, as even in my wrestling infancy, I knew a bargain when I saw one. Those $25 boots would go on to see ceiling (lose matches) in some of the finest arenas in the country-as well as some of the emptiest armories and parking lots.
Even at the discounted rate I had so shrewdly bargained for, I knew that I couldn’t continue to throw money around like I had. So I began skimping on certain things like food and lodging. The Bonanza was out, as was just about any place that charged for food. The era of the jar of peanut butter and the loaf of bread was ushered in. Even at $16 a night, I knew I couldn’t afford both Friday and Saturday night in a motel, so Fridays officially became car night. I threw two sleeping bags into the backseat of my Fairmont, where they stayed for the next year and a half. I would leave Cortland at 10 P.M. every Friday night for the eight-hour trip to Freedom-giving myself six extra hours to rest. If I made it all the way, I would park at the gym and sleep in front of it. If I got tired along the way, I would simply pull over at a hotel and park in the lot, curl up, and catch a nap.
Sometimes the guys would get to the school and have to wake me up. Often the car would be covered in snow, and I would emerge like a bear from hibernation, ready to rumble. I actually enjoyed my backseat bed, as I was very aware that this was part of my paying my dues, and as I kept reminding myself in ten-degree weather, it was building character. It seems to have worked, and I can honestly say that one of the great comforts in my life is that I feel completely deserving of all the good things that have come my way in the last few years. I know for a fact that I earned them.
Not all my car memories are happy ones. About a year after starting at DeNucci’s school, I set out for another weekend of training. I would alternate driving the New York State Thruway west to Erie, Pennsylvania, where I would turn south to Pittsburgh. At that point, I’d never heard of a lake effect storm or snow squall. It had been snowing for some time, but as a road veteran, I was having no problems. Suddenly, just as I was coming to an exit, the wind was blowing and the snow was flying to the point that driving became almost impossible. For some reason, I went on, thinking it would suddenly clear. I was wrong. An hour later, I had traveled only a few miles, and I pulled over for the night and checked into my Fairmont Hotel, where I slept soundly inside my two sleeping bags.
I was awakened by the tapping of a motorist on my windshield. “Are you okay?” he yelled.
I was still half asleep, and responded with a ridiculous “Sure, yeah, go ahead,” that I later regretted deeply. I climbed into the front seat and attempted to fire the mother up. Needless to say, the mother didn’t fire. Neither did it flicker or even spark. It was one dead mother. I got out of the car and my initial reaction was, “I’m going to die.” It was so cold and so windy that the wind was whipping right through my trusty red flannel and freezing me to the bone. In an act of self-preservation, I began to run, and with luck on my side, found a trooper station less than a mile up the road. A day later, the Interstate opened up and I drove the five hours back to Cortland just in time to catch the Super Bowl.
I had some other driving mishaps, but these were sometimes mental lapses on my part. One time, I drove to Freedom to find Dominic on an independent trip that I had forgotten about, as had Tony Nardo, another aspiring student. We drove to Dominic’s house, where we were given the bad news by his wife Jeneane. Jeneane was nice enough to give us the key to the gym, and Tony and I rolled around for an hour, returned the key, and went home. Total training time, one hour-total driving time, sixteen hours.
I did that trip one better shortly after college graduation when I was living with my parents in East Setauket. East Setauket was almost 500 miles away, instead of the 400 that Cortland was, and so it was with great sadness that I showed up in Freedom, only to find out that training was canceled. After a few minutes of somber soul-searching as to what the hell I was doing in the wrestling business, I did an about-face and drove home. Total training time, zero minutes-total driving time, twenty hours. I chalked up all these situations to paying my dues.
After about four trips to Dominic’s, I found I really had only two problems. One, I sucked at pro wrestling, and two, I hated it. After my big Ward Melville Dude Love debut, everything had been downhill. Now, at Dominic’s, I was finally getting to try some offensive moves, and couldn’t cut the mustard. Even the simplest things were confusing to me. Doing a hip toss was like doing algebra-I didn’t have a clue. A schoolboy rollup might as well have been nuclear physics, and a drop toe hold, brain surgery. I have several witnesses who can attest that I was the worst natural wrestler they ever saw. So when in the ring with me, the other students concentrated instead on what I was capable of-namely, taking an ass kicking-and proceeded to help me hone my skills in that specific area. I was really so bad that I wanted to quit, and the only thing that was stopping me was my pride. I had talked so much about wrestling for so many years that, if I quit, I would have felt like a huge failure.
Thankfully, after a long time, the fog began to lift, and I began to learn, and in turn began to enjoy myself. I credit my turnaround to hard work and perseverance, but above all else, the dedication of that old “som una bitch,” Dominic DeNucci. Too many times, I’ve heard horror stories of wrestlers’ “training” guys just as a way to rip them off. The Undertaker recently told me that he paid Buzz Sawyer to train him and basically learned how to lock up (begin a match) in Buzz’s backyard before showing up and finding that Buzz had skipped town. On the contrary, I think Dominic saw me as his special project-as if he wanted to see if combining my thimbleful of talent and my “ball thisa big” could somehow turn out a decent pro.
On several occasions, he would arrange for me to come back later in the evening for one-on-one training, during which I did things I never thought possible. One night he wanted me to learn a sunset flip, and I flat out told him that it was impossible. He persisted, and after several embarrassing attempts, I managed to pull one off. I was elated to the point of jumping up and down. It was like the first time I was able to climb the rope in gym class, except without the half woody. “How was that, Dominic, how was that?” I excitedly asked my mentor.
“It wasa notta bad,” he replied, in typical DeNucci fashion.
He was a vivid storyteller who spoke in parables to illustrate his point. When one new wrestler asked about learning fancy moves, his reply sounded like it came straight from one of the Gospels. “My boy,” be began, “thisa business is likea the alphabet. Ya cannot spell big words without learning all the letters. First, you heara the letters, next you spell out a little word. Then next you using big college words likea Mickey and Troy.”
“Gee, Dominic,” offered Dave Klebanski, “you’re kind of smart for a guy who can’t speak English.”
Well, maybe Dominic never has mastered the English language, even after forty years in this country. Then again, maybe he goes home and drops the Italian accent completely, like a pizza shop owner I know who uses it only as a business gimmick. I do know, however, that my view of Dominic changed when we began traveling overseas, where I stood with my college-educated thumb up my butt, while Dominic rattled off fluent French, Spanish, and of course Italian in all the different countries we went to.
I wrote a little earlier about Dominic testing my will, which he did, but I have to explain how healthy a thing that is. Throughout much of the history of the business, wrestling trainers have often had two schools of thought about aspiring wrestlers. The first school is to take anybody who has the money, teach him the very bare essentials, and throw him to the wolves. Unfortunately, with so many “trained” wrestlers out there, and so few shows being run, most of the guys’ “careers” consist of only a few very small matches. The wrestling landscape is literally littered with thousands of wannabe wrestlers who don’t know a wristlock from a wristwatch.
The other school of thought is the “let’s show them wrestling is real” school. The concept is drummed into these poor unsuspecting kids in different ways, the most popular of which is to exercise them until they puke, and then get them in the ring and eat them alive. I’m guessing most of these trainers didn’t get enough love as children. Some would intentionally injure a prospective student, so as to send him back to the real world with a different outlook on wrestling. A common ploy was to goad an unsuspecting student into the hands and-knees amateur wrestling “referee position,” under the impression of learning some technical skills. Once the student was in the position, the trainer would abruptly drop a knee on the back of the poor kid’s ankle, immediately breaking it, and therefore putting him in a cast so he could tell all his friends that wrestling was “real.”
If a prospective wrestler came from an athletic background, he was often singled out as an example. I knew a guy who helped train wrestlers in the Midwest who told me he was encouraged to “stretch” legitimate athletes to show them just how real wrestling was. Never mind that this guy was one of the worst pros to ever lace up the boots-he was a skilled amateur who knew all the dirty tricks, and he sent many a pro football player packing. So instead of having a quality lineup of great athletes, this one promoter scared off all the good talent and ended up showcasing some of the worst abortions the business has ever seen.
Bar fighting was another way to show how real wrestling was. Sometimes inflicting injury was not enough to prove a point; permanent injury was the answer. For a while in an era that I thankfully was not a part of, the art of taking out another man’s eye was a noble effort in the quest to legitimize pro wrestling in people’s minds. When I broke in, I heard stories that made me sick, including one where an eye was not only torn out of its socket, but was also purposely stepped on and crushed as the victim tried to retrieve it.
I wonder how these people live with themselves now as senior citizens, knowing that there are people their age walking around with hollow sockets because of a stupid, cruel, and senseless code of manhood that they lived by decades earlier. An old episode of Hawaii Five-0 that has stuck in my mind for almost thirty years makes me think of these pathetic wrestlers. In the episode, a tough military man admits to raping a girl, even though his sexual impotence makes the admission impossible to believe. McGarrett asks the man why he would be willing to risk a twenty-year sentence for a crime he didn’t commit. “I’d risk my whole life,” the tough guy boldly states, “to keep the rest of the guys from finding out I wasn’t a man.”
“A man?” a flabbergasted McGarrett shouts. “Do you know what it really means to be a man! You haven’t a clue, you haven’t a CLUE! Danna, get him out of here!” When it comes to being a man, sadly, a lot of wrestlers, both past and present, haven’t a clue either.
Thankfully, DeNucci subscribed to neither theory. He neither took my money selfishly nor tried to make an example of me. Yes, he made me respect the business, and yes, he put me in some holds that were sheer torture, but he never tried to prove himself by abusing me or anyone else. I once heard it said that “there is no such thing as a bad student, only a bad teacher.” I’m not sure if that’s always the case, but I do know that it was Dominic’s patience and skill as a teacher that turned me into such a good student.
In addition to my wrestling studies, I was also turning into quite a scholar at Cortland. Wrestling seemed to give me a focus, and this focus helped me achieve more scholastically than I ever thought possible. My projects in radio and television production, which I had decided to major in, were class favorites, and upon graduation, I was even awarded the Anne Allen Award for the outstanding student in my major. So what if there were only ten students in my major, and the rest of the school were gym teachers-the award was mine, mine, all mine.
One of these school projects nearly cost me one of my most valued friendships. I was doing my documentary project along with a girl named Debbie James, who I’d been friends with since my freshman year. Debbie agreed to accompany me to Pittsburgh for a weekend so that we could do our documentary on DeNucci’s school. Now, I feel that my Freedom travels taught me a lot of lessons about life, but unfortunately, these lessons did not include how to treat a woman on the road. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t mean or abusive, but when it came time to sleep on Friday night, she was more than a little surprised to find that a motel didn’t fit into my plans. Grudgingly, she went along with my routine (it was spring, so the weather was no problem) but it was several days before she spoke to me again. “Mickey, you made me sleep in a car,” was her simple rationale for the silent treatment, when she finally did decide to speak. Somehow, we were able to turn out a great documentary that looked close to professional quality, and she was able to turn out a few kids who are now big Mankind fans. I can’t wait until they get old enough to learn what a cheap bastard their hero was.
After three months at DeNucci’s, I arrived back in Cortland on a Sunday night to a rude welcoming from Jake and Steve. “We need to talk to you” they said.
“What is it?” I innocently wanted to know.
“You sa
y you have a girlfriend,” Steve said, as the interrogation got under way.
“Yeah, so what,” I was quick to say.
“Well,” Jake interjected, “you never call her and she never calls you. You leave every Friday and you come home every Sunday. You smell like shit, and your hair is all plastered to your head. You have sleeping bags in your car, and there are food wrappers everywhere. You have about ten jars of peanut butter in your car, and you have a black eye every other week.”
“So what,” I countered, “what are you trying to say?”
Steve jumped in and came right out with the wicked accusation: “We think you’re wrestling.”
“No, I wish I was, but I’m not,” I lied as I headed up the stairs.
“This isn’t over, Rich [he’d been calling me that ever since the “Frank” incident], not by a long shot. I know you’re wrestling, Rich, I know you’re wrestling!”
I hated to lie, especially to guys that I spent so much time with. But I honestly felt that wrestling was something I wanted to keep just to myself-at least until I reached my goal. And my goal at that time was simple. It wasn’t to be the World Wrestling Federation champ, or to be the King of the Death Match, or to be the tag champs, or even to be a sports-entertainer. I simply wanted to have a pro match and then I would consider myself a success. As school came to an end in May I was getting close to reaching my goal.
In the second week of June 1996, I left a summer school session in Cortland, where I caught up on all my credits and then officially moved to Pittsburgh for the summer. I really didn’t know if the Fairmont could withstand those 1,000-mile round trips. Seventy thousand miles later, when the car finally died, I realized that I was wrong. I got into Emsworth, Pennsylvania, where Rob Betcher had set up a place for me to live with his grandmother, a relationship that almost immediately went sour.