The Hardcore Diaries

by Foley, Mick

  I have read articles ranging from speculative to scientific on the physical, genetic, or psychological differences between conservatives and liberals, which basically deal with whether political sensibilities are a learned or instilled behavior, or a combination of both. For me, it all comes down to my traumatic raccoon experience. A couple years ago, I was heading out onto the highway, about half an hour into a four-hundred-mile trip. I’ve always loved the peace and solitude of the open road, especially when accompanied by some good tunes or a few promos to cut in my head during the course of a late-night sojourn. As a matter of fact, it’s probably the thing I miss most about life on the road.

  I was really looking forward to this particular drive when a raccoon suddenly darted out into the middle of the highway. I swerved to avoid the little masked bandit, but in doing so, hit a second raccoon whose presence had, until that last split second, been unknown to me. It was a direct hit, a sickening thud that left no doubt as to its victim’s fate—roadkill for sure. I turned to my right to see the first raccoon scamper off into the safety of the roadside brush. And in that one moment, my entire trip was ruined. No number of quality tunes could assuage the sadness I felt. Not so much for the dead raccoon, for his demise had been quick, relatively painless, and honorable—after all, it had been the hardcore legend who got him. No, my sorrow was reserved for the surviving raccoon, who would be left to wander aimlessly, ransacking suburban garbage cans without the special friend my Chevy Impala had made such an impression on.

  Look, there’s no way to rationalize this type of reaction. You’re either going to care about the sadness of a surviving raccoon or you’re not. You’re either going to hit that thing, pop in a CD, and continue your drive unaffected, or you’re going to do four hundred miles behind the wheel with a heavy heart.

  So if that makes me a bleeding heart, I guess I’ll wear that badge with pride. In an odd way, it’s probably helped me. Because subconsciously I think our WWE fans know I care about that raccoon. And I think it makes them like me.

  That political debate must have gone very well. For later that night, I heard a knock on my Miami hotel room door. I checked the clock. One-thirty in the morning. At first I thought of drunk college students and put a pillow over my head, hoping that if I ignored the noise, it would somehow go away. No such luck. Instead, the knocking grew louder, more persistent, until I leapt up from my bed, fully intent on giving the inconsiderate door knockers a little taste of the 1995 Cactus Jack. Man, did I have a promo in store for them.

  But when I flung the door open, I was greeted by the ominous sight of two Secret Service agents flanking the tall, lean frame of Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry. “May I come in?” he asked politely, yet with a sense of utmost urgency, as if the country’s very future was at stake.

  “Of course,” I said, ushering in the senator and his security team. “How can I help you?”

  The senator scanned the room, looking for security bugs, or a possible hooker whose services I’d solicited. Finding nothing, he said, “This is a matter of utmost urgency—the country’s very future may be at stake.”

  Yes! I’d been right! But how could I be of any help to Senator John Kerry?

  “I need your advice,” the senator said.

  “Well, for starters, when you go to Wendy’s for a photo op, don’t order the soup. It’s insulting to the public. I don’t care if you have to put a well-manicured finger down your throat when you get back on that bus. You order a double with cheese, fries, and a Frostee, and you smile when you’re eating it. Got it?”

  “No, no, no,” the senator said, backpedaling as if he was a young Michael Jackson, trying to avoid father Joe’s stinging right-left combination. “I’m talking about…advice on my debate tomorrow.”

  “Really?” I said flabbergasted. “Why me? Haven’t you guys been rehearsing that thing for days now?”

  “Yes, that’s true,” the senator admitted. “I believe I know the issues, but after seeing you in action at your debate, it occurred to me that you might be able to help in the presentation department.”

  Little Mick and the eyes that God gave him.

  Courtesy of the Foley family.

  “You saw me? You were there?”

  “Well, I wasn’t there. ABC News. You know, it’s tough to sleep with such a big debate tomorrow.”

  “Okay, I understand,” I said. “And I’m flattered that you would come to me. But I’m afraid you’re not going to like what I have to say.”

  “Well, remember when I said that I voted for the war spending bill before I voted against it? It turns out a lot of people don’t like what I have to say. Be honest with me, Mike.”

  Sure, he’d just called me by the wrong name, but I let it slide. After all, this debate was probably the first time he’d seen me, unlike the president, who had modeled his entire foreign policy around one of my wrestling promos.

  “Well, Senator, you’re much more intelligent than the president…”

  “But then again, aren’t we all?” the senator said with a hearty laugh. I reached up to give him a high five, but Kerry left me hanging on it. I’m not sure he even knew what the hell I was doing.

  When the laughter subsided, I said, “You’re boring, Senator. You know your stuff, but you’re boring. If you go out there with that same dull demeanor, the president is going to look like the winner, even it he doesn’t know Dick.” A reference to the vice president, which I will admit was slightly confusing.

  “Well, what can I do?” the senator asked, clearly dejected. “I am as God made me.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “But then again, we show up at WWE as God made us, and then Vince changes us around, he give us gimmicks.”

  “Gimmicks?” the senator asked.

  “Yes, gimmicks. Look, I’d been Cactus Jack for eleven years when I showed up in Vince’s office. He thought I looked sleazy, like I wasn’t a star, so he put a mask on me, and as Mankind, I went on to be a WWE legend, one of the biggest stars the business has ever seen.”

  “Do you think a mask would help me?” he asked, confused.

  “Of course it would. Look what it did for Tim Woods as Mr. Wrestling II, or Bill Eadie as the Masked Superstar, or Al Snow as Avatar?”

  “You mean I’ll have to change my name?”

  “Well, sure, but just for the debates. Besides, everyone will know it’s you. We’ll make you a mask that augments your really big chin. We’ll make it purple, call you the Purple Heart, really play up your wartime heroics.”

  “I don’t know,” Kerry said. “I don’t want to draw too much attention to my three—count them, three—one, two, three—purple hearts. It might seem gratuitous.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” I said.

  Suddenly Kerry snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it,” he said. “America needs a straight talker, a guy who calls them like he sees them. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why beat around the Bush? No pun intended.” Kerry let out a little chuckle. “I’ll be debating in a mask, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So, I’ll call myself just that!

  “Tomorrow night, I will do verbal battle with President Bush, but not as the old, boring, monotone, soup-at-Wendy’s-ordering John Kerry. No, tomorrow night, right here, at the University of Miami, will mark the debut of—”

  “Of who?” I asked. Kerry had me hooked. Who would he be? Who would he be?

  “I’ll be THE MASKED DEBATER.” Kerry paused. “Do you think it will work? Do you think I’ll be popular?”

  “Senator, I think the Masked Debater will be beating people off with both hands.”

  June 7, 2006

  12:02A .M.—Zanesville, OH

  Dear Hardcore Diary,

  I should have written this entry two nights ago, following my visit to Walter Reid Army Medical Center. But I ended up spending several hours at my friend Marissa Strock’s apartment, eating dinner and just hanging out with her
and her mom, Sandy. Marissa, twenty-one, an Army PFC (private first class) had both her legs amputated following an improvised explosive device (IED) attack in Iraq.

  The imminent dinner had been the subject of a slight debate between me and Colette, who was still mildly upset about the Christy Canyon interview. She was, however, not upset in the least at the prospect of me having dinner with an attractive young lady and her attractive mom at their apartment.

  “So what you’re telling me, Colette, is it’s okay to have dinner with one woman at her apartment, but it’s not okay to do an interview with another one at a radio station. Right?”

  “But that’s different, Mick,” she said.

  “Why, because one of the women had her legs blown off?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, isn’t that kind of a double standard?”

  Colette admitted that it was, indeed, kind of a double standard, but the truth is, most wives wouldn’t let their husbands do either thing—the interview or dinner. My wife gives me an awful lot of latitude to do things she knows are important to me, including my fairly frequent Washington, D.C., road trips.

  It’s kind of hard to explain exactly why a guy like me who has so many reservations about the war in Iraq feels so compelled to visit the troops who are doing the fighting. Perhaps a psychologist might be able to shed some light on the subject, but I’m guessing a good professional could shed light on a lot of the subjects I’ve covered in the course of this book. I do know the reason I took my first trip to Walter Reed in November 2003: sheer guilt.

  For a full year, I’d seen images of the war on television, but had remained oddly detached from it, as if it was some movie or fancy video game. The war really hit home with the injury of a Long Islander, Lieutenant Fernandez, a recent West Point graduate, who had lost one leg and part of another foot. I didn’t know the lieutenant, but some of my friends knew him from his lacrosse-playing days at Rocky Point High School, about fifteen minutes from where I grew up.

  A short while later, I read a Washington Post article about the injured troops at Walter Reed. Sheryl Crow had been there, singing a song in each wounded service member’s room. Hulk Hogan had been there as well. Maybe I wasn’t quite Hulk Hogan, but nonetheless most of the injured troops I read about were young—nineteen, twenty years old—and would therefore have been impressionable high school kids back in my WWE heyday. I felt the guilt start to mount. Were there injured troops who might actually like to see me? Could I actually make a difference?

  I called Sue Aitchison, who handles a great deal of WWE’s community relations work. Even when I’d been estranged from WWE, I’d kept in touch with Sue, and would occasionally represent the company at different fund-raising events. Did we have a connection with the USO, who arranged these hospital visits?

  I was put in touch with Ellen Brody of USO’s Washington Metro office, and was in Washington, D.C., two days later. Ellen made everything so easy for me, and she and USO’s superwoman Elaine Rogers have become valued friends during the course of my two-and-a-half-year association with their group.

  “Slim Jims and wrestlers,” Ellen said on the phone prior to my first visit. “I don’t understand either of them, but that’s what our troops like. So that’s what we try to give them.”

  “How long do these visits usually last?” I asked.

  “Oh, they vary,” Ellen said. “But on average I’d say two hours. Of course, Wynona was here last week, and she stayed for seven hours.”

  “Is that the longest visit?”

  “I think so,” Ellen said.

  “Then I’m going to stay for seven, too.”

  With Chris Nowinski and General Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

  Courtesy of the Foley family.

  I did stay for seven hours on that first visit—a visit I really felt would be my only one when I embarked on it a night earlier. I thought the trip would be depressing. Instead, I found it inspiring. Soldiers and marines who’d left arms or legs in Iraq or Afghanistan talked of returning to be with their unit. At first I assumed they were kidding, but found out I was wrong—they simply had a dedication to their country that was inconceivable to an outsider like me.

  As I finished my visit, I thought of all the hours spent, all the rooms visited, all the photos taken, and realized I hadn’t even talked all that much.

  Instead, I’d done a whole lot of listening; to stories of their injuries, their families, their fallen brothers and sisters in arms. They’d felt comfortable with me around. I guess I’d been a part of their lives for so long that I seemed like someone they knew.

  I prepared to leave, but was told I needed to visit one more room, which had not been on our list. The USO is great about letting troops know who is coming by to visit, so they can get an accurate idea of who actually wants to meet certain guests. It really eliminates the guesswork so that I wasn’t just walking blindly into rooms. Everyone I met had actually expressed an interest in meeting me.

  The soldier I was to visit last had been in a bad accident, having lost a leg extremely high on his hip, almost at his midsection. His name was Josh Olsen, a young staff sergeant from Washington State, whose devastating injury had caused his body weight to drop almost in half, from a rock-solid 190 to slightly over a hundred pounds.

  I talked quietly with the young man for a few minutes, and noticed his mother was crying. I didn’t know at the time that she wasn’t the only one. I found out later that his nurses had been crying and holding each other during the course of my short visit. It seemed that I was the first person Sergeant Olsen had shown any interest in talking to during his month-long stay in the hospital.

  His eventual stay lasted much longer—many months as an inpatient, followed by well over a year as an outpatient. Yet when I returned a month later, he seemed like a new man, buzzing around the hallways in his wheelchair, e-mailing his buddies back in Iraq, working incredibly hard at rebuilding his body and his life.

  Over the months I saw Josh regularly, and each time, he was making great progress. His prosthetic was proving to be a very difficult situation, as even the surgeons and specialists at Walter Reed had never seen an injury quite like his, an amputation quite that high. So he made it a point to rebuild the rest of his body, tearing up the weight room, gaining back his lost size and strength with a determination I can’t really comprehend.

  Ellen Brody gave me regular progress reports, prompting me to leave a late-night, drunken, teary-eyed message on his machine, telling him how much I admire him and how proud I was to call him a friend. Well, it wasn’t all that late, and I’d only had two beers, but I’m a lightweight, and two drinks is all it takes to send me into sentimental mode.

  I had dinner with Sergeant Olsen’s parents about a year ago, at a casino out in Idaho, near the Washington State line, where I was part of an independent wrestling show put on by one of my old Texas wrestling opponents, “Maniac” Matt Borne.

  His mom asked if I was still visiting the hospital regularly. I told her yes, I still tried to get down to visit the troops every month. I kept that pace up for about a year and a half, but have slacked off since, visiting only five times in the last year.

  “Why do you keep coming back?” she asked.

  I thought it over for a second. I knew the answer, but didn’t know if I could actually get it out in front of them. “Well, I think I keep coming back because of your son. Because he made me feel like I made a difference.”

  My Dinner with Wolfie

  As I sat down at the groundbreaking ceremony for the new amputee wing at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, I felt my blood run a little cold. Something was among us, some reptilian form, some snake or miserable air-breathing gill fish. I don’t know if there even is such a thing, but what better way to describe the man in front of me, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Mr. Wolfowitz is now head of the World Bank, but at his most influential, he was something of an architect of the Iraqi war. No, he didn’t draw up invas
ion plans, but it was his persistence, along with that of a few key others in the neoconservative movement, that helped President Bush make the decision to invade Iraq.

  The meeting was inevitable. What was I going to say? If I said, “Nice to meet you,” I was a liar. But there had to be a way to say hello and be respectful, while still maintaining my integrity.

  I needed to be diplomatic. Wait, I had it! My greeting. When he turned to me, I would simply say, “Hello, Mr. Wolfowitz, how are you? I know the troops appreciate your support.” Good, right? Polite, but true. For reasons I don’t quite comprehend, the troops not only appreciate his support, they actually like the guy.

  I try to give credit where its due. Even if I don’t like the guy. Even if it’s Wolfowitz. But I’ll admit, the guy has been relentless in his support for the wounded troops. He is a frequent visitor to Bethesda and Walter Reed, and often hosts the Friday-night dinners for the wounded troops and their families at Fran O’Brien’s, a venerable steak house in downtown Washington.

  During the course of my visits, I have often tried to gently dig up some dirt on Wolfowitz, whenever I discover he has made a previous visit to a service member I am speaking to. It would probably be inappropriate to ask leading questions like, “Isn’t Wolfowitz a dick?” Instead, I ask more open-ended questions, like, “Oh, you met Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz, what’s he like?”

  And damn, I hate to say this, but they all like him. They say things like, “He’s a great guy.” Or, “They don’t get any better than him.” I guess the closest I got to negative was one soldier who said, “Oh, yeah, he was nice, he should be—he’s the reason I’m here.” Which, come to think of it, is kind of negative.