Mick Foley: The Truth About Hell In A Cell, Crazy WWE Moments, The Rock, Randy Orton, Triple H
Mick Foley (@realmickfoley) is a professional wrestler and WWE Hall of Famer. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Irvine, CA to discuss how his career could have been different without the Hell in a Cell match, winning the WWE Championship on WWE Raw, his legendary hardcore matches with Randy Orton and Triple H, getting The Rock with his "It doesn't matter" catchphrase, if November is too early to put up the Christmas tree, and more!
On whether November is too early to put up the Christmas tree:
"No, because I'm working on a year-round, not just a room, a year-round cabin. It's going to look incredible when it's done. I won't be there all the time. The secret is, don't overdo it. You don't have to turn the lights on all the time, because then you get tired of it. But it's there for you if you want it. And that's why the cabin is actually too small to live in full-time, but it's a great place to visit and get recharged out there in nature and see animals, things like that."
On his current health:
"The crazy thing is I'm moving better. I dropped like 90 [pounds]. At one point I'd gone from 372 to 273, and then I may have taken it too easy for the next four or five months and crept up towards 300, but I think I'm down around 275, and hip and knee replacements, those were game changers. I remember talking to Kevin Nash and saying, Kevin, something amazing happened to me today. I said I passed somebody in the airport. I was always the guy where people were like, 'Hey, sir, you move to the side.' And I was starting to pass people, which didn't mean I was fast, and I don't want to over exaggerate the amount of pain I was in, but I think I've got a pretty high threshold. So when I say it was, I don't want to say agonizing, but it was more than severe. If it was not agonizing, it was agonizing at moments. I would need five minutes to get going after I got off, I stood up out of my seat on a plane, or when I was driving my car, and my kids said that this is what I would do for hours at a time, I punched my right thigh to try to get some feeling in my nerves. When I went at a friend's request, who's a physical therapist, she said, I think that's your hip. And I was like, but the pains in my lower back. But then she explained something about the piriformis muscle gripping onto the nerve, mimicking sciatica. And when I went to that doctor, orthopedic guy, and I saw the hip, I wasn't dismayed, I was actually happy, because I saw, you can fix this. He said, 'I've been doing this for 25 years. It's the worst hip I've ever seen. I don't know how you're walking.' Once I realized there was hope, and then once I had the hip followed by the knee, it was like a new lease on life. Now, if you were to suddenly transform someone else into my current body, sure, they might think it was hell on earth, but compared to how I felt for like, 10-15, years, yeah, I am doing a lot better."
On if he is scared of anything:
"I'm afraid of a lot of things. I maintain Shane McMahon was fearless. You could say I was courageous. Courage is action in the face of fear. I was terrified of the cell. When I looked down the entirety of Undertaker's entrance was spent with me thinking, How do I climb down this thing without ruining my career? I couldn't think of it, and that's why the match unfolded the way it did. But yeah, when I drive through the Sierra Nevadas, I get really dizzy. Anything with heights, I can't look over, even if I'm going up to Lake Arrowhead in the mountains, I can't look over. I'm really scared. I'm more fearful of many things that people would believe."
On how his career would have looked if he didn’t get thrown off the Cell:
"Even though it wasn't the end of my career, it put an exclamation point, and it gave me the moment. There are football players who are known literally for one play. Basketball player Willis Reed, great career. He's known for playing two minutes in game seven with an injured ligament in his knee. Joe Montana's career, great, great quarterback. But it's the catch, I think they just called it a catch. I don't know if I would have had one of those moments, you know, beating The Rock for the WWE title was a great moment for WWE and for me, but I'm not sure if that would be something that would be passed on to the next generation. That's what stuns me about the cell is that half of the people who talk to me about it, and this is like, where I don't write it down, but I would estimate half of the people that talk to me about that match were not born when it took place. There's even a story I'll mention from time to time, and I did it on the 20 Years of Hell tour, saying it was really powerful when my wife said my kids wanted to watch the Cell match. I said, 'How do they even know about the Cell match?' And she said, 'Well, kids are talking about it in school.' I said in preschool? But it's something that parents have handed down, and it's the go-to for wrestling fans to show their non-fan friends who don't understand what it's about."
What hurt more, falling through the cell or the chair?
"Chair to the face. I stopped kidding myself. I stopped wearing the bottom flipper. Because my feeling is, I know it's not a good look. My son, Huey, broke it to me this way, like eight years ago, ‘Dad, don't take this the wrong way…’ and first of all, you know no sentence ends well [when they say that]. [He said] 'Don't take this the wrong way, but you still kind of cool with your top teeth missing. Now you look like a crack addict.' I said, 'Son, I believe you were thinking of a meth addict, but point well taken.' But my feeling is like, I know it's not a good look, but it's my look, and I earned it. So I don't mind at all. And plus, you know, Jay Lethal and Kurt Angle could attest for the fact that I was, I would say, was more than an interrogation in Amsterdam, where apparently I was suspicious, because these teeth, one of them was knocked out. The other was knocked in and chipped in half, but they put the other tooth back in. When I got back from that match, it was in a glass of milk to keep it vital. And on the 20th anniversary of the cell, when I did my show in Pittsburgh, the dentist or orthodontist, whatever it was, who was on call said he was there that night. They said, we've had an accident at the Civic arena, and the first thing he asked me was, how long did they last? About eight years. I was like, yeah, yeah. Then they started turning [a different] color. And you probably heard how people, guys in our business, will say, Well, I would do it, but would my character? And so my version of that is, I don't mind having gray and blue gnarly teeth, but would Santa have gray and gnarly? No. So I pulled one out with a ball peen hammer and a pair of pliers. Because even though dentists will let children keep their teeth, for adults, it's considered medical waste. I was like, No, I don't want to lose these. I want to make jewelry. I took one of them out, but I'll admit the other one was too tough. And then my son found a dentist. But yeah, I got interrogated in Amsterdam. I mean, if you have Jay Lethal on, ask him. My memory is that guns were at the ready. I finally was like, 'Do you have a computer?' And they said, Yeah. I said, 'Can you Google Mick Foley Hell in a Cell.' That's my tooth. So you can tell, if this was 15 years ago, I probably would not want to talk about the cell. You know, I had a love-hate relationship with it. And then as you get older, I think it's in the same way that Adam West accepted that he was Batman, guys who feel like their career was pigeon holed because of an iconic role. Even Norman Bates, Anthony Perkins, couldn't get work, you know, outside of a few like knockoffs and sequels. But you come to appreciate it. And I realized, wow, this is even before I started really doing the conventions. I'm so lucky to have anything people remember me for after the fact, let alone, probably two or three things."
On his greatest match:
"My favorite match was Backlash against Randy Orton. Crazy thing is, if he has a new favorite, I don't want to know about it. He's technically, probably had better matches. But the idea of being in that spot, people ask me, you will just say you made somebody. No one person makes anybody. It takes a lot of people, a lot of factors, and even if the bases were loaded for Randy, it's still up to him to knock it out of the park. And he did, and one of the wisest decisions I ever made, much wiser than working at the Huntsville auto show the day before my street fight with Triple H, much wiser than catching a red eye and getting into New York City at 6 am for the Royal Rumble. I did a lot of stupid things that way, as far as travel, I actually canceled a talk at a community college so that I could come in the night before, as opposed to the day of the show. I like people to be able to read between the lines, rather than just spill the [beans]. But in this case, I think it's beneficial to know Randy came up to my room, and for only the second time my entire career, I had an A through Z plan, and I'll never forget, he was just taking it all in. I'm getting the tingles here, because you're talking about a moment that changed his career, and I don't know if we could have had that type of match if I'd gone through that speaking engagement. And the other key factor is that Michael Hayes heard some of the things we want to do. He goes, 'You're going to need more time.' So instead of rushing through, we had time to let things breathe. And it just felt really good. Even though I had many trials and tribulations getting back home. My luggage was delayed for four hours. I did throw up in the parking lot of Tim Hortons in Edmonton, because my brain had jogged a little bit, but I made it back in time for Raw the next night, and it was like the fans looked at him like he was a completely different guy. And it really made me feel good. Now, they turned him babyface in two weeks, which I thought was a big mistake, but it was hard not to like somebody who'd been through that type of ordeal."
What was the other match you went through?
"The street fight with Triple H. So when two of my five favorites are on that list, maybe I should have done more that way. The only other one that was A to Z was when I got to Japan. I only worked two FMW shows. A lot of people think I worked FMW. I actually worked IWA and I did two anniversary shows for FMW. So. It was Wing Kanemura, and he was a good worker, and he did a lot of crazy things, and he had like five notebook pages written out in English. And I'm a guy who likes to have a lot of say, because, it's not a matter of pride, it's, I think I have something to offer. And then when I looked at this thing, I just, I like it. If you watch that match with Wing Kanemura, I had zero input in the creativity, but then it's up to you as a performer, to pull everything off. I asked my kids, 'Hey, see if AI can just come up with a hardcore match.' And a minute later they're telling me the, you know, the spots, the moves. I was like, it's not a bad match, but it's all dependent on how it's carried out. And you see some guys who can do so much with so little, and you see other guys do so much, and it doesn't mean anything."
On taking a Pedigree on thumbtacks in his match with Triple H:
"I knew if I turned my head when I landed and closed my eye really tightly, that the chances [were good]. This is the infamous Foley instantaneous risk reward ratio analysis, where, first of all, we weren't supposed to do the tacks. Mr. McMahon said, no thumb tacks. And as soon as he walks away, Triple H says, Did you put the tacks under the ring? I was like [yeah], so we weren't sure whether we're going to do it or not. But then when I kicked out of the pedigree, I don't think anybody had at that point, maybe the tacks were already out, I'm not sure, but it was like, Yeah, we're going to go for it. And I thought to myself, Okay, okay, you could lose an eye, but imagine the pop. I just closed my right eye as tightly as I could, turned my face, and so there was a few sticking in there. But again, trying to compare that risk to the risk of doing a no rope barbed wire match with Terry Funk, you're going to probably come out better with the tacks than you will with the barbed wire."
On the origin of Have A Nice Day:
"I mean, that was just a throwaway. Jim Ross told me, you know, do your promo and just have a nice day. We might want to edit that in case Jim wants a piece of that marketing pie."
On the mandible claw:
"I apologize to every younger sister or brother who had that happen. Jim Cornette gave me the idea, and it's based on Dr Sam Sheppard, who was the physician that both the TV show and later the movie The Fugitive was based. I'm not a historian like Corny is, but I believe that he was not guilty, but in that state, that wasn't the same as being exonerated. So whether he would not practice medicine or could not, I don't know, but he wrestled for a while in a couple of the Southern territories, and kind of slight a build, and they explained away his lack of physique by amplifying his knowledge of the human anatomy. So the idea is mandible claw, two fingers under the tongue. They press down simultaneously on the nerves lying underneath the tongue while also simultaneously pressing up with the thumb on the nerve underneath the chin. And if you do it, you cannot move. So that hurts. And if a guy like Danny Hodge had that incredible hand strength, if Danny Hodge were to put that on somebody, that person's life would change."
On his I Quit match with The Rock and it being featured on Beyond The Mat:
"Plan was yeah, for five. But I was still in the ring at five. I didn't realize that your body has the ability to give with a chair shot. That doesn't make it fake. It's just like anything. It would be like all of a sudden now, instead of having an ability to give, somebody's punching you square in the face while your head is up against the wall, the impacts would be so much worse. This isn't an exact analogy, but once my hands were cuffed and anyone at home could do that be like, Oh, I can see why. If you were hit in the head, it would be far more painful. So I literally could not believe how much that first chair shot hurt, more than any one I'd ever taken. And so instead of being halfway up the aisle on five, I was still in the ring. And so I wanted to do the best job I could. But even as I was getting there, I did not know my children were crying. The original finish, which was supposed to be the camera sees my family crying, I see my family crying, and I quit. I don't want to do that. Now, if you go through history, it was like, within two weeks, Triple H did the same thing that I wanted to do with Chyna, but it was just done so quickly, there's so much in wrestling you can't digest at all, and that wasn't something people were able to sit down and, like, really enjoy. But that was the original idea. And my worry was that I'd spent their whole lives telling them that I was just playing and that dad that couldn't be hurt. I thought they'd come over to the kids, they'd be like, reading. I didn't know they'd be crying, but to borrow a line from John Candy in Home Alone. Kids are resilient. They came around and started talking after a couple of weeks."
On getting The Rock with a “It doesn’t matter…”
"I'd like to say it was his idea. I don't know. I don't know if I would have been bold enough to say, Can I use your catchphrase against you? But part of the fun of being with Rock is that nobody gave us a script, we went out there as the Rock and Sock Connection. So even when I started playing off his catchphrases, it worked so well because it was live, whereas if I'd said, 'Hey, how do you feel about this?' Maybe it would have gotten shot down. I remember I was doing a signing somewhere, and they were playing like the best of Rock and Sock Connection. And I had to remember, I'm at a signing, because I was marking out so much for our own work. And by the way, I only use the word mark in a positive way towards myself. I think the idea of referring to your fans in negative terms is self-defeating. You're talking about your fans, people who like what you do, and then you're going to give them a name based on them liking what you do? What does that make you? I consider what I do to wrestling is an art form, it really is. It's anything you want it to be, and if you take pride in what you do, then you should not be criticizing the people who like it. So when I say marking out, I only do that in happy terms, and usually about myself."
What is Mick Foley grateful for?
"Family and fans."
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