Authors: Mick Foley
I wonder how these people live with themselves now as senior citizens, knowing that there are people their age walking around with hollow sockets because of a stupid, cruel, and senseless code of manhood that they lived by decades earlier. An old episode of Hawaii Five-0 that has stuck in my mind for almost thirty years makes me think of these pathetic wrestlers. In the episode, a tough military man admits to raping a girl, even though his sexual impotence makes the admission impossible to believe. McGarrett asks the man why he would be willing to risk a twenty-year sentence for a crime he didn’t commit. “I’d risk my whole life,” the tough guy boldly states, “to keep the rest of the guys from finding out I wasn’t a man.”
“A man?” a flabbergasted McGarrett shouts. “Do you know what it really means to be a man! You haven’t a clue, you haven’t a CLUE! Danna, get him out of here!” When it comes to being a man, sadly, a lot of wrestlers, both past and present, haven’t a clue either.
Thankfully, DeNucci subscribed to neither theory. He neither took my money selfishly nor tried to make an example of me. Yes, he made me respect the business, and yes, he put me in some holds that were sheer torture, but he never tried to prove himself by abusing me or anyone else. I once heard it said that “there is no such thing as a bad student, only a bad teacher.” I’m not sure if that’s always the case, but I do know that it was Dominic’s patience and skill as a teacher that turned me into such a good student.
In addition to my wrestling studies, I was also turning into quite a scholar at Cortland. Wrestling seemed to give me a focus, and this focus helped me achieve more scholastically than I ever thought possible. My projects in radio and television production, which I had decided to major in, were class favorites, and upon graduation, I was even awarded the Anne Allen Award for the outstanding student in my major. So what if there were only ten students in my major, and the rest of the school were gym teachers-the award was mine, mine, all mine.
One of these school projects nearly cost me one of my most valued friendships. I was doing my documentary project along with a girl named Debbie James, who I’d been friends with since my freshman year. Debbie agreed to accompany me to Pittsburgh for a weekend so that we could do our documentary on DeNucci’s school. Now, I feel that my Freedom travels taught me a lot of lessons about life, but unfortunately, these lessons did not include how to treat a woman on the road. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t mean or abusive, but when it came time to sleep on Friday night, she was more than a little surprised to find that a motel didn’t fit into my plans. Grudgingly, she went along with my routine (it was spring, so the weather was no problem) but it was several days before she spoke to me again. “Mickey, you made me sleep in a car,” was her simple rationale for the silent treatment, when she finally did decide to speak. Somehow, we were able to turn out a great documentary that looked close to professional quality, and she was able to turn out a few kids who are now big Mankind fans. I can’t wait until they get old enough to learn what a cheap bastard their hero was.
After three months at DeNucci’s, I arrived back in Cortland on a Sunday night to a rude welcoming from Jake and Steve. “We need to talk to you” they said.
“What is it?” I innocently wanted to know.
“You say you have a girlfriend,” Steve said, as the interrogation got under way.
“Yeah, so what,” I was quick to say.
“Well,” Jake interjected, “you never call her and she never calls you. You leave every Friday and you come home every Sunday. You smell like shit, and your hair is all plastered to your head. You have sleeping bags in your car, and there are food wrappers everywhere. You have about ten jars of peanut butter in your car, and you have a black eye every other week.”
“So what,” I countered, “what are you trying to say?”
Steve jumped in and came right out with the wicked accusation: “We think you’re wrestling.”
“No, I wish I was, but I’m not,” I lied as I headed up the stairs.
“This isn’t over, Rich [he’d been calling me that ever since the “Frank” incident], not by a long shot. I know you’re wrestling, Rich, I know you’re wrestling!”
I hated to lie, especially to guys that I spent so much time with. But I honestly felt that wrestling was something I wanted to keep just to myself-at least until I reached my goal. And my goal at that time was simple. It wasn’t to be the World Wrestling Federation champ, or to be the King of the Death Match, or to be the tag champs, or even to be a sports-entertainer. I simply wanted to have a pro match and then I would consider myself a success. As school came to an end in May I was getting close to reaching my goal.
In the second week of June 1996, I left a summer school session in Cortland, where I caught up on all my credits and then officially moved to Pittsburgh for the summer. I really didn’t know if the Fairmont could withstand those 1,000-mile round trips. Seventy thousand miles later, when the car finally died, I realized that I was wrong. I got into Emsworth, Pennsylvania, where Rob Betcher had set up a place for me to live with his grandmother, a relationship that almost immediately went sour.
Mrs. Betcher lived in a tiny house on a tiny street. Pittsburgh was in the middle of a heat wave, and the little Betcher house didn’t have air conditioning. And I didn’t have a room, so I slept on the pullout couch in the living room. As a result, Mrs. Betcher, who like many elderly people was an early riser, was treated to a regular morning view of my hot, sweaty, twenty-year-old body sprawled in her living room, attired in only my Fruit of the Looms. I guess even at 210 pounds (which I was down to due to a lack of food in my budget), I had a body that spanned all generations in its ability to turn off the female gender.
A few days later, a professional football player died of a drug overdose, which, combined with the oil spill the size of a nickel I left on her driveway, spelled trouble. I guess one of her friends got into her ear and convinced her that the football OD meant all athletes, including me, were drug users. Apparently, she felt strong enough about it to wake me up out of a near naked sleep to request my immediate departure from her humble abode. “Ricky [yes, even older women forgot my name], you’ve got to go right now,” she yelled, as she shook a feather duster for emphasis. Sadly, I left the little house, and went to the University of Pittsburgh, where for $25 a week I sublet a room in a house with two college students that I got along fine with. When I got to Clarksburg, West Virginia, on June 24, for my first battle royal (where all the guys are in the ring at the same time), I was ready.
I was feeling cool and confident when I got to Clarksburg. After all, how difficult could a battle royal be? I had seen them as a fan and also sat ringside at Tommy Dee’s shows, so I knew that there wasn’t a whole lot to them. This, I felt, would be a great way to get my feet wet, without actually having to dive all the way in. Suddenly, Dominic appeared, and in one quick sentence, shot down my cool and confidence and my whole “feet wet” strategy. I was going to wrestle in a singles match. “Mickey, you a gonna wrestle Kurtains [Kurt Kaufman] in the second match tonight,” he informed me. “And I want to see some wrestling, no punch kick.”
Man, this was nerve-wracking. To be in the prestigious Clarksburg Armory alongside such wrestling luminaries as Jerry “the Wanderer” Macintyre, Bill Berger, Lord Zolton, Buddy Donovan, and Irish Mike McGhee was all I could have ever hoped for. I sought out ring announcer Hank Hudson to give him my statistics. “You’re one of DeNucci’s students, aren’t you?” the velvet-tongued Hudson asked.
“Yes, Mr. Hudson, I am,” I replied.
“Okay, what’s your name?” Hudson inquired.
That was a tough one. I wanted to be Dude Love, but I knew that I didn’t have the experience or the talent to be the Dude just yet. Maybe in another six months. In the meantime, I needed another name while I developed the poise to be the Dude. I thought back to a fantasy wrestling game that I had ordered a few years earlier, in which I had been Mick “Big Train” Foley, and my dad had been Cactus Jack.
The Cactus Jack name had come up as a joke when I asked Danny Zucker why everyone seemed to be nervous when they came over to my house. “Well,” Zuck had said, “we’re afraid to do anything wrong when your dad’s around.”
“Zuck, don’t be ridiculous,” I informed the former Grand Lizard, “my dad is nothing like that when he’s home. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t even want to be called Dr. Foley at home-he wants to be called Cactus Jack.” This was a complete lie that was told in the hope of Danny coming over and saying, “What’s up, Cactus Jack?” to my unsuspecting father, who would no doubt have put his papers down long enough to give Zuck a look as if he’d just farted in church.
So when Hank asked me my name, “Cactus Jack” was the answer that came out. “Where are you from, Cactus Jack?” the veteran ring announcer/postal worker asked next.
“Urn, urn, Bloomington, Indiana,” came my weak reply.
Hudson quickly showed why he earned the big bucks by responding, “I don’t think there’s any cactuses in Indiana, what about Arizona?”
“Okay,” I agreed, “is Tucson, Arizona, good?”
Now Tucson would have been just fine, but not to a man like Hank Hudson, whose postal training had exposed him to every hometown under the sun. “Isn’t there a Truth or Consequences in Arizona?” Hank asked my blank face. “Oh no,” he corrected himself, “that’s Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.”
The hometown fit like the pants of a man with five penises-like a glove. I liked the hometown so much that I kept it for the next twelve years. I kept the Cactus Jack thing longer than expected, too.
I had a name and a hometown-now I just needed to wrestle. I was lucky enough to be wrestling against the grizzled two-match veteran Kaufman, whose “Don’t worry kid, I’ll lead you through it” did little to soothe my nerves. Fortunately, I remembered a series of moves that we had done at DeNucci’s gym earlier, and asked him if we could try the “leapfrog dropkick thing” we were working on earlier.
“Sure, kid,” said the battle-tested Kaufman with a Backwoods stogie clenched between his teeth. “No problem.”
Despite Kurt’s reassurances, there was indeed a problem. A leapfrog, you see, can be done two different ways. In one way the man in the middle of the ring leapfrogs over a charging opponent. In the other, the man in the middle bends down for a backdrop and the charging opponent does the leapfrog over him. Can you see where this is headed? Midway through the match, I shot Kurt into the ropes and bent over for the backdrop, expecting a leapfrog. For his part, Kurt came charging off the ropes with his head down, expecting my jumping skills to carry me over him. Klong! We smacked our heads together like two rams performing a mating ritual. The force of the collision sent both of us on our asses, as the audience both gasped and laughed at the sick sound of our skulls cracking together. I saw stars, but also saw red. “Come on Kurt,” I pleaded. “Let’s do the leapfrog.” Another whip, two more heads going down, and klong, an exact repeat of our previous debacle. Luckily, I don’t remember the rest of the match, although whether it was due to the injury or selective memory I’m not certain. I do know that I lost the match, and that the show in Clarksburg was the first day that I met Brian Hildebrand.
Brian was a manager that night, although of whom, I can’t recollect. At one time or another, Brian managed everybody in the West Virginia-Ohio- Western Pennsylvania area. I believe the show in Clarksburg was his final one as Heimi Schwartz, as he has spent the last thirteen years as Marc Curtis. When he came to DeNucci’s the next day, it was obvious that he was far more than just a manager-at 140 pounds, he was one of the most well-rounded wrestlers I had ever seen. Brian had the ability to work any style, from brawling to technical to high flying. He was studying Japanese tapes and attempting their moves long before I knew such things existed. If he’d been fifty pounds heavier, he would have been a big star in the business, but his rapid metabolism never allowed him to put on weight. As a result, he went into managing as a second choice, and as a result, became my second manager, after the Grand Lizard.
I often wondered why Brian came to DeNucci’s at all, as after the Clarksburg show, he became a regular for the rest of the gym’s existence. “How much better does he need to be,” I thought, “especially when he’s a manager!” The truth is, Brian was simply out there because he loved this business more than anyone I have ever met, and he would do anything to be around it. His presence at Dominic’s was like having another teacher there, and because he was my manager for the next two years, I was privy to an expert’s analysis of my match immediately. I have since had the benefit of being managed by some very good people, many of whom have been national stars, and I can honestly say that none of them knew or loved wrestling like Brian did. His knowledge and presence helped me greatly and his friendship and support have been among the most prized possessions in my life.
Over the summer of 1986, I also began developing a strong friendship with Troy Martin. DeNucci now had several students, and many of them seemed to think that they would learn by proxy-as if all that was required was their presence in the gym to improve. Getting in the ring, it sometimes seemed, was not a prerequisite for success. For some of them, DeNucci’s became a place to joke around. For me and Troy, who had made something of a pact that summer, the gym became a place to make our dreams come true. By the time the summer ended, I not only had a partner to develop moves and matches with, I also had a place to stay every Saturday. Friday was still car night, because I could never guarantee my arrival, but Troy and his mom proceeded to house me almost every Saturday after that. As the summer came to a close, I was actually starting to show some potential, and was elated to get a mid-August call from DeNucci.
“Vince needs some boys to do the TV,” DeNucci’s unmistakable voice informed me. “Do you want to do?” I was dumbfounded. On one hand, I knew that being an extra, or a “job guy” (body to be thrown around), for the World Wrestling Federation was great exposure. On the other hand, I knew that performers were easily typecast in their role of loser, and once in it might be unable to get out. I know that I remember perennial World Wrestling Federation losers like Israel Matia, Gino Corabella, Ken Jugan, Mike Shape, Mac Rivera, S.D. Jones, and Steve Lombardi every bit as well as the guys who defeated them. Still, the World Wrestling Federation was on a roll, and I, along with Troy, Tony Nardo, Kurt Kaufman, and trainee Ray Miller, shuffled off to Providence and Hartford for a chance in the big leagues. It turned out to be a rude awakening.