During the most recent episode of Insights with Chris Van Vliet, WWE Hall of Famer Mick Foley talked on his health, Hell in a Cell and more!
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 had no got thrown off the top of cage:
“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.”
On which hurt more, falling through the cage 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 how the ‘Have A Nice Day’ catchphrase began:
“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.”
Foley also talks about taking the Pedigree on thumbtacks, crazy WWE moments, The Rock and more!
You can watch the full interview below:
All quotes are courtesy of Insights with Chris Van Vliet.