By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
Insight With Chris Van Vliet with guest Mick Foley
Host: Chris Van Vliet
Podcast available via Podcasts.Apple.com
On how his career would have looked had he not been thrown off the Hell in a Cell structure: “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 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 his favorite match: “My favorite match was Backlash against Randy Orton. Crazy thing is, if he has a new favorite, I don’t want to know about it. He’s technically probably had better matches. But the idea of being in that spot, people ask me, you will just say you made somebody. No one person makes anybody. It takes a lot of people, a lot of factors, and even if the bases were loaded for Randy, it’s still up to him to knock it out of the park. And he did, and one of the wisest decisions I ever made, much wiser than working at the Huntsville auto show the day before my street fight with Triple H, much wiser than catching a red eye and getting into New York City at 6 am for the Royal Rumble. I did a lot of stupid things that way, as far as travel. I actually canceled a talk at a community college so that I could come in the night before, as opposed to the day of the show.
“I like people to be able to read between the lines, rather than just spill the [beans]. But in this case, I think it’s beneficial to know Randy came up to my room, and for only the second time of my entire career, I had an A through Z plan, and I’ll never forget, he was just taking it all in. I’m getting the tingles here, because you’re talking about a moment that changed his career, and I don’t know if we could have had that type of match if I’d gone through that speaking engagement. And the other key factor is that Michael Hayes heard some of the things we want to do. He goes, ‘You’re going to need more time.’ So instead of rushing through, we had time to let things breathe. And it just felt really good. Even though I had many trials and tribulations getting back home. My luggage was delayed for four hours. I did throw up in the parking lot of Tim Hortons in Edmonton, because my brain had jogged a little bit, but I made it back in time for Raw the next night, and it was like the fans looked at him like he was a completely different guy. And it really made me feel good. Now, they turned him babyface in two weeks, which I thought was a big mistake, but it was hard not to like somebody who’d been through that type of ordeal.”
On the other match you went through: “The street fight with Triple H. So when two of my five favorites are on that list, maybe I should have done more that way. The only other one that was A to Z was when I got to Japan. I only worked two FMW shows. A lot of people think I worked FMW. I actually worked IWA, and I did two anniversary shows for FMW. It was Wing Kanemura, and he was a good worker, and he did a lot of crazy things, and he had like five notebook pages written out in English. And I’m a guy who likes to have a lot of say, it’s not a matter of pride, it’s I think I have something to offer. And then when I looked at this thing, I just, I like it. If you watch that match with Kanemura, I had zero input in the creativity, but then it’s up to you as a performer to pull everything off. I asked my kids, ‘Hey, see if AI can just come up with a hardcore match.’ And a minute later, they’re telling me the, you know, the spots, the moves. I was like, it’s not a bad match, but it’s all dependent on how it’s carried out. And you see some guys who can do so much with so little, and you see other guys do so much, and it doesn’t mean anything.”
On his “I Quit” match with The Rock and it being featured in Beyond The Mat: “Plan was, yeah, for five. But I was still in the ring at five. I didn’t realize that your body has the ability to give with a chair shot. That doesn’t make it fake. It’s just like anything. It would be like all of a sudden now, instead of having an ability to give, somebody’s punching you square in the face while your head is up against the wall, the impacts would be so much worse. This isn’t an exact analogy, but once my hands were cuffed, and anyone at home could do that, be like, Oh, I can see why. If you were hit in the head, it would be far more painful. So I literally could not believe how much that first chair shot hurt, more than any one I’d ever taken. And so instead of being halfway up the aisle on five, I was still in the ring.
“And so I wanted to do the best job I could. But even as I was getting there, I did not know my children were crying. The original finish, which was supposed to be the camera sees my family crying, I see my family crying, and I quit. I don’t want to do that. Now, if you go through history, it was like, within two weeks, Triple H did the same thing that I wanted to do with Chyna, but it was just done so quickly, there’s so much in wrestling you can’t digest it all, and that wasn’t something people were able to sit down and really enjoy. But that was the original idea. And my worry was that I’d spent their whole lives telling them that I was just playing and that Dad couldn’t be hurt. I thought they’d come over to the kids, they’d be like, reading. I didn’t know they’d be crying, but to borrow a line from John Candy in Home Alone, kids are resilient. They came around and started talking after a couple of weeks.”
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