3: I Quit
EVEN THOUGH I WAS THE CHAMPION, I felt like I knew my role in the company. Steve Austin was the number one good guy in the World Wrestling Federation, and The Rock was the number one heel. The two of them needed to be separated until WrestleMania—the World Wrestling Federation's premier event. That's where I came in. While Austin was tied up with the Undertaker, I would occupy The Rock's time. As a matter of professional pride, I considered it my duty to do more than just occupy his time—I wanted to "get him ready" for Austin. I considered one of my strengths as a performer to be getting my opponent "over," or in The Rock's case, even further over, as the guy was already receiving a tremendous reaction from the crowd. His level of reaction was so strong and he was so entertaining that it was hard to keep him a heel. The Rock was a third-generation star, and his combination of movie-star looks, Herculean physique, and interactive promos made him hard to boo. I felt like the people needed to hate him, and I felt that he needed to show a genuine mean streak. In a decision that would create more turmoil and controversy than anything I have ever done, I suggested an "I Quit" match to Vince McMahon.
The idea behind an "I Quit" match is really very simple—two guys beat the hell out of each other until one yells the two magic words. It is a tremendous premise, and when done properly, as Terry Funk and Ric Flair did it in 1989, the intensity can be incredible. When done improperly, it is embarrassing. One such match ended when the referee asked a wrestler if he quit, and when he replied, "No, you quit it," the match was over. I guess that was the "You Quit" match. Even worse was the time that the referee asked Buddy Landell, "Do you quit?" in the Smoky Mountains territory in 1995. When Landell said yes, the match was over. Landell then protested the decision by claiming he thought the referee asked if he thought he was handsome. Pretty pathetic. Actually, it's pretty much par for the course when you consider wrestling's past history of "country whippin' " matches where no one got whipped, a hair-vs.-hair match between a guy with a crew cut and a guy who was bald, hardcore matches featuring Rodney, and retirement matches where no one retires. I'll get back to that last one later.
I wanted this to be a real "I Quit" match. I wanted there to be a definite winner and a definite loser, and I wanted the fans to see a side of The Rock that they could truly despise. I also wanted to explore the devastating effects, not so much physical, but mental, that such a match would have on a guy who had built his reputation and career on never giving up. Even as the loser of this proposed match, I had no doubt that, if it was done right, I could eventually emerge from the scenario more over with the crowd than ever.
The story line I proposed would be heart-wrenching, I would be bludgeoned, I would be helpless, and my wife would be watching from the front row. To be helpless, I would need to be handcuffed. I had come up with this idea years earlier, and used to get major adrenaline rushes while I roared down the highway at 4 a.m. thinking of my emotional scenario. If I happened to have the Bruce Springsteen Live cassette, forget about it. I would play "Candy's Room" a dozen times and get goose bumps over and over while the scene ran through my head. I had actually used the handcuff trick in Philadelphia-based Extreme Championship Wrestling three years earlier while facing my old DeNucci School of Wrestling friend Shane Douglas, but that one had never gone that extra emotional mile. To go that mile, I would need Colette.
"Are you sure that you would be willing to do this?" Vince asked. I was sure. "Vince, if we can make the fans actually feel the dilemma I'm going through, it will be the heaviest angle we've ever done." I then told him how I thought it should go, starting slow, and then culminating with a series of chairshots to my unprotected skull. Vince became very concerned. Ever since the infamous "Hell in a Cell" match in June of 1998, which had left me with a concussion, one and a half missing teeth, a dislocated jaw, fourteen stitches in my mouth, a dislocated shoulder, and a bruised kidney, Vince had forced me to take it a little easier. He voiced his objections to the idea, but I was insistent. "Vince, he only has to use the chair a few times. The anticipation of what he's going to do will be much worse than the actual shots. I mean Rock can take two minutes in between each shot. When that camera shows Colette crying, and then cuts back to me watching her cry, the fans will be begging me to quit. We can build up the drama so that the damage seems much worse than it actually is." I think the part about not doing too much actual damage sold him on the idea, and I had the match I had been dreaming about for years.
"I want to go too, Dad." "Me too, big Daddy-O." My kids wanted no part of being left out of a trip to California, which is where the 1999 Royal Rumble would take place. I told the kids that it would just be a few days, but there's something about Noelle's prolonged, five-year-old "pweease, puhweeze" that was almost impossible to say no to. So I said what all take-charge dads say: "Let me talk to your mother."
"Colette, maybe they can come but not watch the match," I said. She knew the kids would never buy it. If Colette had any idea how bad things were going to turn out, she never would have said her next words. "Mick, the kids have grown up with you getting hurt. You said it wouldn't be that many chairshots, right? So why not let them watch?" I sat both kids down and had one of my serious father-son-daughter talks. "Dew, Noelle, if you go to this match, it will look like Daddy's going to be hurt. Will you get scared?" They both vehemently denied that there would be any fear. "Now, you know that The Rock is Daddy's friend?" They nodded. "And The Rock would never really hurt Daddy, right?" Again they nodded while Noelle chimed in, "I want to go so bad, Dad. You have no idea how bad."
I thought it over. I had been involved in some extremely intense matches over the past year, and my body had been screaming for a break. After the Rumble match, I was going to "disappear" for a few weeks, during which time the announcers would speculate about my physical and mental well-being. I intended to spend a lot of time with the kids, and their wanting to be at the match caused an idea to flash into my mind. "Kids, if you go to California, after the match would you like to go to Disneyland?"
For some reason, that postmatch Disney vacation comforted me whenever I thought of my kids watching their dad get beat up. Every day I would talk to them about the match, either at home or on the phone, and every time they would assure me that they wouldn't be scared. "And where are we going to go after the match?" I would ask. "Disney!" they would yell. "And it's gonna beee?" "Great." I wish it had been.
I somehow was able to convince Vince that my children would be fine and then approached him about another subject. "Vince, I'm going to be coming to California as the champ, and leaving as an ex-champ, and it would really mean a lot to me if my family could fly first class." Vince didn't even think about it. "Mick, I would love to fly your family first class." Hey, this was going to be great—first-class treatment, a few weeks off, a Disney vacation. At least that's what I thought.
At this point in my career, I had been wrestling for fourteen years. I had been flying in first class for two weeks. I never asked to be flown in first—I just one day saw an F on my ticket. I didn't know what the hell it meant. At first I thought it was a mistake, but those Fs just kept coming. Kind of like my friend Scott Darragh's college transcript.
A call from head writer Vince Russo two weeks before the Rumble threw a wrench into the works. "Mick, we're going to put a match on during half-time of the Super Bowl, and we want you to be in it." Bye-bye, vacation; bye-bye, Disney. I couldn't do this to the kids. I had once taken them to Disney World in Florida on a Jewish holiday, and the place had been so crowded that we left after forty-five minutes. Even now, four years later, I can still hear them crying in my mind. I wasn't going to let them down again. I decided that I would simply take them out of school for a few days and go to Disney before the show. Unfortunately, I had lost the important advantage of being able to walk up after the match and say, "We're going to Disney!" Almost like one of those commercials. "Mick Foley, you've just had the crap beaten out of you in front of your children. You've terrified them, and
they'll grow up to be serial killers—what are you going to do now?" "I'm going to Disneyland!" I tried putting myself in my kids' shoes. If my dad had walked up to me when I was five and said, "Okay, I'm going to get the crap beaten out of me and then we'll go to Disney for four days—do you want to do it?" I would have screamed, "Hell, yeah!" But if he'd said, "Okay, kids, we're going to go to Disney for four days, but then you have to watch me get the crap beaten out of me," I'm not sure I would have taken the deal.
Barry Blaustein then called, and my life would never be the same. Barry was a well-known screenwriter who had been instrumental in the early success of Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live. Indeed, many of Eddie's best-known bits had been written by Barry, including "The Shooting of Buckwheat," "Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood," "Gumby," and "James Brown's Hot Tub Party." After SNL, Barry had written several successful movies, including the Murphy hits Coming to America, The Nutty Professor, and its sequel, The Klumps.
Barry had been a wrestling fan since childhood, a fact that he'd been hiding for several years, as, until recently, a love for wrestling was something that was better left unsaid. I guess in Hollywood until recently wrestling fans adopted Bill Clinton's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. But Barry loved wrestling, and even more, he was intrigued by the actual guys behind the characters. Because of his success with Universal Pictures, he had been able to get the studio to finance his idea for a documentary on the lives of professional wrestlers. That was in 1994. I met him in 1995 when I was in Las Vegas for an independent show. I heard a knock on my hotel door, and when I opened it I saw a man named Barry Bloom. With Bloom was another man, who was introduced as Blaustein. I had met Bloom when I worked for WCW, when he was Jesse Ventura's agent. (Hey, I try not to drop names too often, but when I do, I make sure it's a good one.) Blaustein explained that he was going to be making a documentary and asked if I would be interested in participating.
At the time Barry was considering me for the "former-star-now-wrestling-in-small-towns" role. As fate would have it, Vince McMahon, the benevolent genius, plucked me out of small buildings and Japanese "death" matches and made me a "World Wrestling Federation Superstar." Personally, I hate the term "superstar," but that is our given moniker. I mean that the term is inclusive of all World Wrestling Federation wrestlers. So, technically, Al Snow is a "superstar." Somehow it doesn't seem right. This term was responsible for one great moment on an airplane, when after a short conversation with me; the flight attendant got on the public-address system and cheerfully stated, "Ladies and gentlemen, American Airlines would like to welcome all of the World Wrestling Federation Superstars . . . and Al Snow." Al refused to admit that I had scored a verbal knockout by proxy, but did admit that watching me laugh until tears came out of my eyes was somewhat amusing.
The World Wrestling Federation had agreed to give Barry access to all of the guys, and as a result, I was used to his camera being around sporadically. I had told him earlier that I had reason to believe I would be leaving California without the belt, and when he found out my kids were coming, he decided to be at the show with his crew. I told him I was planning something memorable, but didn't go into details. I had no idea just how memorable it would be.
When I left for Los Angeles—in first F'n class—I actually had the fear that the camera would show my kids in the audience, and they wouldn't look concerned at all about their dear old dad. Worse yet, I feared they would be laughing. In retrospect, I wish they had been.
We had a great time at Disneyland, which the kids decided they loved even more than Disney World, but even as they were yelling "let's go again" after a ride on Space Mountain, I couldn't shake the feeling that the Royal Rumble was a big mistake.
The night before the Rumble, I received a call from Vince Russo at approximately eleven o'clock. "Cactus, we've got to change the finish," Russo said, using the name that I had used for the first eleven years of my career. I was hot. "Change the finish! Why?" Well, it turned out that Vince had just come from a meeting of the Television Critics Association at which the head of USA (the network that, at the time, aired Raw) had taken a lot of heat for the controversial content of the show. He told his detractors that he had no problem with the content, and in fact, he was taking his nine-year-old son to sit ringside. "Mick, if we do that finish, we're going to bury the guy after he went to bat for us." Russo had a point, but, damn, this could have been brought up to me a little earlier. "Vince," I said, "if we don't do the finish, I'll be the one who gets buried." Russo quickly offered an alternative. "What if you take a big bump and Colette pleads with you to quit—that would make sense." Yeah, it would make sense if I wanted my wife to receive hate mail and have my kids beat up at school. "We can't do that," I told Russo. "Everyone remembers the 'Hell in a Cell'— they saw what I went through. If I take a bump that can't even come close to those two, and then quit because my wife asks me to, the fans will fart on it. I don't know who would be the bigger heel—Colette for whining, or me for listening to her."
On and on it went, until I told him I would try to think of a Plan B, which I eventually did. As far as Plan Bs went, this one was pretty good, and in retrospect, with the way things got carried away, it's a good thing that my children weren't on television.
I found it hard to sleep, as I often do the night before a big match. Dewey and Noelle woke up early, and I took them back over to the park for a few prematch rides. Then on to the building. When I got to the Arrowhead Pond venue, Barry's crew was already there. The camera stayed on me most of the day. I don't know if it was the camera, or the pressure of the match, but I had never been as nervous as I was that night. To make things worse, I had two other problems to contend with. First, I had a cut on my head from a previous match that hadn't healed yet, and was afraid it was going to open at any time. Instead of going to an emergency room after that match for a quick three or four stitches, I opted to try the macho wrestling method of gluing the cut together. Mr. Gargulia, my old elementary school art teacher would have failed me for sure if he'd seen my botched art/first-aid project.
Compounding my problems was a meaningless television match with 450-pound wrestler Viscera that was designed to let The Rock get heat on me before we went to the Pay-Per-View. Actually, we had done a wonderful job of promoting the match, and The Rock had plenty of heat already. Instead of trying to have a good match, I spent most of my time hoping I wouldn't bleed during this fiasco.
When I got back through the curtain, it was time for Colette and the kids to take their seats. Colette looked beautiful, Dewey looked so gosh-darn handsome, and Noelle looked like a precious little present in her little red dress. The Rock came over and spoke to the kids before they went outside. He asked them all about Disney and assured them that he would never do anything to hurt their dad. Even with things getting out of hand later that night, what The Rock ended up hurting most was my feelings.
The Rock and I had great chemistry inside the ring. On this night, we didn't talk much about what we were going to do, but decided to improvise most of it. We did decide on the number of chairshots that would be given—five—and that the last one, the knockout blow, would be to the back of the head.
I stretched out and tried to get rid of the strange feeling that something was wrong. Then Rock's music played, and I knew I had about a minute until showtime. I feel like I vaguely know how a death-row inmate feels when his number is finally called. Sometimes, I can't wait to get through that curtain, but on this particular night, I was hoping that his ring music would go on forever.
Then I heard the shrieking of brakes, the shatter of glass, and a catchy three-chord guitar riff. My time was at hand. I crossed myself for safety and stepped through the curtain. I didn't feel much like the World Wrestling Federation champion, and after seeing the tape, I don't think I looked much like one either. Instead I looked like someone pretending to be the World Wrestling Federation champion. I walked by the ring and I saw Noelle. I leaned over and gently kissed her on the cheek. I looked
for my little buddy, but couldn't see him—maybe he was hiding behind Colette. Then I stepped into the ring, and moments later the bell rang.
It's strange. Without the aid of a videotape, I remember almost nothing about the first half of the match, and almost everything about the last. After about ten minutes of intense back-and-forth action, highlighted by good microphone work, where we each attempted to make the other say the magic words, we headed up the aisle. There was a ladder lying on the ground by the back of the arena, so I put it to use by slamming Rock on top of it. I attempted to drop an elbow on him, but he moved out of harm's way, and the sound of my body hitting the steel elicited a groan from the crowd.
Rock then took the ladder, after admonishing me that "only The Rock can drop a true People's Elbow," and propped it up against the wall so that the top of the apparatus reached the next level of the audience. Once the ladder was in place, he began to climb. I should point out now that the People's Elbow is one of The Rock's patented moves, and is possibly the most foolish thing seen in any form of entertainment. He doesn't like when I say that, but actually it's a compliment. With Rock halfway up the "People's Ladder," I began to give chase.