The Hardcore Diaries

by Mick Foley

  It continues to cross my mind that writing a book is not the best way to fire oneself up for such an emotional match as ECW’s promises to be. Maybe there’s just not enough hours in a day to write, hit the gym, be a father to four children, and make daily sojourns to Promoland as well. I don’t want to burn myself out too soon emotionally, as I may have done at WrestleMania XX. But it is a distinct possibility.

  Whoreand balls are a major concern. Can we say them (repeatedly, in whore ’s case) at the nine o’clock (ET) hour? Just to be safe, we decide that Paul E. will go with prostitute and nuts . Paul’s central theme will involve labeling me as a prostitute. Hey, I give him credit—he can’t be charged with making claims in private that he’s not willing to make in front of millions around the world.

  I’ve always gotten along with Paul E., and had until recently considered him a good friend, but as I’ve come to realize and accept, there are very few real friends in wrestling. Lots of business relationships, lots of friendly acquaintances, but very few friends. But whatever disappointment or hurt I felt at discovering his opinion of me, it can’t tarnish Paul’s legacy as one of the most creative, incredibly gifted minds I’ve encountered in our business. We can definitely do business together, even if business will often involve what Terry Funk calls “borderlining,” coming very close to what you really feel and mean about an individual.

  Paul made it very clear that nothing is off the table as far as his life is concerned. I can say anything I want to. But Brian Gewirtz has assured me that we will get to that previously mentioned definitive Foley/Heyman promo. Oh, yeah, for those of you who don’t know, Paul E. and Paul Heyman are the same guy, and the two names will be used interchangeably. But my feeling is that now is not the time to address Paul’s changes. We’ll let them stew in the minds of fans, let them try to figure it out, before I give my side of the story.

  Basically, I plan to paint ECW as a fanatic cult, a latter-day Jonestown, if you will. Paul is the charismatic cult leader, the Jim Jones of ECW, lording over his naive, trusting flock of hardcore wrestlers. Why shouldn’t they have been loyal? After all, most of them were guys who’d bounced around the independents for years, seemingly going nowhere, when Paul breathed new life into their careers. The guys worked their butts off, don’t get me wrong, but Paul E. was the maestro, conducting an eclectic blend of bloodshed, humor, emotion, and good old-fashioned ingenuity into a symphony of hardcore entertainment. During its heyday, it blew away what WCW and WWE had to offer.

  It was fresh, it was exciting, and it did wonders for the careers of many, especially those for whom it served as a conduit, a way to get noticed by the big boys—guys like Eddie Guerrero, Chris Benoit, and Dean Malenko, who were something of anomalies in ECW. They were actually wrestlers, having wrestling matches, which stood out amid the potpourri of weapons, blood, and bad language that was the staple of the ECW diet.

  The company also served as a creative springboard for so many, myself included. Paul E. didn’t script interviews, he nurtured them. He was like a father figure in that way; bringing out the best in his children simply by believing in them, by giving them the room to grow. I grew immensely under Paul E.’s guidance. Stone Cold Steve Austin did as well, as did many others who were fortunate to have called ECW their home, if only for a little while.

  But I never drank the Kool-Aid, although I did come mighty close. WWE, at that time, was not even a possibility for me. Jim Ross had been pulling for me for years. Nothing. I called the WWE offices once a year on principal. Nothing. I had even thought about calling WCW and offering my services, as a strictly TV performer. By combining my ECW, Japan, and prospective WCW bookings, I could have made a pretty good living for my family.

  My bread and butter was Japan, where by engaging in incredibly physical matches with Terry Funk, I was becoming something of a minor cult hero. WCW might have been some gravy for the bread, although in all likelihood I would have been used up, beaten, and discarded quickly by the group. But my heart belonged to ECW. Until I saw it for what it really was—a dead end.

  I had the glass of Kool-Aid right up to my lips. I saw Paul E. smiling contentedly, another soul for him to keep, another career gone for good. You guys do realize I’m speaking metaphorically here, right? There really wasn’t any Kool-Aid there, unless of course the Sandman had poured a quart of vodka into it.

  The “Cane Dewey” sign is usually seen as the defining moment in my ECW career. Before the sign, everything was good. After the sign, I saw things a little clearer. “Cane Dewey” was a sign held up by a fan that seemed to encourage the “caning,” or beating with a kendo stick, of my then-three-year-old son, Dewey. I knew it was meant as a joke, and had even told the “sign guy” who made it that it was okay to show it. But the sign made my wife physically sick to her stomach, and served as the catalyst for my ECW heel turn, which is still spoken of reverently in wrestling lore.

  But it was actually an incident involving longtime Philadelphia-based indy wrestler J. T. Smith that affected me more. I’d known J.T. for years and thought he was a heck of a guy, although he seemed intent on wrestling a style that his body just wasn’t made to handle. He liked the wild stuff, the big, high-impact bumps, which always seemed to leave him in incredible pain. But man, he would have done anything to please the fans, including risking his life. Eventually, he found love in ECW in a comedy role as wrestling’s first full-blooded Italian black man. His biggest impact on my life, however, was the time he slipped off the top rope at the ECW arena (Viking Hall) and crashed headfirst to the concrete floor below.

  Back in my ECW days.

  His head swelled up immediately, dangerously so, maybe even life-threateningly so. But that didn’t stop the ECW faithful from reveling in his pain. “You f’d up, you f’d up,” they chanted, over and over. But as you can probably guess, they didn’t just say the first initial. I was really pretty stunned. Sickened. Because in that one moment, I realized that ECW was a dead end—that to stay any longer than necessary would be the death of my career.

  For me, it all comes back to just where my life would be if I’d listened to ECW fans who chanted, “You sold out,” upon learning of my imminent defection to WWE. If I’d listened to good friends who said WWE would be the death of my career. Or even Paul E., who warned me that my program with Undertaker would be “a dead deal.” Where exactly would I be? Broken down, bitter, probably divorced, possibly penniless, and looking at WWE’s proposed new ECW brand as a life-saving measure.

  All right, maybe that’s melodramatic. I probably could have done wild matches in Japan for years and lived a fairly decent life. Or perhaps gotten out of wrestling completely, and had the intestinal fortitude to actually make my way in the real world. And I’ve often considered my final ECW match, with its completely unexpected hero’s farewell, to be a highlight of my career. I really did love so much about ECW. So it was a love/hate relationship that for Pay-Per-View purposes I will only be dwelling on the hate side of.

  But I’ll go out on a limb and say that most of what I have has been made possible through my experiences with WWE. And no, this is not a blind tribute to the philanthropic nature of Vince McMahon. I was given an opportunity, and I made the most of it. I paid a price, and I was paid a price for doing so.

  But there would be no Hardcore Diaries without WWE. No Have a Nice Day, no Foley Is Good, no children’s books, no novels. I’ve had my share of battles with Vince McMahon, and I’m sure I’ll have more in the future. Maybe Vince only gave me the ball and I did the running, but at least I was running somewhere with it—not on a path to nowhere, like so many of ECW’s finest ball carriers.

  Good stuff, done really well, makes for great TV. Good stuff, done decently, makes for forgettable TV. I thought the stuff we had was really good, and I knew we had the potential to do it really well, so I wasn’t all that worried about the finer comparisons of whore and prostitute and balls and nuts. It was going to be good. So what if I didn’t know my lines? I could make
it up while I was out there. We’d be fine.

  And we were. I came out to a far more mixed reaction than a week ago. Very cool. Once inside the ring, which I had considerable trouble actually getting into (I know my knee is bad when I have to push off the ropes to stand up), I informed the fans that there had been a misunderstanding, that I was actually a good guy, letting parents know it was okay to give their kids permission to cheer me.

  “After all,” I said, “I’m the cuddly guy, the human Muppet, the guy who puts his thumb up in the air and says, ‘It’s great to be in Vegas!’” A big, cheap pop. Sure not everyone is buying into it, but enough are to make the next line work.

  “Except it’s not really that great to be here in Las Vegas.”

  I then explained the problem I had with millions of people attempting to change their lives with a lucky hand at cards or roll of the dice, instead of working hard for their accomplishments, like I had. After all, I hadn’t won three WWE championships by rolling sevens on the craps tables, or written two New York Times number-one best-selling books by putting a quarter in a slot machine. I’d earned them.

  I then introduced a man who had earned everything in his life as well, Edge. Edge then came out to participate in a major-league schmoozefest, during which I presented him with the old hardcore title, in recognition of him truly embodying the spirit of hardcore. Edge declined the title, claiming that I was the more deserving of it, for having toiled in obscurity for so long in ECW, and for tolerating the words of a so-called legend like Ric Flair, who had referred to me as a “glorified stuntman” in his aforementioned book. So the first seed of the Flair match had been planted.

  I began my rebuttal of Edge’s rebuttal, noting the irony of a man who called me a glorified stuntman earning his WrestleMania paycheck by basically not getting killed in a ladder match. “That’s fine,” I said. “What’s not fine is, it seems like we’ve got a little problem here. I think you deserve the hardcore championship, and you think I deserve the hardcore championship. So as far as I can see, there’s only one way to resolve the issue—you and I beat the holy hell out of each other, right here tonight!”

  The crowd went wild. They bought it. They actually bought it. Fortunately, for the sake of my knee, no such match was going to take place. Because Edge had another option. He whispered into ring announcer Lilian Garcia’s ear, and Lilian, after a moment of befuddlement, made the announcement I had been picturing in my mind for weeks, even months, when Edge and I were first hatching this plan prior to WrestleMania.

  Paul Heyman, aka Paul E., one of the most brilliant guys in the business.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the new coholders of the Hardcore title, Mick Foley and Edge.”

  Yes, we had done it! We had a vision, and we saw it through. One of the cheesiest moments in WWE history; two men willingly sharing a single title. How much more unhardcore could holding the hardcore title possibly get? Proudly, the three of us, me, Edge, and Lita, held the title belt aloft, floating in the rising tide of boos that were so richly deserved.

  Then Paul E. had to ruin it. Like a turd in the punch bowl of life (not the same punch bowl he served the ECW Kool-Aid from), he had to arrive on the scene to the accompaniment of the ECW music, and a surprisingly loud ovation.

  “Look at this,” he said, obviously relishing his return to the spotlight. “In the only state where it’s still legal, a blatant display of prostitution right in that very ring.”

  Everyone cheers as Edge and I console Lita, who, the fans of course believe, is the object of Paul E.’s derision.

  “Oh, and there’s Lita, too,” Paul says, temporarily confusing the audience. “because the prostitute I’m talking about is you, Mick Foley.” I act stunned, like the thought has never entered my mind. Actually, it hadn’t, until a few weeks ago when I first heard a rumor of his claim.

  Paul then went on to cut a masterful promo, accusing me of prostituting my name, my likeness, my legacy, the fans’ faith in me, even the term hardcore . But he does far more than just make charges. He builds me up first, so that our fans realize the significance of the charges. “Build him up before you tear him down.” It’s old-time wrestling psychology but it still works. I’m not just a piece of crap—I’m a guy who has chosen to become a piece of crap. There’s a big difference.

  He concluded his diatribe by asking how it felt to look in the mirror and see a shell of my former self. Paul had previously asked me backstage about mentioning my wife and kids in the promo, and I hadn’t been in favor of it. Sure, they’d been referred to, respectively, as a “whore” and “bastards” just a week earlier, but I felt once was enough. I don’t want my older kids under any more pressure than they already are. Adolescence is tough enough without a WWE storyline hanging over their heads.

  “Do you know what I see when I look in the mirror?” I say. “I see the coholder of the WWE hardcore title. I see a WWE Superstar. I see a real-life action figure. I see a man who has written seven books and who’s working on another that will be available in bookstores everywhere next spring.” By this point I’m yelling, my emotion is high, even when getting in a blatant plug for The Hardcore Diaries.

  I continue, saying, “I see a man of immense power, unlike you, Paul, who has none. You’re not general manager of SmackDown! anymore, you don’t own your own company, you’re nothing.”

  Paul agrees that his power is limited, but he does have the power to make a suggestion, or to issue a challenge. Here it comes, the official challenge for the coholders of the Hardcore Championship to face any ECW scumbags of his choosing.

  I’ve slummed long enough, I tell Paul E., so listen to the authoritative voice of a WWE Superstar as he tells you, “No way.”

  But Paul E. is laughing, throwing me off my game, causing me to demand an explanation for the inappropriate anger. Actually, I think I just said, “What’s so funny?”

  Paul E. continues to laugh, then says, “It’s just that I’m looking at Lita, Edge, and Mick Foley in the ring, and the only one with any NUTS is Lita.”

  Sure, balls would have been better, but it’s the nine o’clock hour, so out of respect for the children watching Raw, Paul puts forth the less offensive of the testicular references. Actually, I thought he might seize the moment and the advantage of live television to let “balls” fall out of his mouth—wait, I’m not sure that sounded right—but he does the responsible thing. Otherwise, the only seizing done would be by Vince, when he seized Paul E. after the segment.

  The insinuation of female ball possession is enough to send Edge over the edge (a deliberate play on words by the best-selling author), and against my wishes, he accepts the challenge, and offers to show Paul E. a little sample of what’s to come on June 11.

  Paul E. then reveals our opponents, Funk and Dreamer, who proceed to administer the obligatory butt-kicking, sending the coholders of the hardcore title fleeing for safer grounds, through the crowd and out the exit.

  Sure, Paul E. got chewed out for the segment going three minutes over, but in this case, rushing things would have been detrimental to the angle. We all realize that our angle is second in significance to the reformation of DX, but nonetheless, we all believe in the importance of what we’re doing and we don’t want to undermine it by skimping on important details, like not maximizing audience reactions. Besides, I’ve seen some stinkers that seemed to go on forever, and there didn’t seem to be any ramifications for the overrun, or any loss in future mike time for the people who overran. We’ll have to closely consider the time next week, however, as I don’t want to risk the potential last two weeks of promo time for having been slapped with an “overrunner” label.

  May 24, 2006

  5:30A .M.—Burbank, CA

  Dear Hardcore Diary,

  I’m sitting in the spare bed at my manager Barry Bloom’s house, resting my notebook on a large green stuffed alligator as I write. I would have been happy to spend most of yesterday as a designated Diaries day, but a quickly scheduled MRI a
ppointment threw a wrench into my literary works.

  At least I’ll know what I’m dealing with from a health standpoint. I’m pretty sure something is wrong into the back of my knee—the posterior cruciate ligament is still my best guess—but the MRI should help me be better prepared to deal with it. Maybe I’ll need a special brace, or can be given a specific training routine. For now, I’m doing a lot of work on recumbent bikes and a variety of elliptical trainers. But I’m staying away from weights with my legs—not that I’m bombarding my upper body with weight work either—and as always, staying far, far away from tanning beds of any type.

  In the old days, I had my own tanning bed—a Chrysler LeBaron convertible. By 1991, I’d become adept at the act of the cover-up wrestling attire, which displayed only my bare arms. So a few days a week, I’d simply go sleeveless in the LeBaron and, presto, instant farmer’s tan.

  I do continue to wonder if I’ve bitten off more than I can chew these next few months. Gearing up physically and emotionally for One Night Stand would be trying enough, even if I weren’t attempting to pen a towering best seller at the same time. Plus, I’ve got the Flair match looming on the post-ECW horizon, meaning I’ll have little time to relax and enjoy what we’ve all worked so hard to create at One Night Stand.

  That was always one of the biggest demands of life with WWE—continually having to climb to emotional highs without a decent downtime to enjoy them. At least I was able to sleep in late after WrestleMania, and take an early-afternoon flight home. Edge, who was hurt worse than I was, had to actually wrestle the next night on Raw.