by Mick Foley
Of course, the promo had its detractors. Quite a few, from what I’m told. But fortunately, Vince was not one of them, and he green-lighted not only the Philadelphia pretape for Sioux City, but two additional weeks of pretaped promos as well. Those promos had their detractors as well. I was making Flair look bad, they thought. I will admit that I rode Ric hard in these promos, but I thought he would see them as a challenge, and respond accordingly. If I thought for one second that Ric Flair wasn’t capable of handling my best stuff, and knocking it out of the park, then I wouldn’t have gone at him quite so hard. I wasn’t sure he would knock it out of the park when we finally met face-to-face (which was scheduled for the July 31 Raw in New Jersey), but I did know he had the potential to do so.
Besides, as I explained to Vince and Brian Gewirtz, WWE Superstars weren’t exactly lining up to propose scenarios in which they would suffer the most devastating loss in recent memory, to be followed by the most humiliating act of degradation and betrayal imaginable. I knew where I wanted to end up, and Vince trusted my unconventional method of getting there.
Flair trusted me, too—at least, I think he did. And I like to think that trust paid off for everyone—me, Ric, Vince, the fans—when we finally did face-to-face verbal battle in New Jersey. It really felt like we were making magic out there, feeding off each other, working from a loose basic outline but with a genuine sense of real emotion, the likes of which WWE fans rarely see. I hoped it could be a historic promo of sorts, the one that would finally put to rest the idea that Ric Flair only gives “eighties ’rasslin’ promos.” Surely his effort in New Jersey would serve as a harbinger for a post- SummerSlamFlair push.
Despite all the emotion of the promo, it was actually a hokey comedy line, delivered prior to Flair’s ring entrance, that will live on (if only in my mind) as one of my finest sports entertainment moments.
“Ric Flair and I were really not that different,” I told Melina, who had served, at my request, as my personal ring announcer.
“After all, Ric Flair and I both have famous friends. You see, Melina, Ric Flair is a personal friend of the president of the United States.”
Which is kind of true. Ric does know the current president, although he was better acquainted with the first President Bush.
“And I am personal friends with hardcore porn icon Christy Canyon.” Christy, I must say, received a much more friendly and enthusiastic response than the president.
“Now, one of our friends,” I told Melina and the crowd, “got to the top by screwing an awful lot of people…and the other one appeared in adult films.”
Yes! Now admit it, that’s a good line. Even if you do like President Bush, you have to admit that’s a good line. Hey, I just had lunch today with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and even he admitted it was a good line. Okay, maybe he didn’t say anything remotely like that, but I really did have lunch with him at chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace’s house. Same house, different tables, limited (five or six words) conversation between us.
One of my relatives didn’t care for the joke. It actually caused quite an ugly scene at my cousin Kelly’s wedding the day before SummerSlam. The relative had never actually heard the line, but nonetheless, the very fact that I’d made a political joke was an affront to his heartfelt belief that celebrities should never use their status to advance political beliefs. Fair enough. He’s entitled to his opinion. But his feeling that he “shouldn’t have to listen to Vanessa Redgrave’s politics at the Academy Awards” as his primary argument was a little weak. Why? Because he’d never actually heard her speech. And because the speech took place in 1977.
My mother thought the line was quite funny. She did, however, have one question for my wife, which Colette later relayed to me.
“How does Mick know a porn star?”
“What did you tell her?” I laughed, guessing that this was not exactly a typical mother-in-law–type conversation point.
“Well, I said that you were on her radio show and that you really liked her because she’d helped children overseas.” Which is true, although her philanthropic tendencies never really crossed my mind when I first started liking her about twenty years ago.
Christy herself got quite a kick out of it. Although she didn’t see the show (I don’t know if she’s ever seen Raw ), her phone apparently rang repeatedly over the next few hours, prompting the joyous voice mail I received the next day.
“Hey, Mick, this is your hardcore porn icon friend calling. You are so awesome.” Followed by several minutes of interesting life observations by someone who views life through a slightly different lens. I think I’ve only talked to Christy twice since our lone meeting in that Los Angeles radio studio, but I have been on the receiving end of many of her meandering (but never boring) stream-of-consciousness messages, leading me to believe that Christy Canyon may be to voice mail what Garrison Keillor is to public radio. Of course, Christy does occasionally throw in choice verbiage not regularly heard on the Prairie Home Companion .
Wow, where the hell was I? Oh, yeah, Ric Flair. During the course of my pretaped interviews, I had dared Ric to bring his “A” game to New Jersey. He did. He also brought his “A” game to Boston for SummerSlam. Unfortunately, I left my “A” game somewhere else, maybe at home, maybe in New Jersey, maybe at my cousin’s wedding, opting instead to bring my “C+/B-” game to town.
It wasn’t a bad match by any means, in fact it was pretty good. Maybe if I’d been an outside observer, I would have thought it was very good; it was certainly an intense, bloody spectacle, with many barbaric moments sprinkled liberally into the mix. (Although I doubt Ric would want any derivative of the word liberal used in connection with his name.) Take, for example, the classic Ric Flair open-hand chop to the chest, seen literally thousands of times by millions of fans over the last thirty or so years. Our match, however, saw the first “hand wrapped in barbed wire” variation of that chop—an idea that seemed great at the time of delivery, but somewhat less so while receiving twenty-five stitches in my chest after the match.
But I wasn’t an outside observer. I knew how good it should have been. And I know who was to blame for it coming up short. Ric! No, just kidding, Ric was great. I’m the guy to blame. Basically, I had a game plan for a match that would have been somewhat akin to a sweeping Hollywood epic. Maybe a complete thirty-minute drama, twenty-five minutes from bell to bell, plus entrances and aftermath. Except I couldn’t get thirty minutes to work with. I got twenty. So I began thinking of ways to lop off scenes, kind of eliminating the dialogue that would have made the action more memorable. I gave up on the idea of a sweeping thirty-minute epic, and settled instead on trying to give fans an incredible twenty-minute action movie. Except I became so consumed with giving WWE the twenty minutes they wanted that I forgot to deliver the three extra minutes I really needed.
Damn, I wish I had those three minutes over. What a difference they would have made. The difference between an intense, bloody spectacle and a hardcore classic for the ages.
In the end, I guess I changed my opinion of Ric Flair. Or, to be more accurate, I changed my opinion about his opinion of me. I think he respects me. He might even like me. But I think both of us are glad that we were able to put our past problems behind us and put together an inspired body of work.
But that’s not to say that I’ve completely forgotten about what he said about me in his book. Because I think it’s changed me; caused me to become less concerned about my career and whatever legacy it might leave in the wrestling business. I no longer expect my peers to say nice things about me. Quite the opposite. If they do happen to say, or write, something nice—great. If not, well, I guess that’s life. I guess now is as good a time as any to throw in a random Ricky Nelson quote, so here goes: “You can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself.”
I have come to accept that not everyone is going to be a fan of my particular style, be it in the ring or on the mike. Fortunately, Vince McMahon liked my st
yle. Sure, it took me eleven years to get to WWE. Sure, Vince may have thought I looked sleazy, like I wasn’t WWE material. And sure, it may have taken years of prodding from J.R., as well as a few words of support from guys like Undertaker and Kevin Nash, for me to even get my foot in the door. But ultimately it was Vince who made the decision to hire me, to push me, and eventually to treat me like I was one of his top guys—even if he was stingy when it came to Pay-Per-View credit attribution. Ultimately, it was Vince McMahon, “the decider,” overruling all of the potential “persuaders.” It was Vince who became like a second father to me, who told me to treat his house like it was my house, who…Okay, maybe I’m overdoing it a little.
As of the writing of this afterword, Vince has been made aware of the worst of the criticisms expressed in this book, and found them to be alternately amusing and insightful. The fact that he allows criticisms about him in a book that he publishes speaks very highly of either his belief in freedom of speech or his apparent joy at courting controversy wherever possible.
The fact that I feel free to express this criticism toward the man who pays me speaks well of either how confident I am in our unique relationship, or how many times I’ve been hit in the head with steel chairs.
All right, all right, that’s enough kissing Vince’s ass in the literary sense. Let’s move on to kissing it in the literal sense. As those of you who skipped to the color insert may have noticed, I did indeed join Vince’s special club. Yes, Vince kept his word, and I got to do my big angle with Melina—the one I proposed in Anaheim, where I agreed to kiss Vince’s ass to save her job. But by the time the big moment rolled around, the day after SummerSlam, I had grudgingly accepted that the idea was not going to come off as the big deal that I had imagined.
We weren’t given much time—six minutes for everything—and I was well aware that the angle’s main purpose to Vince was to serve as a backdrop to his continuing adventures with DX. But even with the short time allotted and even with all sense of subtlety stripped from the sequence, I still held out hope that strong personal performances could make the idea a success. The performances were indeed strong. Melina more then lived up to my faith in her, with genuine tears streaming from her eyes as she begged me to reconsider my commitment to Vince’s crevice. And Vince and I slipped effortlessly back into our old chemistry together, probably because deep down, we share a small, but very real, dislike for each other. Maybe even a little bigger than small. At least on my part.
Sure, the whole thing wasn’t played up as big as it could have been. But Melina was so genuinely grateful and happy afterward that it made the mere consideration of disappointment on my part seem foolish. I even got choked up when I said good-bye to Johnny Nitro, thanking him for being a hell of a guy who never made me feel like I was hovering around his girlfriend, or treating her in any way but with the utmost respect.
As I headed out onto the road, for home and the seven-month vacation that my public firing would bring, I received a call from Barry Blaustein, who marveled at how I had been able to turn an act of degradation (kissing another man’s ass) into an act of defiance. Which is exactly what I had hoped to do, although in truth, following Blaustein’s call, not one other person has echoed his cinematic sentiment.
If only it had all ended there, I would have labeled the entire experience, from One Night Stand to SummerSlam , as a success. If only. Unfortunately, it didn’t end there. I sat in front of my television every Monday for the next several weeks, a helpless observer, watching in vain as everything I had worked for vanished. There was no new Flair push—no mike time at all—just a few meaningless matches with the Spirit Squad. The spotlight I had hoped would be shone on Melina, the one I was sure Vince would take full advantage of, turned out to be a momentary flicker. Within three weeks, it was as if our angle had never existed.
I took it all as a personal defeat, and as a personal slap in the face from Vince and the creative team. The conspiracy theorist in me surfaced, and I began to internally question everything about my last several weeks with WWE, from the lack of any meaningful promotion of my Raw segments with Ric to what I viewed as Vince’s preoccupation with everything DX. For a few weeks, I just flat-out lost my mojo, and couldn’t seem to get it back. On more than one occasion, I woke up in a cold sweat thinking about the Flair match, wishing I could have those damn three minutes back. I questioned whether I even belonged in the ring any more. I looked back at the DVDs of my most recent matches, the 2006 comeback matches, and couldn’t help but think that something was missing. The fire in my eyes was gone.
I even came to compare my return to WWE—the contract I’d signed in September 2005—to a fictional decision to get back together with an old flame. At first I was constantly reminded of why I’d fallen for her to begin with, but as the months went by I became more and more aware of just why we’d parted, and for several weeks after SummerSlam, I found myself wondering what the hell I’d ever seen in her. I felt like Jack Nicholson in The Shining —the beautiful woman in room 217 had become a nasty, pus-filled, decaying, putrid cadaver right before my horrified eyes.
A kind and considerate text message from Melina served as a temporary oasis from my desert of disenchantment. The segment with Melina, understandably, was not among my wife’s personal favorite Mick Foley moments. But Colette agreed that it was a nice message.
A few days later, I called Flair, just to tell him how much I’d enjoyed the match (I didn’t tell him it was causing me nightmares), and that I was sorry it hadn’t led to anything resembling a decent push.
“Hey,” Flair asked, “did you get my text?”
“No, but I just wanted to tell you—”
“Hold on,” Ric interjected, “before you say anything, let me send it again.”
So, I waited a moment, my cheap cell phone vibrated, and there it was—Melina’s text message! Holy crap, it wasn’t even her text, it was Flair’s all along. Colette thought that the text from Flair was the nicest thing. I guess I did too, I even saved it. Why? Because he’s Ric Flair. The same reason his book bothered me so much. Because he’s Ric Flair. The same reason why I outright refused to even think about winning at SummerSlam . Because he’s Ric Flair.
In fairness to Melina, she was kind enough to forgive me for having single-handedly built her hopes up, leading her to believe (as I expressed earlier in the book) that our angle was going to be the biggest break of her career. Indeed, I think the guilt I felt over seeing her storyline amount to little more than nothing, combined with the embarrassment I felt over having dedicated so much Hardcore Diary energy to it, may have been the primary culprits behind the tragic loss of the Foley mojo.
Fortunately, that mojo has largely returned (in a steady trickle, not a flood), so that I am now better able to see the larger picture in a slightly more positive light. Hopefully, you the reader have escaped from the downer zone I just sent you journeying into, without too much psychological trauma.
After all, the outcome wasn’t all bad, was it? I had some good matches. I did some good interviews. I even got a chance to romp around Promoland, long after I’d assumed it was closed for good.
I’m proud of myself, too. I came back for six months of ideas, angles, interviews, and matches, and I don’t think I ever looked or felt like I was coasting or resting on my laurels. I gave the fans a different version of Mick Foley, and I think, for the most part, they enjoyed the effort. I know I did—at least, some of it. Despite the frustration, I really did enjoy much of the process. The in-ring promo with Funk, teaming up with Edge, proving Vince wrong, making magic with Ric Flair. Hey, let’s not forget about Melina’s hand touching my “guys.” Sure, that hand was balled up in a fist and was traveling at high speed when that contact with the “guys” was made, but, hey, it’s my book and I’m going to count it. Yes, I am aware that I made a similar stupid joke in Foley Is Good .
No, I never really got to “wrestling immortality.” Those two balls I could have sworn I’d hit out of the pa
rk (the April 25 pitch in Stamford, and the May 8 pitch in Anaheim) barely reached the warning track. But at least I took my best swings. When it comes to this whole experience, maybe I need to quote President Clinton from his now infamous September 24, 2006, interview: “I tried…and I failed. But at least I tried.”
Besides, time may be the final judge as to whether this whole thing was ultimately a failure. Maybe we can reexamine the Vince McMahon and Melina possibilities when I return. Who knows, with the benefit of a little creative fertilization we may yet see growth from those seeds planted on August 21 in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The promos have already started to sprout in my mind—they should be ready to harvest when I return to WWE. Unless, of course, Vince isn’t interested in any more of my crop (another winning pun from the best-selling author), and opts instead to bury the fruits of my mental labor.
Pretty lame agricultural analogy, huh? I probably should have just stuck with the Promoland theme.
So now for the big question. If I had known then what I know now, would I still have pitched my idea in Stamford, the idea that served as the basis for The Hardcore Diaries?
Let me see, I just quoted Bill Clinton earlier, so perhaps I should quote another famous statesman here. How about the Texas Rattlesnake, Stone Cold Steve Austin, who might very well say, “Oh HELL NO!”
No, I wouldn’t have shown up in Stamford.
But I think my mistake made for a good book.
Acknowledgments
Thank you first and foremost to Vince McMahon, for suggesting the idea of another autobiography, and for allowing me to share my story in its entirety.
Special thanks to my editor, Margaret Clark, for her feedback corrections, grammatical expertise, belief in this project, and for all the many other tasks required in transforming over six hundred pages of handwritten notebook paper into actual book form. The transcriptions of the live speeches were provided by Sue DeRosa, Michael Dalvano, Anwar Fennell, Ben Williams, and Matt Yackeren from WWE. Thanks also go out to Richard Oriolo for his design, and to Dean Miller at WWE and Erica Feldon at Pocket Books for their support.
