Countdown To Lockdown (25 page)

April 9, 2009

Williamsburg, Virginia

11:25 p.m.

It would have been so cool to see
Impact
tonight, with Hughie (or at least his photo) making his big national debut. But alas, the Great Wolf Lodge only gets twenty or so stations, so we carried on as best we could, watching
Paul Blart: Mall Cop
on PPV to cushion us from the disappointment of the missing Spike channel.

I know I name-dropped Kevin James a couple of times in
Hardcore Diaries
, but this
Mall Cop
thing was so huge that I figure I might as well get a little more mileage out of my high school and college association with the man who breathed life into Paul Blart.

My son Dewey asked me what Kevin was like back in high school, wondering if he was a lot like the hapless but likable losers he plays so well on-screen.

I laughed. “Actually, he was kind of a stud back then,” I said. “He was the star of the football team, and only one of two guys who could bench-press three hundred pounds in high school.”

Just in case you were wondering, I was
not
the other guy. Definitely not.

Which actually got me thinking about my high school wrestling days, including the question: What the heck was I thinking going out for a team on which Kevin, the guy with the 300-pound bench, was already penciled in as the top heavyweight?

Actually, I think Kevin was going to be our go-to guy at 275, one of the guys who could wrestle at 215, but put away some big meals later in the season to go into the county tournament at the higher weight. Sometimes a really good athlete could do very well for themselves at 275, making up for lack of experience with power and attitude.

So I went out for the team on a whim, convinced by my buddy John McNulty that I could get in better shape for lacrosse — my real sport — by wrestling, as opposed to embarrassing myself at Winter Track.

I immediately became the number three heavyweight behind Kevin and Gus Johnson, the only other kid at Ward Melville High School with a tattoo on his bicep, this one some kind of lion. Back then, tattoos on a high schooler were so rare that their appearance alone could sometimes provide a distinct psychological edge on the mat. Of course, a tattoo hidden on a hip, inked solely to impress Diane Bentley, provided no advantage whatsoever.

By the second or third meet of the season, Johnson was history, after
a practice-halting F-bomb directed at Patriots coach Jim McGonigle. Coach McGonigle, having dealt leukemia a serious butt kicking in 1978, wasn’t about to let some punk kid with a tattoo drop an unanswered F-bomb in his gym. So, McGonigle, with his classic New England accent, dropped one of his own, and we all got back to practice as if nothing had changed. Oh, but something had changed. I was no longer the third-string heavyweight. Nope, now I was the second-string heavyweight.

A mere week or two later, Kevin James went down with a season-ending back injury, and bingo, Foley gets the slot. As Kenny Powers might just say, “You’re f ’n out, I’m f ’n in.” And so it went, one of sports’ great success stories, from third-string heavyweight all the way to the state championship.

Wait, what’s that, you say? I wasn’t a state champion? Not even close?

Okay, okay, I’ll admit it. After winning a couple matches by pinfall in the county tournament, I lost a heartbreaker, and failed to advance past the quarterfinals.

Sometimes things have a way of working themselves out. I went on to do pretty well for myself: got thrown off a cell by the Undertaker, was interviewed (twice) by Katie Couric, and got a hug from Tori Amos. One of my former high school wrestling opponents was arrested for tying up a woman and making her watch as he danced naked to the “Eye of the Tiger.” Hey, I couldn’t make something like that up.

I saw Coach McGonigle in Las Vegas about a year ago, where he has lived since retiring from teaching. He took me out to eat at a casino, and while we waited for a table I dropped a quick twenty dollars on blackjack — the first time I had ever gambled with anything other than my own body.

I told Coach that I had recently uncovered a few of my old wrestling clippings. After my two dynamic pinfall victories at the county
meet, Coach McGonigle was quoted as saying, “Mickey Foley is on the verge of becoming a respectable heavyweight.”

That was as good as it got for me. I may have never actually become a respectable heavyweight, but at one time I was right on the verge.

So, who, you may ask, was the better high school wrestler, Kevin or me? You know what, it was pretty darn close. We were both spectacularly mediocre. Neither of us actually respectable. But both of us right on the verge.

Every book needs a scoop or two, something provocative to get people talking, generate some buzz. In past memoirs, it’s been the old kiss-and-tell, unveiling the curtain on my superhuman sexual performances with celebrities both large and small, literally and figuratively, from years gone by. Wait, what’s that you say? That wasn’t my book? I’ve never delivered a superhuman sexual performance with any celebrity, big or small? Or any type of sexual performance with a celebrity for that matter? You say that was Geraldo’s memoir,
Exposing Myself
, a best seller in 1991? Oh, sorry.

Anyway, here’s a
Countdown
exclusive. Ready? Here goes. I once scripted a wrestling match! Good, got it out, feel a lot better now. A wrestler admitting to scripting a match isn’t such a big deal anymore, right? Randy “the Ram” Robinson showed how it was done in
The Wrestler.
Oh yeah, but what if I told you that the match I scripted was back in the winter of 1982 inside the Ward Melville High School wrestling gym? And that the guy I scripted it with was none other than the “King of Queens,” Kevin James?

That’s right, the secret’s out, and now I can finally shed some light on the whole sordid affair. Keep in mind the Ward Melville wrestling gym was in the bowels of the building, a stifling hot slice of hell on earth assigned to the team years earlier by the school’s sadistic athletic director, Dr. Jack Foley, also known as, um, you know, my dad. So, anyway this sadistic Foley guy had the team locked inside this sweltering sauna, a place so vile that even a callous Gitmo guard might likely
tap McGonigle on the shoulder and say, “Hey, Coach, maybe you should take it easy on these kids.”

So Kevin and I, both around 215 (although he looked likely to kick some ass in his green Melville singlet, and I really didn’t), are watching these poor guys — all of them except us trying to drop weight — sweating their balls off. Literally, sweating their balls off. Don’t believe me? Go ahead, check the balls of any former Melville wrestler. Not there. Gone.

The two of us figured there had to be a better way. To this day, I don’t know who first made the suggestion. The “single leg” suggestion. Or who first said, “Sit out and switch.” But, my goodness, we started doing impressive stuff in that godforsaken gym. Takedowns, reversals, escapes, the sock, the worm. And boy, did we earn the admiration of Coach McGonigle. “Good work!” “That’s the way!” “What the hell are you doing with that sock on your hand?”

And then Kevin had to ruin it with that back injury. But I learned a valuable lesson. Wrestling sure is a lot more fun with someone helping you look good.

You know who won’t like this story? Coach McGonigle, who will feel a certain sense of betrayal upon learning that not all of my actions in that ball-melting furnace he called a gym were done in the true spirit of competition. But at least he’ll understand why I could never hit a Granby roll in competition.

You know who will like it even less? Kurt Angle, who will see it as a betrayal to everything he’s stood for, lived for, breathed for.

Actually, I think Coach McGonigle might get a kick out of it all these years (twenty-seven of them) later. Kurt? Not so much.

Eight parts wrestling, two parts sadness.

As long as I’m on the subject of Kurt Angle, let me share a touching story with you, designed not only to enlighten and entertain, but also to illustrate some of the emotional burdens that go hand in hand with an almost superhuman drive to be the very best.

In January 2009, I took part in a two-week TNA tour of the United Kingdom — England, Scotland, Ireland. I was hobbling pretty bad, having lacked the judgment at our January Pay-Per-View to remove my leg from underneath a table when A. J. Styles and Kip James came crashing through it. So my main goal on the tour was to entertain; telling the fans in Birmingham that it was an honor to be in the city that was the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement — before being informed by J.B. that we weren’t in
that
Birmingham.
That
was Alabama.
This
was England. Oops. Each night was an attempt to outdo the night before, to raise the tomfoolery to previously unthinkable levels.

Our little band of traveling entertainers arose early one morning, around 6:00 a.m., for a 9:00 a.m. flight out of Dublin. We showed up
at the Dublin Airport weary, looking much the worse for wear. I was exhausted, having spent the better part of three days writing the Tori Amos chapter that I hope you enjoyed. I’d finished writing somewhere around 5:00–5:30 a.m., and knowing it would be fruitless to lie down for thirty minutes, and with Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle” still in my head, passed the remaining time until departure by reimagining the song as a Jim Croce/Hulk Hogan composition entitled “Time in a Bottle Brother.” Sample lyric:

I’ve looked around enough to know

That you’re the one I want to show

My twenty-three-inch pythons to, brother.

The airport was full of UFC guys, as their company had held a huge show in Dublin the night before. There were a couple of pretty impressive black eyes and other assorted bruises among the fighters; apparently there’d been a couple of world-class slobber-knockers on the card.

I felt a hand on my back and heard the hoarse whisper of a voice. “Hey brother,” it said.

I turned and was met with a big smile peering out of the most hideously battered visage I’d ever been witness to. I had no idea who the guy was; his features were so swollen, he could have been anyone. He looked almost antlike, the way his cheekbones were swollen in almost perfectly symmetrical fashion; as if his opponent had been thoughtful enough to bludgeon him in a most nonexclusionary way.

“Brother, it’s Mark Coleman.”

Mark Coleman! Holy crap! I mean, he was just unrecognizable. I’d met Mark once, in Japan in 2004, and I had told him that he’d seemed unstoppable, like an impenetrable monster, back in his days as UFC Champion in 1997. The guy had just destroyed Don Frye, one of the great MMA fighters of all time, and seemed poised to rule the MMA roost for years to come.

But that was 1997. A lot had changed since then. The head butt, Coleman’s main offensive weapon, was now barred, part of an overall attempt to clean up the sport, which was dismissed even in the halls of Congress as “human cockfighting.” In retrospect, the rule changes were a great idea and helped lead to a rebirth of UFC, but they also served to sweep old-school gladiators like Coleman to the wayside. Back then, Coleman, an All-American wrestler at Ohio State, could simply manhandle overmatched martial artists and nail them on the ground.

By 2009, slowed by age and injuries, Coleman was happy just to be in the game, noting that he’d gotten a bonus for “best fight” the previous night, a slugfest with Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira that had been stopped with only fifteen seconds left, after the referee decided Mark had simply had enough.

Kurt Angle walked by, said hello to me, and briefly shook Coleman’s hand, obviously not recognizing the battered brawler in front of him.

“Kurt, it’s Mark Coleman,” he said as Kurt began to walk away.

“Mark?” Kurt said, turning, surprised. “Oh my God, Mark.”

It was really quite a touching scene — a big hug in the Dublin airport by two men who’d known each other for almost twenty years, having been among the world’s wrestling elite for several simultaneous years.

“We wrestled each other eight times,” Mark said.

“That’s right,” Kurt said, nodding. “I won four and you won four.”