I was looking for the illusion of Rock luring me up the ladder, and then knocking me off, but we probably overdid it by fighting in the crowd for several seconds before I took the big punch that knocked me off the balcony and onto a set of lighting equipment a legitimate eight to ten feet below. I say "legitimate" because wrestling does have a tendency to exaggerate heights a little bit. We've all heard it. "He was just thrown fifteen feet off of that ramp," and then the EMTs run in to help and their heads come within inches of the ramp. So either these EMTs are fourteen and a half feet tall or someone's stretching the truth a little. But this fall really was a long way and it hurt for a long time. Upon impact, sparks flew out of the system, which then tipped over on me (which also hurt), and half the houselights in the building went off. To answer the doubters who automatically assumed that the speakers were gimmicked, here's the truth: lighting equipment, real; sparks and blackout, gimmicked. In any event, it was a cool effect, and the ooh'ing and aah'ing went on for several seconds.
This was where Russo had suggested that Colette come out and call the whole thing off, at which point The Rock would no longer have been the company's top heel—my wife would have been. Instead, we took the opportunity to show off The Rock's new mean streak.
Shane McMahon (the boss's son and an excellent talent in his own right) came out, and as one of the leaders of The Rock's heel faction, "the Corporation," actually told Rock to end the beating. "Come on, Rock, he's done, that's enough," Shane said, to which The Rock reacted violently. "He's not done, not until he says the words." (Author's Note: I don't know the exact words. I'm sitting in my hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, and don't have access to a tape. Don't worry, though, with the exception of the quotes, everything else is burned into my memory.) With that, The Rock picked me up, and we began a long stumble/beating/walk up the aisle and into the ring.
I sincerely believe that professional wrestling is at its best when the performers lose their own sense of disbelief and begin to actually "feel it." In a sense, the match becomes real, or at least real in that they actually "become" their character, and actually "feel" what the story line is attempting to make the audience feel. As I took the beating up the aisle, I lost that sense of disbelief and began to actually "feel" that I was the wounded Mankind, so beat-up that I could hardly stand. Now, if you're Robert De Niro on the set of Raging Bull and you "feel" like Jake LaMotta, it's probably a positive. If you're Mick Foley, and you're about to be handcuffed and bludgeoned in front of your children, it's probably not.
The Rock rolled me into the ring, and while I was down and "feeling it," produced a pair of handcuffs. The audience began to understand. While I was on my belly, The Rock cuffed my wrists behind my back and began to taunt me. "Come on, say it, or The Rock's gonna kick your fat ass." He put the mike in front of my mouth. "Up yours." Boom— The Rock sent me down with a punch. Somehow I managed to make a comeback while handcuffed, and even managed to drop a headbutt on the "People's Jewels." But while I was recuperating, The Rock got to his feet and met me with a devastating clothesline when I got to mine. Upon impact, I could feel my jaw dislocate.
A jaw that dislocates easily has always been one of my Achilles' heels. I trace the origin of this to the second match of my career, when the Dynamite Kid tore a ligament in my jaw with a clubbing clothesline to the point of my chin. In theory, these clotheslines are supposed to be delivered just under the neck, but in practice, well, sometimes the aim is a little off. I used to ice the jaw for days and wait for the swelling to go down. In the last few years, I have relied on the unique skills of Frenchman Francois Petit, to move it back into place with a "Meek, Meek, I can fix it..." snap!
As I lay on the ground, I heard a definite ooh of anticipation from the crowd. Rock had the chair. He rolled me onto my back and placed the chair over my face. I instinctively turned my head to the side so that the coming impact wouldn't damage my nose or teeth. Rock signaled for the People's Elbow, and when he landed, and the steel of the chair smashed into my skull, the move certainly didn't feel all that silly. Upon viewing Beyond the Mat, I could see my family scream at this impact. I wish I could say that my mind was on them at this point, but I was thinking only of the match, and the first of the five chair-shots to my head which I knew was coming next.
Slowly I got to my feet, with my back to The Rock, who had the chair high overhead. I knew that I wouldn't go down on the first one because in my entire career one shot had very rarely been enough to do the trick. I turned to face him, and crash, I was wrong. I went down to my knees. The shot had legitimately knocked me down, and it had hurt worse than any chairshot that I had ever taken. I hadn't taken into account how the cuffs would alter my body's ability to give with the blow and thereby cushion the impact. Every chairshot hurts, but this one had been extraordinary. I resigned myself to the fact that I would have to take four more and comforted myself with the knowledge that I had about a minute of Rock's mic work and taunting before having to take another one.
Crash! I was wrong. That one minute had suddenly shrunk to about three seconds, and the impact had been violent. The blow knocked me off my knees and onto the ground, but I was up quickly and begging for more.
Over the past eighteen months I have tried many times to rationalize my behavior after this and I'm still not sure how to do it. The best I have come up with is that by not allowing me time to recuperate, and by legitimately hurting me, The Rock had triggered a great deal of anger within me. That anger, combined with my lost sense of disbelief in the match, caused me to become defiant, and with my children among the 20,000 in attendance at the Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim, California, I looked The Rock in the eye and dared him to knock me down.
Boom. The first one was hard, but I shrugged it off and dared him to give me another. Boom. He was up to it, and I wasn't quite as feisty, but still on my feet. Crash! The third one was perhaps the hardest shot I've ever received, and sent me straight down on my back. It also not only opened the cut that I had suffered days earlier, but tripled it in length and depth. As I lay there, I felt the blood start to flow. At this point both Colette and the kids were devastated. Noelle had her head buried in Colette's shoulder, and Dewey's crying was causing him to shake. Once again, I wish I could say that my mind was on them, but I was oblivious to everything but the match. It would be five months before I saw Barry's footage of my family. The impact the video had on me made those chairshots seem weak in comparison.
Five shots. That's all it was supposed to be. Five had already been given, but I was still in the ring and not up the aisle, where the finish was supposed to transpire so as not to make the head of the USA Network look bad. It would take six more to get me up the aisle as my children screamed and the blood poured down my face. My theory of "the anticipation being worse than the actual shots" had been trampled—the shots were much worse than the anticipation. In reality, the shots came quickly, with a minimum of buildup and mike work between them. After eight shots, I turned my back to The Rock and began stumbling up the aisle. This was my nonverbal cue for The Rock to hit me in the back of the head, "knock me out," and end this massacre. By this point my defiance was gone, as was my sense of disbelief. I knew exactly what was going on. I was in a match that had gotten carried away—I was suffering a great deal—and I wanted it to end. Unfortunately, The Rock didn't pick up on my nonverbal cue, as he ran a circle around me and smashed me another time on the top of the head. On the bright side, it seemed that my goal of showing his mean streak was being achieved.
After another shot, I turned my back again and started stumbling up the aisle. This time The Rock was right on the money and caught me with a crushing blow to the back of the head for the "knockout." Then, with Mankind lying still and on his stomach, The Rock again demanded the word, and when the microphone was placed in the general vicinity of Mankind's mouth, a loud "I Quit! I Quit! I Quit!" resounded throughout the arena. Plan B had gone into effect. I was knocked out, and then, as was revealed the following night on Raw, Sh
ane played a tape of me promising to make The Rock yell out "I Quit! I Quit! I Quit!" Of course the part about The Rock was left out, and a great percentage of people left the arena that night thinking the impossible: Mankind had quit. As I mentioned earlier, it wasn't bad for a backup plan, but in the end, it was still a rip-off.
I was disoriented from the blows and had to be helped to the back, but once I was there, my focus returned to where it should have been all along. "Where are my kids?" I was pointed to them, and as I reached them, the other wrestlers saw me and gave me a standing ovation. "I'm okay, I'm okay," I assured Colette, although I probably should have been asking them if they were okay as well. In my own defense, I must say that they all looked okay, and I had no idea that they had been that upset, until I saw the footage months later. Colette had taken them away from the ring after the fifth shot, and they had calmed down greatly over the next several minutes.
"Are you okay?" Noelle asked me sweetly as we walked to the dressing room, where I had been told a doctor was waiting. "It's just a little boo-boo," I assured her, before adding, "You can't hurt Daddy." Noelle surveyed the bloody situation before offering her medical opinion, which turned out to be right on the money. "Daddy, that looks like a big boo-boo." It surely was. I looked in the mirror and was not met with the same small gash I had tried to repair. This thing was a four-inch gully in the hairline of the right side of my head. Sadly, I turned, and lay down on the floor to be tended to, while Barry's camera captured the whole gruesome scenario. I guess most children don't have the opportunity to watch their dad get stitched, after getting the opportunity to see him get the crap beaten out of him. At this point the Disney trade-off probably didn't seem like such a great deal.
Dewey stayed very quiet while Noelle made another astute observation as she watched the doctor wrap gauze around my stitched-up head. "Daddy looks kind of cute," she said sweetly, to which Colette agreed. I agreed as well. "Daddy is cute ...in a rugged type of way." Noelle then told me she wanted to wrestle me, to which I said, "Sure, honey, you and Daddy will wrestle when I get home next week." Apparently one week was too long to wait for my tiny angel, as she yelled, "I want to wrestle you right now!" With those few words, she made me feel so much better, for, until viewing the film, I really didn't feel all that bad about what I had done to them. Then it was Dewey's turn to speak up and ease my mind. "Dad, can I go watch the end of the Rumble?"
I had many visitors while I lay in that room, all of them asking how I was. Billy Gunn, who I usually shared only a joking relationship with, was very kind, as was Darren Drozdov, who offered up this sentiment: "You are the fucking man." Droz was paralyzed in a match ten months later and remains in a wheelchair. Whenever I think of him, I think of that visit to the dressing room.
When I left the arena, I was troubled by the fact that one wrestler had not come in and checked on me. This would bother me for a long time, and in truth it is something that I have still not forgotten, nor entirely forgiven. Of all the visitors who came into that room, The Rock was not among them.
4: The Violent Truth
I CAME UP WITH A tremendous scenario for a rematch. I pride myself on being creative, but when I came up with this bad boy, I knew that I had set new standards for myself. Okay, here it is.
The Rock, fresh from his "I Quit" victory, would find himself somehow unsatisfied with the brutal California skull crushing. No, he would want more—he would want my death. But instead of doing the deed himself, he would send an assistant or a flunky to do his dirty work. Someone like Al Snow. I knew that Al would take great pleasure in killing me, even if it was a fictional scenario. But The Rock wouldn't be satisfied with just a simple death. No, he would want the act to be brutal and he would want a souvenir; like, say, maybe ...a body part. Yeah, that's it—Al Snow would cut out part of my body and bring it back to The Rock.
There was one thing The Rock wouldn't count on, however. Either through a hidden warm spot in his own heart, or the hope that I would one day maybe team up with him and drag his career out of the toilet, Al Snow would not be able to turn the trick. Instead, he would stooge off The Rock's despicable plan and urge me to flee.
I would then break into a small house and sleep there until the inhabitants came back. Even though I had criminally broken into their home, I would force these innocent people, who suffered from such afflictions as narcolepsy and mental retardation, to completely change their way of life to fit my standards of what was acceptable. If they could not do this, I would not allow them to eat.
Meanwhile, The Rock, having learned of Al's failure, and having punished Al by making him wrestle in poorly received opening matches (or pretty much letting him resume his normal duties), would swear revenge. The Rock would take matters into his own hands by finding the house that I had broken into and killing me.
What The Rock wouldn't count on, however, was my newfound dysfunctional family. Spurred on by love, this group of weirdos would hunt The Rock down and brutally murder him by pushing him off the edge of a cliff.
As I mentioned, however, this group was a little strange, and they wouldn't be content to just bury me and let me rest in peace. No, these people would realize that they had a former World Wrestling Federation champion and a New York Times number one bestselling author on their hands, and they would put me on display. That's right, this band of bearded bastards would put the hardcore legend on display so they could ogle his twisted physique and one-eared cranium.
Yeah, these guys would be sick, but not as sick as the pampered, pretty-boy necrophiliac who would plant a big kiss on my corpulent corpse before carrying me away, to make me his love slave.
I came up with this idea on a Friday morning and immediately called Vince at World Wrestling Federation headquarters. "Vince is in a meeting," I was told. I understood that Vince was the owner of a billion-dollar company, but I also knew that I held in my hand (I had written the idea down and had it copyrighted) the key to making the World Wrestling Federation a multibillion-dollar company—it was that good. "Tell Vince it's important," I told the woman on the other line. She was back moments later. "Vince said to call back tomorrow."
Tomorrow? Tomorrow? Call back tomorrow? Isn't that what the Emerald City guard told Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz? There was a big difference. I wasn't asking him for anything. I didn't need a brain. No, dammit, I was already a number one bestselling author. I didn't need courage either, because I had that too, only nobody refers to it as courage anymore—it's called "testicular fortitude"—and if there's any word that accurately describes what my testicles are full of, it's "fortitude." Hell, the World Wrestling Federation even had a special "testicular fortitude" T-shirt made for me, even if I did feel a little foolish wearing it. A heart? No, I had one of those too. And Kansas? No, I didn't need to go there either. I'd already been, and to tell you the truth, with the exception of Harley Race's barbecues, it was kind of boring. (Readers of the first book will fondly recall Harley as the gruff but lovable wrestling legend who never got to bust open my eyebrow.) No, I wasn't asking Vince for a gift. I was giving him one. "Tell Vince that I'm getting on a plane and coming to Stamford," I yelled at the lady. "And tell him I'm pissed."
I stormed into Vince's office seven hours later and threw my masterwork on his desk. Vince is a man of principle, and doesn't enjoy being bullied. He looked at me with contempt in his eyes and spoke. "I'm a man of principle," he said, "and I don't enjoy being bullied." He may have been my boss, and he may, with exception of the "big gulp of fear," have the best facial expressions in wrestling, but I wasn't about to be deterred. The company, I knew, was planning on going public, and I knew that after reading it, Vince would want this baby on his asset sheet to lure potential investors.
Vince looked it over as I waited for the big smile and bear hug that I knew would be coming my way. Instead, his face contorted in disgust, as if he'd just swallowed sour milk or watched a Nitro broadcast. He looked up at me, and noticing the excitement in my eyes, his expression changed
to one of sympathy. Slowly, he broke the news. "Mick, I can tell you worked very hard on this, but as the owner of the World Wrestling Federation, I cannot, in good conscience, allow your idea to air in any way, shape, or form." I was crushed. After all, Vince had a reputation as a genius, and it was a reputation that, with the exception of the Harvey Wippleman vs. Miss Kitty "Snowbunny" match and the decision to allow Howard Finkel to be seen on national television in his underwear, I felt was deserved. "Vince," I moaned, sensing that my quest for creative nirvana was slipping away faster than spectators to the popcorn stand during a Posse match, "why not?"
Despite his on-air persona as a bigmouthed jerk, Vince can actually be quite a gentleman, and sensing that I was about to cry like a thirteen-year-old at a Titanic screening, he broke the news as gently as he could. "Mick, to tell you the truth, despite my reputation for pushing the envelope, I find the whole thing morally reprehensible." Man, it was hard to get happy after that one, especially when Vince continued: "Mick, what you've come up with does sound moderately entertaining, but your story has vile and morbid elements, including, but not limited to, contract killing, murder, sexual harassment, breaking and entering, trespassing, necrophilia, and making fun of the handicapped."
I was devastated, but after reflecting on it, I realized that Vince was right. Still, I wanted to make one last dying grasp. "What if we soften the story, put the idea through animation, and market it to families," I said, hoping that Vince would see the logic in such an idea. Instead, he looked at me as if I was an idiot. "Mick, Walt Disney did something like that over sixty years ago, and called it Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs!"
All right, so maybe that conversation never actually took place, but I'm trying to make a point. Wrestling is under a microscope by everyone from the PTC (Parents Television Council) to Muslim leaders I just spoke to in Singapore for being too violent. No need for a microscope, guys—just open up your eyes and look around you. Violence is everywhere. Wrestling is, and always has been, a mirror of the times we live in, and to my eyes at least, it's a fairly innocent reflection. From the "evil" Germans of Karl Von Hess and Fritz Von Erich, to "evil" Russians like Ivan Koloff and Nikolai Volkoff, to Iranian villains like the Iron Shiek, to Iraqi sympathizers like Sgt. Slaughter, wrestling has always been a simplified and somewhat inaccurate "textbook" of modern history. Then again, my textbooks in school were simplified and somewhat inaccurate versions of modern history—where else can you learn about the four-hundred-year-long institution of slavery in one easy paragraph?