The Hardcore Diaries (31 page)

There you go. Not so great, right? Grammatically incorrect, indecisive, vague, not especially thought-provoking.

But the image saved it. It didn’t just save it. It made it work. Thank goodness for Terry Funk and his plethora of punches. There wasn’t much blood, but it was enough; in its own subtle way, it was far more memorable and powerful than the gushers guys hit so regularly on Pay-Per-View.

My eye was swollen too, courtesy of punches three, four, and five. They had sure hurt at the time, but watching on TiVo, seeing how the eye literally swelled and changed color during the course of the promo, made the pain I’d endured seem like a small price to pay.

I watched that promo five or six times, each time marveling at the lighting, the blood, the swollen eye, the haunting message. It was the first time since ’98 I’d watched any of my stuff more than once. That was Hell in a Cell. Hopefully this promo will raise one-thousandth the number of goose bumps as that infamous match did. Hopefully it will serve as a bridge between the true believers and the intrigued but hesitant.

Come on over, everybody. Come on over and watch
One Night Stand.
It may not turn out to be as lonely a viewing experience as I had previously thought.

June 10, 2006
4:06
P
.
M
.—Long Island, NY

Dear Hardcore Diary,

Everything I am doing to prepare for this match is wrong. I knew exactly what the correct path of preparation was. Following last night’s personal appearance at a video store in Brooklyn, I should have headed into New York City, checked into a hotel for two nights, and committed myself to preparing mentally and getting enough rest for such a big match.

As I have mentioned earlier, writing a book about my adventures was probably not a bright idea. Stopping by the Linda Ronstadt show at the Westbury Music Fair (it has a new corporate name, but I refuse to acknowledge it) and writing until 3:30
A
.
M
., sleeping in a child’s bunk bed and being woken up by a three-year-old at 6:00
A
.
M
., will probably be looked at as a mistake when my tongue is dragging on the floor tomorrow night.

My knees were begging for a rest today, but instead of listening to them, I took Hughie and little Mick to a nature fair for a couple of hours, walking around, looking at animals, buying a variety of foods of negligible nutritional value. Snow cones, cotton candy, popcorn—by the time we made it to McDonald’s, Chicken McNuggets seemed like health food. Then it was on to Noelle’s softball game, where I was nice enough to help the kids polish off their McFlurries. My weight was at 304 yesterday—down eleven pounds, but obviously not quite what I’d hoped for going into
One Night Stand.
I can’t help but feel that I’d have been far more successful with my weight issue if I hadn’t had the rug pulled out on me so many times over the last six weeks. The knee injury didn’t help either, as it caused me to alter work-outs and seek solace in ice cream and candy. Maybe I should have sought solace in Christy Canyon instead. Sure I would have been wracked with guilt, causing me to confess my transgression, leading to the loss of wife, children, and half of everything I own. But at least Christy would have constituted a noncaloric consumption. Unless, of course, there was some type of whipping cream or chocolate sauce involved.

Even this hardcore diary entry is suffering for my decision. Instead of completing my last offering in solitude and silence, there is a constant cacophony of confusion calling out to me, permeating even the inner sanctum of the Foley Christmas room. The dog is barking. The Belmont Stakes is on. Dewey was thoughtful enough to let a fart make its way into my world before he left the room.

We’ve got a leak in our pipes as well, the source of which, at this juncture, has yet to be detected by the plumber. Mickey wanted a flashlight so he could join the plumber. “I want to look like a plumber,” he said. “I want to look like a plumber.”

“Mickey, come here,” I said. Once the little guy was close enough, I pulled his sweatpants halfway down his butt. “There you go,” I said. “Go upstairs and tell Mommy that you look like a plumber now.” Which is exactly what he did, eliciting a big laugh from Mommy, and giving me temporary sanctuary from my concerns.

Little Mick’s personality is something of a sanctuary for me. I get the biggest kick out of the little guy, even if his recent (as in last five minutes) inaction during the Los Lonely Boys song “Heaven” has made me rethink my whole plans for tomorrow. Mickey, you see, is supposed to sing “Heaven” in the church choir tomorrow. As you already know from reading my May 14 diary entry, his performance in the choir has been a little less than clutch. Indeed, the chances of him choking under pressure again are almost guaranteed. Yeah, it will be fifteen kids and me up there again, except this time I’ve got a huge black eye, just in case the missing teeth and hair down to my shoulders didn’t make me conspicuous enough.

He’s laying on the floor now, listening to “Heaven” for the sixth time without the slightest hint of singing along, and has just asked me about Jesus’ exact positioning on the cross at the time of his crucifixion. “Were his arms like this [palms down] or like this [palms up] when he died?”

“I’m pretty sure they were up,” I told him.

“How come my teeth are so sharp?” he said.

The day before One Night Stand with little Hughie.

Courtesy of the Foley family.

I really don’t know if I’ll stick with plan A: church choir, Noelle’s softball game; or go with plan B: get a good night’s sleep in a hotel and prepare for the match without a single thought of my kids. Except I know that’s not an option, for if I miss out on church and softball, I’ll do nothing
but
think about my kids during my prematch preparation. Why am I forced to walk the earth with this conscience? Maybe, if there’s such a thing as reincarnation, I can come back down to earth and just trample all over people without giving a damn about anyone but myself. That would be awesome. That’s it—in my next life, I’m coming back as a conservative.

Hopefully, the poor quality of this final prematch entry will not be indicative of the match itself. I really would have liked to have sent all of you into
One Night Stand
with a provocative, heartfelt written account of my ambitions and fears surrounding this vital match in my career. But as this entire six-week experience has shown me, very little of what I counted on has turned out to be true.

I’ll check back in with you in a couple of days, following my match, and a trip to Six Flags Great Adventures, where my battles to fit into roller-coasters never intended for asses the likes of mine will make my struggles with Vince, the creative team, and the hardcore duo of Funk and Dreamer look woefully wimpy by comparison.

June 15, 2006
10:20
P
.
M
.—Long Island, NY

Dear Hardcore Diary,

I would have loved to have written this final entry in the luxury of some fine hotel room immediately following the climactic
One Night Stand
conclusion. Unfortunately the reality of WWE sometimes gets in the way of fairy-tale endings, and with
Raw
airing from Penn State University the next night, I was looking at a very anticlimactic five-hour postmatch drive.

I had made an allowance for a nice hotel in the Foley budget for this particular night, but as 3:00
A
.
M
. rolled around, the Budget Rest motel on Interstate 80 started looking really good. Sure, the mattress was a little lumpy and had probably been witness to sexual encounters by hundreds of travelers over the years, but nonetheless, this place was still way ahead of some of the dives I’d stayed in over the years. Besides, I was fairly sure there would be no parade of crack-heads streaming in to say hello.

I set a pillow up underneath my knees, to alleviate the stress that these types of motel beds tend to cause my back. I lay down, making sure to rest my upper back on the towel I’d placed on the bed. I had five large ugly gashes on that back, like a paw swipe from some angry bear, and I feared having a bedsheet of questionable cleanliness sticking to my wounds come morning.

No, this was not the way I’d pictured my postmatch routine. Usually, after a big match, I order room service and a Pay-Per-View movie, then lie in bed thinking about how great my performance was. Come to think of it, I think I skipped that part of the routine after my September 2005 Carlito match, as there was not a whole lot of greatness to digest.

But this routine was vastly different, not just because of my one-star accommodations, but because of the unique hardships my variety of hardcore injuries caused. Uh-oh, I was in trouble. I turned on the light and examined my hands. Underneath a swath of gauze, reminiscent of Boris Karloff in
The Mummy,
I had a litany of lacerations on both hands. I wished I could have put the problem off, but it was an increasingly urgent one, a problem that simply would not go away. A problem that was presenting itself at the most inappropriate time. Slowly, I made my way into the bathroom and looked into the mirror at the kaleidoscope of blues, purples, and yellows that Terry Funk had painted on my face with the painful, hardway brushstrokes of his left hand. I saw that face turn into a mask of confusion. How exactly, I wondered, was I going to wipe my ass?

Though I had long since abandoned the foolish notion that I was going to achieve some kind of wrestling immortality with this whole ECW thing, I still felt as if the ultimate chapter (this diary entry) could be either happy or sad, depending on the quality of our match. In the words of the poem “Invictus,” “I am the captain of my fate, and the master of my soul.” Despite the fact that my idea had been greatly altered, minimized, and, in terms of confidence in both Tommy Dreamer and Terry Funk, had suffered from an embarrassing case of premature evacuation, I still held out some hope that we could all have a hell of a match, and a great deal less hope that I could wrestle some type of admission of misjudgment out of Vince.

I made it to church to see little Mick really give “Heaven” his all…in rehearsal. Man, he was really working the fret board of his blue blow-up guitar, as if he was Angus Young hitting the “Stiff Upper Lip” solo. Then, come show time—nothing. He didn’t even make it to the front of the church, choosing instead to say, “I don’t really want to be here,” over and over, while sitting on Dad’s lap.

I made it to Noelle’s game too, to watch her squad lose a heartbreaker, 11–10 to the team coached by a guy who helps run the league. Actually, the game seemed like a tie, until the coach unveiled a secret error in the scorecard that allowed his team the victory.

This coach has the distinction of being the only guy in my youth league experience that I’ve questioned, raised my voice to, or yelled at. It’s just that some of these “win at all costs” parents strip all the fun out of the game. I remember limping onto the playing fields a couple of years ago, right after my
Backlash
injury, and watching in shock as this guy’s team stole base after base, including double steals, during the course of the game. I asked our coach if stealing was even allowed. “Yeah,” he said, “but so far the coaches have had a gentleman’s agreement that there would be no stealing.” This coach, however, didn’t want anything to do with this agreement. For his girls, it was off to the races.

I did a little research on the subject of stealing bases in ten-year-old girls’ softball games. I interviewed many people associated with the league, including the head of umpiring, and no one, it seemed, could recall a
single
instance where a girl had been thrown out stealing. Not a single one.

Why such a lopsided percentage of say 100 percent to 0 percent in the steals/caught stealing ratio? At Noelle’s next practice, I lined up the girls at home plate and asked each of them to attempt a couple of throws to second. Noelle came closest—a high arching lob that landed a good ten feet from the bag. The other girls did not fare quite so well. Some couldn’t reach the pitcher’s mound.

I called the head of the Little League (not the head of softball) and asked why a rule in which failure was virtually guaranteed would be allowed. “Well, we want to encourage the girls to practice skills that they’ll need as they head into middle school.”

I thought about that logic for a second, then said, “When they get to middle school, they will be mature enough to reach second base. Right now, you’re asking ten-year-olds to defend the indefensible. My experience shows me that when someone has no success whatsoever at a certain skill, they will simply stop trying.”

“That may be true,” the man said. “But at least the rule is fair to both teams.”

“Actually, it’s not,” I said. “It favors the better team.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Because the better team makes less mistakes, gives up fewer hits, and allows fewer base runners. A bad team may get an extra run or two a game out of a stealing rule, but a good team can just trot around the bases at will. This is what leads to the blowouts, the 16–2 games that make adults sick and make little girls cry. This is what leads to kids never wanting to play sports again.”

I hung up, having made my point, but I wasn’t satisfied. The image of that damn coach arguing every little call while his team treated the base paths like a track meet just wouldn’t go away. Now I know how Mets fans felt when Mike Piazza was behind the plate. I only wished I had the power to change things. Wait a second, I did have the power. The power of the pen.

A day later, I called the Little League office. I know that most of the coaches and volunteers involved in youth sports have only the best interests of the kids at heart—including the head of our league—but it bothered me to see one guy (the coach) affecting the lives of children and their parents with his self-imposed rule changes (he had made up the stealing rule at the younger age group) and petty, selfish attitude. So I invoked the power of the pen.

“Hi, Mr. Jones [not his real name], this is Mick Foley, the parent who talked to you yesterday. Good, thanks, how are you? Listen, I’m not sure if you’re aware of it, but I’ve written a couple of
New York Times
bestselling books, and therefore, when I expressed an interest in doing a story on fanaticism in youth sports,
Newsday
[a Long Island paper] was very interested. So I’d like to get some comments from you and Coach Steiger [not his real name] for my article.”

I never did write that article. I’m not sure I ever really had the intention. And Steiger’s team beat ours handily in the championship game. But seeing that loudmouthed coach sitting meekly on the bench, opening his mouth only to offer the mildest of encouragements, gave me a feeling of great pride and power.

“What’s wrong with Steiger?” I heard our team’s parents ask repetitively. “He’s just sitting there.” I shrugged my shoulders for a few innings, as if I too was baffled by the case of Steiger’s inaction, before finding myself unable to contain the story of my great power any longer.

“It was the pen that got him,” I said. “The power of the pen.” The confused faces of our team’s parents gave me the necessary excuse to unveil my literary past, and unearth such notable references as “towering number-one bestseller,” “a million copies sold,” and “wasn’t ghostwritten like the president’s was.” So from the jaws of softball defeat I was able to snatch moral and literary victory.

Now that I got that softball tangent out of the way, let me see if I can snatch wrestling victory out of Vince’s hungry jaws of defeat. Wow, what a weak segue, even by my limited literary standards.

Trying to make six people happy in a match like this can often be a difficult proposition. Participants often have their own agenda, their own interests to look out for down the road, and can therefore often be difficult to appease in such a wild setting. After all, everyone wants to get their stuff in. “Stuff” is not usually the word used in such a sentence, as most wrestlers opt for a more excretory euphemism to describe their repertoire of moves in one-word fashion.

We’re lucky. Everyone’s on the same page. Everyone feels screwed. Everyone feels betrayed by Vince and the creative team, and everyone wants to prove them wrong. There is only one way to do that—tear the house down! We’re all together on this one.

I had a few ideas for a basic structure of the match. Luckily, everyone agreed. One by one, the participants chipped in with ideas, some accepted, some discarded, but each one given in the best interest of the match. It may have been the easiest Pay-Per-View negotiating session I’d been a part of. We had a few great gimmicks (foreign objects, or “international objects,” as they were called in WCW in the name of political correctness), a few dramatic transitions, a few huge surprises, and one great finish, courtesy of Paul E. A few weeks earlier, I had expressed concern that involving Lita and Beulah in the finish might strike many (including me) as a cheap way out. What sense would it make to leave a bad taste in people’s mouths? With the news of a new plan, I am no longer concerned.

This is about the point where I will start using past and present writing tenses interchangeably. I apologize ahead of time for the grammatical incorrectness. But, in order to take you guys on a harrowing journey through the match, I have to feel like I’m living through it all over again. So screw the grammar, the past and present tenses, and the punctuation as well. And as far as Dreamer, Funk, and Beulah go, I’ve got three simple words: “Bring ’em on!” Oh, man, I hope the president didn’t read that.

It’s twenty minutes before the match, and I’m in an oddly mellow state. I can’t help but contrast this mellowness to my pre-
’Mania
mindset, where I had worked myself into a frenzy. Back on April 2, I had found a private corner of the building and rocked back and forth for minutes, listening to “Winter” by Tori Amos, a beautiful, haunting song that for some reason continues to give rise to goose bumps and thoughts of hardcore destruction, thirteen years after first being touched by it in Maxx Pain’s car on a long forgotten WCW road trip.

Kane later told me that he walked by and opted not to say hello, seeing the altered state I was in the process of entering.

But all the mental preparation in the world couldn’t hide the doubts, concerns, and even fears I faced heading into
’Mania.
I remember heading up to the gorilla position, mere minutes—two or three—before match time. I saw Edge and Lita and, without even thinking about my words, asked them if they would say a prayer with me before we went out there. A prayer for safety, not for performance, although I was so scared that I was willing to take whatever the big guy was willing to give me.

Words are like that sometimes—they just kind of sneak out. Although the last time I remember being that surprised by my own words was back in 1987, on one of my weekly 800-mile round trips from college to Dominic DeNuccis’s wrestling school, when I asked a hitchhiker if she would touch me in a not so innocent way while her boyfriend slept in the backseat. Wow, where did that come from? I swear, I was a really shy kid back then.

The poor woman didn’t really know what to say. Keep in mind that I’d been very polite about the idea, and that it was presented as a question/suggestion so that there was no need for fear, or bold action, like slashing me with a hidden blade, or jumping out of a moving car. In an odd way, she seemed genuinely flattered by the remark. Finally, she said, “I’d like to, but it would be kind of disrespectful to my boyfriend.”

“How long have you two been together?” I asked.

“We met earlier today.”

About an hour later, the long-term boyfriend woke up and, yawning, asked a question from his prone position on the cracked burgundy interior of the Ford Fairmount’s backseat. The woman turned in her seat to face him and, in the process of doing so, grabbed a hearty handful of the future hardcore legend’s most private parts.

A few minutes later, I dropped them off. She said good-bye with a wink and a sly little smile that I interpreted as a victory of sorts. Sure, as far as victories go, it was devious, and morally bankrupt, but at that point in my life, I was willing to take victories wherever I could find them.

An unforeseen factor almost makes a most unfortunate mark on our match. Dreamer reported a sense of queasiness and gastric pains an hour or so before the match. Unbeknownst to me, my partner Edge was almost indisposed for his entrance music, having sought emergency relief in the Hammerstein Ballroom restroom. A day later, following
Raw
at Penn State University, I fall victim to some sort of intestinal virus—severe enough to keep me bedridden for three full days.