Authors: Mick Foley
With the airing of my World Wrestling Federation matches, things began to change socially for me also. Suddenly, I was on TV and girls were coming out of the woodwork to talk to me when I went out. After a few minutes of small talk, the conversation would inevitably end up the same, with the girl saying, “I hear you wrestle,” and me saying, “How did you know?” Every last time, the answer would be the same-“Because my boyfriend told me,” and then she’d point to some fraternity guy standing behind a wooden beam, giving me a big thumbs-up. I can honestly say that no girl I ever met in college was attracted to me because I was a wrestler. Or if they were, maybe they were just doing a good job of hiding it from me. Actually, there was not a whole lot of time for socializing anyway, because in my senior year, a time that most college guys are having the time of their lives, I spent twenty-eight out of thirty-two weekends in Freedom, Pennsylvania, or whatever small town I happened to be wrestling in. And believe me, I wrestled in some small ones.
Maybe the low point of my career was our big event in Polka, West Virginia, at the Polka High School, home of the Polka Dots. Yes, the team’s name was the Dots. Now that must have sent a shiver down the spines of countless opponents. The trip started out in fine form, with me, Troy, Brian, and Dominic all in the same car, having a jolly good time. Actually, a lot of the times were good ones back then, despite the fact that I was beaten up, financially destitute, and couldn’t get laid if I was in a women’s prison with a fistful of weekend passes. There was just an innocence to it then, because my motives were so pure. I loved wrestling, plain and simple. Now, with wrestling being hotter than it’s ever been, I tend to look at it as a business and don’t want to risk too much on any given night-whereas back in those days, I’d put it all on the line no matter what the attendance was. Polka, however, was pushing it.
We got to the building, and there were only two cars and a ring truck there. “Maybe we’re early,” I cheerfully said to Brian, who, with several years under his belt, knew better. “Cactus, think of this as a practice session that you will make $10 for.” In Polka, West Virginia, in front of exactly twenty-six people (I know because I counted them when I was out there), Troy and I had a full dress rehearsal and gave the people who were dumb/lucky enough to be there a match that was probably better than half the stuff that’s currently on WCW Pay-Per View. At that time, I was just starting to be a high-impact risk taker, and I took risks on that empty gym floor that I won’t take on Raw tapings these days.
We drove back 200 miles to Freedom, elated from the match instead of deflated from the bomb scare (poorly attended match) in Polka. I spent my $10 payoff at a RAX restaurant, and there wasn’t a sour face at the table. Even Dominic was happy, looking at “his boys.”
Somewhere around this time, Dominic pulled me aside at the gym in Freedom. “How long you been coming here?” he wanted to know.
“I don’t know,” I began before adding, “I guess about nine months.”
“And all this time you been paying me, right?” he added in what seemed like a strange tone of voice. I didn’t know where he was coming from, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. Dominic then eased my mind. “I tella you what-from nowa on, you don’t pay me. What you have done take a ball about this big [basketball size] and you don’t need to pay me anymore.” So for the next year, I went to Dominic’s free of charge. I learned and improved a great deal that year.
I did a few more Federation shows in the next few months, but stopped as soon as I sensed the slightest recognition from the fans. I didn’t want to be the next Israel Matia, and so I politely declined the next invitation I received. A month later, I was given the chance to indirectly work for Bill Watts, whose MidSouth territory was now attempting to expand nationally. Watts was known in the industry as one of the founding fathers of exciting television. While Vince McMahon’s Federation had expanded nationally by virtue of great marketing and the image of sports-entertainment, Watts had depended on a more physical style and an episodic TV format. Unfortunately, Watts’s territory of Louisiana, Oklahoma, and parts of various MidSouth states had felt the financial sting of the oil business drying up, and as a result, he was looking elsewhere to run his territory. He already had TV syndication in Pittsburgh, Ohio, and West Virginia, and he was using Dominic’s shows as a litmus test for future expansion.
The four shows would feature UWF (Watts had changed to Universal Wrestling Federation so as not to be stigmatized as a Southern group) stars Terry Taylor, Buddy Roberts, Eddie Gilbert, Missy Hyatt, Chris Adams, Dark Journey, and the Missing Link, and talent from DeNucci’s school. I drove with Troy along 150 miles of back roads to get to Hundred, West Virginia. The roads were so desolate that we envisioned another Polka on our hands as we weaved in and out of dense mountains. When we got to Hundred, we were shocked. The tiny high school gym was packed with 1,000 screaming fans, and we were on first, so I headed for the dressing room to take a quick Snow and get dressed for my match.
Apparently, Hundred, West Virginia didn’t believe in pooping in peace, as the toilets were unsheltered in what seemed to be the middle of the dressing room. It was on this rather revealing bowl that I met Eddie Gilbert, who would go on to be one of my best opponents, and his wife, Missy Hyatt, who at that time I thought was the most beautiful woman in the world. I quickly wiped my Sarven (Al’s real name) and once dressed, proceeded to tear the house down with Troy, who by this time was wrestling as Troy Orndorff, supposedly the nephew of World Wrestling Federation superstar Paul Orndorff.
The next day, several of the UWF wrestlers were raving about the show. Terry Taylor told me that I would make a great “middle heel” in the UWF, and Buddy Roberts, in his own inimitable way, rasped, “You might have a future in this business.” Of all the comments, though, Dominic’s praise meant the most. After ridiculing Tony Nardo and Crusher Klebanski for having a match that was “the absolute drizzling shit,” he pointed to me and said, “Now Mickey and Troy can take that match and go anywhere in the world with it.” It was the biggest compliment I had ever received from that som un a bitch Dominic, and it meant a lot to me.
The next few nights with Troy were so impressive that I was matched up with Chris Adams, one of the UWF’s top stars, on the final night. Apparently, this matchup had come at the request of Watts himself, to further verify all the positive things he’d been hearing. The Adams match in Ohio was the highlight of my career until that point. I’ve been in high school gyms packed with 1,500 rabid fans and their support for the English Gentleman was strong. So strong that their cheering and stomping actually made my legs weak as I held Adams from behind in a rear chinlock. The Adams match was my first real hands-on lesson in ring psychology, and I analyzed it in my head for days to learn just why the crowd was so tuned in. I had been told several times, but I had no real way of understanding that in pro wrestling, it’s not just what you do that matters, but when you do it and why. From then on, when “The Ride” boomed over my “top of the line” speakers in my “bottom of the line” car, I visualized not just what great moves I would do, but also when and why.
If January in Ohio had made me high, March in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, brought me as low as I’ve ever felt in my career, as I saw my big chance practically blow up in my face. My emotions were already jumpy when I found out that Bill Watts had sold the UWF to Jim Crockett, who owned the NWA (National Wrestling Alliance), the company that would later be sold to Ted Turner to create WCW. I was convinced by DeNucci, however, that Crockett was intent on keeping the two companies as entirely different entities in order to do a Super Bowl of Wrestling-type supercard. As it turned out, Crockett took all the top stars for his own NWA, and pretty much killed off the UWF, but all of that was unknown to us on that dreary March 1987 evening. What was known was that Troy was on his way to the UWF as Shane Douglas and that the company was high on me for a good spot once I graduated college two months later. I really felt like this show in Johnstown was a final tryout for me, and my opponent for the night was Sam Houston.
Sam was the half-brother of Jake Roberts, and the son of former wrestler Grizzly Smith, and a hell of a young talent. He was skinny as a rail, but the chicks seemed to dig his youthful good looks. I knew I was in a separate locker room from Sam and couldn’t even say hello, which was the way Bill Watts always wanted it, so I asked Michael Hayes for a little information on Sam. “What does he like to do?” I asked the leader of the Freebirds, who informed me “since Sam is small, he likes to fight from underneath-maybe out of a bear hug.” I thanked Hayes for his opinion and imagined all the sympathy that would be pouring down on Sam when I wrapped my seventeen-inch pythons around his tiny waist.
The crowd wasn’t exactly what Dominic had been hoping for, but they were enthusiastic and were getting quite into my contest with Sam, which was going very well. Sam was a natural and we had good chemistry, right until I shot him into the ropes for my dreaded bear hug, and I saw my career fall apart two seconds later.
As I was shooting him off, he said three words that baffle me even to this day-“Watch the elbow.” I am as confused about it today as I was twelve years ago. “Watch the elbow”? What does that mean? Watch it do what? Do I duck it? Do I take it? I really didn’t know, but any answer would have been better than the one I came up with. Sam came bounding off the ropes full speed, and I saw him in the opening stages of what certainly looked to be a flying elbow off the ropes. I had every intention of taking it, and making Sam look like a million bucks in the process. Sam certainly did come at me with a big elbow, and I went down like I’d been shot, but immediately knew that I had screwed up worse than I’d ever messed up before. The elbow had missed me by at least two feet, and I had gone down-not just gone down but flown off my feet. I wanted to crawl in a hole-I hadn’t been so embarrassed since my mother walked in on me when I was fourteen and caught me playing Coleco electronic football nude. At least then, I’d had an alibi. Barbara Mandrell’s “If Loving You is Wrong (I Don’t Want to Be Right)” was on the radio, and I’d quickly slipped off my gray corduroys. Barbara’s wholesome sexiness always turned me on, but before I could get to know my body a little better, I’d seen the game, which was the hottest thing in school, sitting on my desk. My competitive spirit had won out over my primal urges, and I was in the middle of a hell of a game-the door opened and … I took a huge bump off of Sam Houston’s invisible elbow.
At least there had only been one witness to the unique Coleco game. Two thousand people had witnessed my Johnstown blunder, and their laughter had let me know that I wasn’t going to get a free pass on this one. I knew enough to get up immediately and proceeded to get some good heat on Sam. We finished our match, but I knew I’d lost my prospective job. Sometimes, all it takes is one big mistake for a hot prospect to be written off completely, and I’d just made it. Shane Douglas was going to the UWF, but his buddy Cactus Jack was going back to the drawing board.
That night, I sat almost comatose at a booth in the lounge of the Plaza Hotel in Pittsburgh. The other guys from Dominic’s school tried to cheer me up, but it was no use. Brian Hildebrand did come close with one story, however. “There was a guy in a battle royal in the seventies who was one of the last three left,” Brian began. “After he eliminated the third guy, he turned to the crowd with his arms in the air. A fan threw a box of popcorn at him which hit him in the head. This guy thought it was his opponent, and he took a huge bump over the top rope to end the match. You see, Mick, what you did tonight wasn’t so bad.”
“Well, yeah, that was pretty bad,” I had to admit, “but let me ask you this-was the guy’s career riding on that match?” Brian had to admit that it wasn’t. “Mine was,” I said sadly. “And I blew it.”
Yes, I had blown it, but life went on, and I found myself faced with a heck of an opportunity as graduation closed in. Dominic had a spot open on a trip to West Africa one week after I graduated. Burkina Faso was a third-world country that had previously been known as Upper Volta of Upper and Lower Volta fame, and it was trying to change its image. The tour was actually booked through a friend of the country’s president, Thomas Sankora, who had already done quite a bit to improve his impoverished country. Professional wrestling was one of many things that summer, including a concert by Kool and the Gang and an appearance by Muhammad Ali, that were to be provided to entertain the citizens of Burkina. Because the tour was guaranteed by the government, we were to be paid $1,500 a week each for the two-week trip. I was overjoyed. While it may not have been the UWF, three grand was a lot of money for someone just out of college-in actuality, it was more money than I’d made in my two years in the business.
We touched down in the Ivory Coast, and I was immediately stunned by the poverty. On the outskirts of the city of Abidjan, most people didn’t even live in houses-they lived in huts made of earth and twigs. As we walked along the streets, foul smelling human waste ran through the streets in a sewage system that was more primitive than I could have imagined. The next day, we flew to the swinging city of Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, where conditions were even worse. President Sankora had attempted to cut down on the amount of panhandling in the country by teaching the locals various crafts. As a result, Burkina crafts were everywhere as we made our way by bus to the hotel that we were told was the best the country had to offer, but that looked suspiciously like a Days Inn in Cleveland. Actually, it wasn’t too bad, and it even had a nice pool where we spent several hours a day swimming during the three days leading up to our first big show at the national soccer stadium.
It was at this pool that we spied Dave Klebanski, slathering on baby oil while sitting in his chair in the oppressive 110-degree weather. “Dave, what are you doing,” I tried to warn him, “don’t you know that baby oil will make you burn?”