by Mick Foley
Chapter 18
Ding Dong, the witch is dead came the voice over the telephone. It was my old friend DDP, and it was his way of saying that Bill Watts had been let go.
“That’s great,” I said, not really meaning it, but not wanting to be ostracized as a Bill Watts supporter. “But who’s taking his place?”
“Try to guess,” said DDP. I tried a half-dozen times but failed. Finally he gave the word that, in all fairness to the guy, would change the face of wrestling-quite a bit. “Bisch.” I was stunned.
Bisch was Eric Bischoff, who had been until that time an announcer and not a very good one. What I didn’t know was that Bischoff had been impressing the Turner brass with his reasonable ideas and his smooth personality-in a sense he had been impressing them by being everything that Bill Watts was not. The Turner people had been getting real tired of Cowboy Bill. He cursed like a sailor, peed in a garbage can at an office party, and was uncouth in general. He had even punched Shane Douglas in order to get a cut on his head to “swell up for the camera.” If Shane had thought about it, he could have staggered up, fallen down the stairs, pooped his pants, and sued to become part owner of WCW. As it turns out, the final straw for Watts came when some comments that Bill had made to an underground newsletter became public and were brought to the attention of baseball home run king Hank Aaron, who had a front office job with Turner. The comments were construed as racist, which didn’t sit well in a politically correct company like Turner’s, and the Cowboy was forced to ride out into the sunset.
I may not have always liked what Bill did, and sometimes I didn’t even like him, but I can’t help feeling proud that I had the chance to work for him and that he respected me. About five years later, I actually had the opportunity to “wrestle” Cowboy Bill in Tulsa. The Undertaker had been hospitalized with a staph infection, and road agent Jack Lana contacted Bill about coming in and wrestling Mankind. “Mankind, who the hell is that?” Bill asked, before being told that he was the former Cactus Jack. That night, Watts slapped Paul Bearer so hard he drew blood, and backdropped me, threw me into the casket, and slammed the lid-all without losing his cowboy hat.
I actually thought for a while that the whole Bischoff hiring was going to work out well for me. As an announcer, Eric had not exactly been the most respected guy among the wrestlers, and I was one of the few guys who hadn’t treated him like a peon. I actually considered the guy a friend, and hey, there are worse things in the world than having a friend for your boss. Unfortunately, something happened that I hadn’t counted on; once in power Eric made new friends, and dirty, unkempt Cactus Jack wasn’t on the new list. Actually, I can’t say Bischoff was ever bad to me, and maybe I wasn’t completely off the list, but I had been pushed down it.
A few personnel changes were made that didn’t bode well for me. Jim Ross was taken off the air, saw the writing on the wall, and left shortly after. Eric’s take on Ross was that he was fat and he was Southern, and didn’t play well to mainstream U.S.A. Well, Jim Ross is still fat, and he’s still Southern, but he’s also the best announcer who’s ever called a match, and he’s a big reason that Raw Is War is the hottest show in the country, which, last time I checked, included mainstream U.S.A. That troubleshooting referee himself, Ole Anderson, was hired to help Dusty with the booking. With Ross, who was one of my biggest supporters, jumping ship, and Anderson, one of my biggest detractors, simultaneously jumping on board, I really didn’t know what the future held for me.
As it turned out, the future was a little rough on Cactus Jack. Within a month, I went from working main events to jerking the curtain (being the opening match). I had another problem in that I was having trouble getting the right reaction from the fans. Don’t get me wrong, I was getting a great reaction when I came out, and I had very quickly become the number two good guy behind Sting, but it was hard for the heels to get any “heat” on me. Because I had been portrayed for the last year and a half as a guy who not only felt little pain (false), but also seemed to enjoy it (even falser), the fans had little sympathy for me. I mean, why would they feel bad for someone who was doing something he loved? Vader was a different story, though. We had recently had a match in Gainesville, Georgia, and Vader’s stuff looked (and was) so devastating that the fans had rallied behind me during the heat. I called Dusty and set up a meeting wanting to stress the point that I was just a flesh-and-blood man who could be (and hadbeen) injured. I thought a series of matches with Vader would help the fans see me in a more sympathetic light.
I laid out a scenario to Dusty-one that culminated in a devastating injury. The Dream thought about it for a few minutes, and then got a look on his face as if he’d just had a major revelation. He started to speak, Dusty-style, in his excited, animated fashion. “That’s it, baby, and when Vader hurts you, you’ll have amnesia. You’ll go home, but you won’t even know your family … ” He continued to speak, but all I could think was how outlandish the whole thing was, and that it would never work. Nobody was going to believe amnesia. This was WCW, dammit-not Days of Our Lives. I was just about to speak up when Dusty said the magic words, “We’ll take you off the road for four months and we’ll pay you.”
Let me see-I could get buried and languish in the opening matches, or I could be with my wife and son for four months and come back in a main event feud. The choice wasn’t difficult. When he asked me what I thought, I gushed, “I love it, Dream, I really love it.” Vader and I had two matches to set up the injury. I talked a little bit about the first one, but it was so brutal that it really deserves an extra little look. I thought the psychology was pretty simple; I get the living crap beaten out of me, but somehow pulled out a victory. I began talking to Vader about swelling my eye up a little bit, and he seemed to brush it off by offering me another idea. “Maybe I can get a little blood from your nose, too.”
“Okay,” I said. Harley was there and helpfully offered to bust my eyebrow open.
Busting an eyebrow is the little known and little exercised act of creating a gash over the eyebrow by punching downward with the point of the knuckles. When done correctly, it is as effective at creating realism as anything in the business. When done incorrectly, by stressing force over technique, it does nothing but raise welts. There were only a few people whom I trusted to bust me open, and Harley was one of them. Oddly, even though I have the reputation for being a Hardcore Legend, I was surprisingly inept when it came to eyebrow busting. One night in ECW in 1997, I tried to open up Tommy Dreamer, and I was failing miserably. After I bounced punches off his nose, cheek, and forehead, he looked at me and asked painfully, “Please stop hitting me.”
The bell rang and Vader started in. He pushed me into the turnbuckle, pushed my head back, and brought down four forearms in a row, right across the bridge of my nose. BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM! You could actually hear the sick sound of his wrist bone breaking my nose. Vader looked for blood, and when he didn’t see it, he became a man obsessed. He forgot all about the eye swelling and continually went after my nose. I wanted to tell the dumb bastard that I’d reconsidered, and that maybe he ought to think about stomping his foot on the mat instead. Finally, about a thimbleful of blood dribbled out, and he remembered our talk about the eye. Boom, boom-two punches to the cheek and eyebrow and I went down. I have an unedited version of the tape (WCW refused to show some of it), and those two punches were awesome. I rolled out to the floor, where Harley was waiting anxiously for his big punch. He took one look at me, however, and saw that blood was already streaming from both my eyebrow and cheek, in addition to the little dribble from my broken nose. “Dammit, it’s already done,” grumbled a disappointed Harley as he rolled me back into the ring.
The fans were completely caught up in the contest, as I think most of them could tell that something a little different was going on. Vader went for a splash against the rail, and caught nothing but steel, as I moved out of harm’s way. One Cactus Jack upside-down crack smash later, and I rolled back into the ring, the winner of a cou
nt-out victory. The fans reacted as if I’d just won the Super Bowl. It was a rare moment of real emotion, in a promotion that was almost void of it.
Believe it or not, the locker room was like a huge celebration afterward. The other wrestlers were blown away by what they’d just seen. Even Ole Anderson came by and admitted that it had been a hell of a match. Lex Luger jokingly checked Ole’s trousers to see if he’d been “aroused” by the beating, as Ole was known to enjoy misery and human suffering. Vader and I hugged and even Harley tried his best to put on a happy face, despite the bitter letdown he’d just endured.
I asked our TV people it they wanted to tape some fired-up backstage interviews. They said they really didn’t think they could air my face in its current state. The next day, Eric Bischoff told me that Turner wasn’t going to allow the match to air but that he was fighting them on the matter. I hated to think that the whole thing had been for naught. I’d been stitched up above and below my eye, my nose had been broken, causing both my eyes to blacken, and I’d dislocated my jaw. As a guy who had a martial arts background, Bischoff could appreciate what I’d been through. “Cactus,” he said, “I’ve had my ass kicked lots of times, but never that bad, and never by someone I let do it.” Little did Bischoff know that the worst ass kickings in his life would occur six years later, in the Monday night ratings wars.
The match did air, and I have to in all sincerity thank Bischoff for taking a stand-but every drop of blood had been taken out. I don’t know how many hours they spent trying to homogenize it, but by making liberal use of crowd shots, long shots, and major editing, it paled in comparison to the real deal. Tony Schiavone is actually a pretty good announcer, but his stomach seemed a little weak for it, as he continually said, “Oh my goodness, oh my goodness.” Governor Ventura seemed to enjoy it, though. Jim Ross, who was at this time announcing for the World Wrestling Federation, left a message on my machine saying that he’d seen the match, and really wished he’d been the one to call it.
A strange thing happened right after the match aired. A commercial played hyping Slamboree, WCW’s Pay-Per-View that paid homage to the stars of the past. I’ll be damned if every star they showed (the Crusher, Verne Gagne, Blackjack Mulligan) wasn’t wearing “the crimson mask.” I guess WCW’s policy on blood was that they could air it if the footage was twenty years old, but week-old blood-no way!
About a week later, I got a surprising phone call from the people in television production. They wanted to do promos for my return match with Vader that would air on the following Saturday, and they needed me right away. “Oh yeah,” they added, before hanging up, “we need you to look the way you did after the match.”
“Hey,” I thought, “that’s just great.” I had offered them the opportunity to capitalize on a unique situation, and they’d been too squeamish, and now they’d reconsidered. With the odd taping schedule WCW employed, however, the two matches were taped almost two weeks apart, even though they would air on consecutive Saturdays. By now, my wounds were all but healed. Now, in my book (yes, once again, it is my book), there is nothing quite as good as the real thing, but I was about to receive an A for effort. I must have looked like quite a sight as I barreled down Highway 75 in my ‘84 convertible, with one hand on the wheel and the other brandishing a skinremoving square of sandpaper. At the stop lights, I threw punches at the rubbed-raw cheekbone area for added emphasis.
The return match was a scary, eerie night that I’ll long remember. Before leaving home I wrote a note for Colette. It was essentially a last will and testament instructing her on what to do in case things didn’t turn out too well. Thank God she never had to read it. I hope you don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that the ramifications of this match were tremendous and the risk of serious injury was extremely high. As the willing participant of a powerbomb on the concrete floor, I was putting myself in a precarious predicament. I was essentially letting the most dangerous man in the business perform the sport’s most dangerous move on a concrete floor. As mentioned earlier, I had seen Vader temporarily paralyze Joe Thurman with the move inside the ring that had some give to it. I had seen that powerbomb literally knock out others, and as mentioned earlier, I had seen some kids quit the company rather than risk the consequences of the powerbomb. The biomechanics of the powerbomb are simple-simply flip your bent-over opponent in the air as high as possible, and bring his back, neck, and head down to the canvas with as much force as possible. It can be scary to watch.
Something seemed wrong when I walked into Center Stage that afternoon. The hallways seemed a little darker and the atmosphere seemed a little heavier. Dusty called me into his office. “Just for the record, Cactus,” the Dream started, without his usual animation, “I don’t want you to do this.” I think by saying this, Dusty was relieving both his conscience and any legal liability that the company might have.
“I appreciate that, Dusty,” I said, “but this is important to me.” Vader also tried to talk me out of it, but again I said no.
I had an interview scheduled for the middle of the show. Dusty wanted to talk to me about it. Again he was uncharacteristically lowkey. “Cactus, when you give this interview, I don’t want you to think beforehand about anything you’re going to say. This is an emotional night-I want the fans to feel your emotion.” This was a valuable piece of advice, and with the knowledge that Dusty Rhodes was one of the great promo men in the business, I took it to heart. As good as many of my promos were, I had the habit of walking around backstage before interviews, practicing what I was going to say. That night from Center Stage, I spoke right from the heart. I honestly can’t remember what I said, but that night, as is true in most cases, it’s not as much what you say that’s important, but how it’s said. I’ll always be thankful to the Dream for that small piece of advice, advice that would make my later ECW interviews so memorable.
The match itself was a solid piece of business. Many considered it to be better than the first, although, obviously, I couldn’t absorb the same shots to the face again. As the match drew to a conclusion, I attempted another Cactus Jack upside-down crack smash-the same move that had led me to victory a week before. This time, Harley jerked Vader out of the way, and I landed hard on the blue protective mat. As Schiavone and Ventura called the action, Vader threw back the blue mats, revealing the cold, concrete floor below. I was crossing myself as Vader picked me up off the floor. As he put my head between his massive thighs, I was talking out loud. “I love you, Colette, I love you, my tiny man.” Vader crouched down, and with all his might lifted me into the air. “My God, if he does that, he’ll kill him,” yelled Schiavone. A moment later, I hit the concrete. My initial reaction was strange. “That didn’t feel too bad-but I bet it didn’t look too good on TV.” Then my right foot and hand went numb.
I lay there for about forty minutes, while we waited for an ambulance. Now, a lot of fans speculated that I wasn’t as hurt as I acted, and to some extent, that was true. I probably could have moved, but the longer I lay there with the other wrestlers all around me, the more I thought I really was in trouble. After a few minutes, I became scared to even try to move my hand and foot. “How are you doing, you sexy thing?” asked Scorpio, in an attempt to get me to laugh. “Scarp,” I said softly, “I can’t move my foot.”
“Sorry,” replied Too Cold.
The ambulance finally arrived, and I was put on a stretcher. Several people in the audience were crying. I was placed in the ambulance, and of all people, Jesse Ventura came along for the ride. As the ambulance pulled away, with sirens wailing, the show faded to black. It was great drama. Was it staged? Yes, but in many ways it was real nonetheless.
I was wheeled into the hospital, and while strapped to the gurney, I was asked by an especially sensitive fan if I would pose for a picture with her. Upon admission, I was checked out thoroughly, given a battery of tests, including a CAT scan that revealed-you guessed it-a concussion. X-rays were taken and, fortunately, revealed no fractures. The doctor inf
ormed me that I had suffered a severe blow to the back of my head, which had likely caused my brain to more or less “short circuit,” causing the temporary loss of sensation in my extremities. I was given a list of things to do and not to do, and was released at about 1 A.M. Janie Engle, a WCW front office employee, drove me home. I was groggy, but all things considered, I felt pretty fortunate. In reality, Vader had actually taken care of me pretty well. He had followed through with me, and released me low, to ensure a safer landing. If it had been a typical Vader powerbomb, things might have been a lot worse. “Pull over please,” I asked Janie, about a mile or two from my house. I proceeded to bolt out of the car and left remnants of my prematch meal all over Highway 575.
When I got home, Colette met me at the door and gave me a long embrace. I went upstairs and kissed my sleeping little buddy, then went into our bedroom, where against doctor’s orders, I fell asleep myself. I awoke to the ringing of the phone. “I just called to check on you,” said a weathered, slightly inebriated voice on the phone. It was Handsome Harley.
“Do you think it went okay?” I asked.
Harley paused and softly (for Harley that is) said, “Cactus, it couldn’t have gone any better if we’d done it a hundred times.” He spoke one more time before he hung up. “You’re the new Harley Race, kid.” That was the greatest compliment I have ever received.
