Authors: Mick Foley
I lay there for about forty minutes, while we waited for an ambulance. Now, a lot of fans speculated that I wasn’t as hurt as I acted, and to some extent, that was true. I probably could have moved, but the longer I lay there with the other wrestlers all around me, the more I thought I really was in trouble. After a few minutes, I became scared to even try to move my hand and foot. “How are you doing, you sexy thing?” asked Scorpio, in an attempt to get me to laugh. “Scarp,” I said softly, “I can’t move my foot.”
“Sorry,” replied Too Cold.
The ambulance finally arrived, and I was put on a stretcher. Several people in the audience were crying. I was placed in the ambulance, and of all people, Jesse Ventura came along for the ride. As the ambulance pulled away, with sirens wailing, the show faded to black. It was great drama. Was it staged? Yes, but in many ways it was real nonetheless.
I was wheeled into the hospital, and while strapped to the gurney, I was asked by an especially sensitive fan if I would pose for a picture with her. Upon admission, I was checked out thoroughly, given a battery of tests, including a CAT scan that revealed-you guessed it-a concussion. X-rays were taken and, fortunately, revealed no fractures. The doctor informed me that I had suffered a severe blow to the back of my head, which had likely caused my brain to more or less “short circuit,” causing the temporary loss of sensation in my extremities. I was given a list of things to do and not to do, and was released at about 1 A.M. Janie Engle, a WCW front office employee, drove me home. I was groggy, but all things considered, I felt pretty fortunate. In reality, Vader had actually taken care of me pretty well. He had followed through with me, and released me low, to ensure a safer landing. If it had been a typical Vader powerbomb, things might have been a lot worse. “Pull over please,” I asked Janie, about a mile or two from my house. I proceeded to bolt out of the car and left remnants of my prematch meal all over Highway 575.
When I got home, Colette met me at the door and gave me a long embrace. I went upstairs and kissed my sleeping little buddy, then went into our bedroom, where against doctor’s orders, I fell asleep myself. I awoke to the ringing of the phone. “I just called to check on you,” said a weathered, slightly inebriated voice on the phone. It was Handsome Harley.
“Do you think it went okay?” I asked.
Harley paused and softly (for Harley that is) said, “Cactus, it couldn’t have gone any better if we’d done it a hundred times.” He spoke one more time before he hung up. “You’re the new Harley Race, kid.” That was the greatest compliment I have ever received.
I convalesced at home, while a pair of writers prepared an elaborate story line that would air throughout my twelve-week absence. Even though I would be off the road for four months, I would be back for television tapings after three. I really felt like I was on top of the world; I could finally spend quality time with my son and wife, who was now one month pregnant with our second child. And I had just come out in one piece from a daring angle, which would no doubt set the box office on fire when I returned. I was confident that when my contract rolled around in four months I would be well compensated for all my sacrifices. Everything was going to be just fine for the Foleys-right? Come on now, this is WCW we’re talking about here, a company that could screw up a wet dream. Sacrifice? Dedication? Loyalty? They were seemingly foreign words to my employers. Of course they’d screw it up. One phone call saw to that.
“Hello, Cactus, this is Tony Schiavone calling. How are ya feeling?”
“Not too bad, Tony, what’s going on?” “Well, I wanted to talk to you about your vignettes.”
“How are they? I can’t wait to see what they come up with.”
“Well, one of the things that we’ve decided is that there’s got to be some humor in them.”
“Tony, to tell you the truth, I don’t see anything funny about the whole situation. I mean, head injuries aren’t usually a real comedic thing.”
“I understand that, it’s just that we feel we can’t air twelve weeks of serious vignettes-it will turn people off.”
“Tony, the vignettes are only a couple of minutes long each, surely you guys can put some humor somewhere else in the show.”
“I’m sorry, Cactus, we talked about it, and we decided that this would be best. Janie will drive by later and give you a script.”
After reading the script, I felt as if they had reached out with a steel-toed boot and kicked me, as DeNucci might say, “right in the ball.” I saw my career and pay raise fading away before my eyes. In this script, I was to portray Cactus Jack as an escaped mental patient, who, believing himself to be a veteran sailor, leads a group of homeless people to a better sense of purpose and self-respect. Wow! There was even a scene where a reporter attempts in vain to get information from Colette as to my whereabouts, while Dewey causes havoc in the background. Unfortunately, Colette was not even allowed to play herself, because as Dusty put it, “We don’t think your wife ought to be so attractive.” So a dumpy woman was brought on to portray my wife, a small piece of casting buffoonery that bothered Colette for months. Even today, when many people think of Mick Foley’s wife, they envision the dumpy chick with the bad clothes and the droopy boobs (not that there’s anything wrong with that) instead of the white-hot chick who fell so hard for her battle-scarred ring warrior.
I thought that this thing had failure written all over it. I sensed that Eric Bischoff had some reservations about it, even though he had given the go-ahead to three days of filming for the vignettes. I was not needed for the first two vignettes, which consisted of a visit to the mental hospital, and the aforementioned visit with the fictitious Colette. I called director Neil Pruitt, who was a friend of mine, and asked him how it went. Now usually a director, or artist of any kind, is the first person to stand behind his work. I was expecting Neil to say, “Ohman, it’s great,” or, “Wait till you see this-you’ll love it.” Instead his stammered answer was slow in coming. “Well,” Neil said, “it’s got a little more humor in it than I would like.”
“Can you show it to me?” I asked, with a knot tightening in my stomach.
“I’ll be right over,” said Pruitt.
I slipped the tape in the VCR and within two minutes, saw all my aspirations crumble before me like the cookies in Diamond Dallas’s bed. I could feel my figurative ball swelling to grapefruit-size proportions from the blow of the steel-toed boot entitled “Lost in Cleveland.” In the vignette, a tabloid-like female television reporter seeks clues to find the missing Cactus Jack at the mental hospital he has escaped from. A helpful patient with a blanket folded over his lap, eating Cheez Doodles with a toothpick, and eerily reminiscent of Dustin Hoffman’s idiot savant in Rain Man, says, “Jack, over there, yeah, Jack’s definitely over there.” Running over to a man shooting baskets at a tiny basketball hoop, the reporter yells, “Jack, Jack, is that you, Jack,” causing a man to turn around and say in a terrible Nicholson impression (hey, I’m not making this stuff up), “How’s it going, nursery baby?” Upset at this cruel hand that fate had dealt her, the reporter whines that she’ll never find Jack. “Jack?” asks the Hoffman character. “Cleveland, yeah, Jack’s in Cleveland, definitely Cleveland.”
I lay down and waited for the swelling to dissipate. I wondered how this could have happened. It was as if a bunch of guys had gathered in a board room and said, “Okay, gentlemen, what we’ve got here is an angle that people believe in, a wrestler who was willing to put his life on the line, and a feud that’s going to draw a ton of money. Now tell me, what can we do about this nagging problem? I know, let’s make the fans feel like idiots for ever believing in anything we did. That way, they’ll be cynical and uncaring the next time we try to do an exciting angle on television. As for that wrestler guy, well, we’ll show him. We’ll make him curse the day he ever sacrificed his body for this company. Let’s make him look like a complete nincompoop. Oh, we’ll show him. Head bouncing off the concrete and all that concussion business. We’ll make a farce out of him, that’s what we’ll do. Gentlemen, you have my word that as long as I’m in charge, this company will never, and I do mean NEVER, make a dime. Meeting adjourned.”
I couldn’t envision this stinker ever finishing its twelve-week run. What I could envision was the plug being pulled after about three weeks, and with WCW doing its “the fans won’t know-we’ll just pretend it never happened” routine, I’d be in worse career jeopardy than when I’d started this whole angle. Fortunately, I had an ace up my sleeve. Well, not an ace, exactly-it was more like a ligament. It wasn’t up my sleeve, either, it was in my knee, and it had been torn some four months earlier during a match with Ricky Steamboat. I figured a ligament replacement operation would give me my four months off, guaranteed.
“Dusty,” I said, in a call to the WCW offices. “Oh yeah, man, I love them, Dream,” I lied, hoping that the phone wasn’t magically connected to a polygraph machine that would have surely been dancing off the charts. “Yeah, while these things are running, I was thinking about having a little knee surgery done. What do you think?” I had my fingers crossed. “I can. Oh great, yeah, don’t worry, I’ll be able to shoot the vignettes-I’ve still got two weeks, right? Oh yeah, I saw it. Loved it. Especially the Nicholson imitation. Okay, thanks, Dusty. Bye.”
On May 12, 1993, I had my right posterior cruciate ligament replaced with a cadaver’s patella tendon. Sure enough, about eight weeks later, Eric Bischoff pulled the plug on “Lost in Cleveland.” It was a mercy killing.
Actually, I don’t mean to be so hard on Dusty-it wasn’t his fault. Like me, Dusty compared a lot of his ideas to movie scenarios, and I think his real career goal was to direct in Hollywood. The idea could have worked, but this was WCW’s first attempt at using writers, and they let the writers take the whole thing in a ridiculous direction. Hey, I wanted to believe in the project too, especially when I showed up on the set and saw the elaborate scenery, props, and hordes of extras. Still, all the same, if you do have a copy of these rare sketches, resist the urge to watch them, even if the idea of a clean-shaven, eyebrowless Cactus Jack talking about mizzenmasts and nor’easters does turn you on. Instead, please, if you have any respect for me at all, burn it now, to preserve the sanctity of my reputation for future generations.
I tried to put the whole Cleveland thing behind me and just enjoy the time at home. I was scheduled to come back at the September Clash of the Champions, and in the meantime, I rehabbed my knee with diligence for my showdown in late October with Vader. I know most people don’t think of Cactus Jack or Mankind as training hard for anything, but I think they’ve been misled. The truth is, I usually show up ready to go, and I have had long, fast-paced matches with some really well-conditioned athletes. Now, as far as being not all that impressive when it comes to lifting heavy weights, I’ll plead guilty, but with the footnote that over the years, my joints, muscles, and tendons have been through quite an ordeal. Over the years, when guys in the business have had less than stellar physiques, announcers have covered for them by claiming they had great tendon strength. Sometimes, as in the case of Dan Severn, it was true. I’m actually in the process right now of trying to get Jim Ross to sell the fans on the idea that I am one of those guys. Can’t you just hear it? “My goodness, look at that tendon strength. Foley is deceptively strong.” Actually, it’s one of the small comforts in my life to know that on any given day, I can walk into any gym in the country and lift the exact same amount of weight that I did when I was a sixteen-year-old kid.
I started getting the feeling that something wasn’t right. This feeling started right after my return at the Clash, and grew as my Halloween Havoc match with Vader drew closer. I was scheduled to wrestle Yoshi K wan, a martial artist who was Harley’s newest wrestler. He was undefeated over the course of several months, with the idea being that if I beat him at the Pay-Per-View, I could start gunning for Vader. Instead, I watched in disgust as Kwan lost to Johnny B. Badd, who wasn’t even booked on the PPV. I asked Dusty about it, and he apologized for the error, but it didn’t stop the company from airing the match twice more that weekend.
After defeating the not-quite-as-impressive Kwan, I noticed more small details that didn’t seem to be quite right. As one of the better promo men in the company and with a strong reason to seek vengeance, I knew that I could help sell this show on the mike. Instead, in the four weeks leading up to the show, I was given one live interview to build up the main event. In that same amount of time, Dusty gave himself four live interviews to promote the fact that he was going to be in his son’s corner for another match. Priorities were definitely screwed up.
Also interesting to me was the fact that I wasn’t written into any of the television shows that would air after the Havoc show in October of 1993. I asked Dusty what he had in mind for me after Havoc, and he admitted he had nothing immediate. It was obvious to me that somebody somewhere didn’t want a Pay-Per-View that Cactus Jack was headlining to be a success. It was more or less booked to be a failure. Just like Stallone’s Rambo felt when he learned the only reason he had been sent on a dangerous mission was that he was supposed to fail, I too felt expendable.
It was in this atmosphere that I attempted to renegotiate my contract. In the history of wrestling, I don’t think anyone has ever done more research or work in attempting to renegotiate. I presented Eric Bischoff with a twenty-page, professionally printed thesis complete with charts, graphs, statistics, and analyses. My research had shown me that I was as valuable as anyone in the company, and as such, I certainly believed I deserved to be paid that way. I didn’t expect the $750,000 that guys like Sting were pulling in at the time, but I felt like I deserved something.
“You’re preaching to the choir,” Bischoff said, simultaneously stroking my ego and letting me know that all my hard work wasn’t going to earn an extra nickel. “If it was up to me, I’d be glad to give you more, but my hands are tied here.” What could I do? In today’s open market, an unsigned wrestler headlining an upcoming Pay-Per-View show would be worth a fortune, even if just to screw up the other company. I wasn’t in that position, however; the World Wrestling Federation had made it clear to me that they weren’t interested, or at least J. J. Dillon had. J. J. was Vince McMahon’s right-hand man, and the guy I got ahold of once a year when my contract came up. Every year, he’d give me about a minute and five seconds of his time. “Sorry, we’re not looking for talent right now. You should be happy you’re working-a lot of guys aren’t, you know? Give us a call next year.” That was it. They weren’t looking for talent? The World Wrestling Federation was always on the lookout for talent. Excuse my language here, but I’m a little upset thinking about this-1 was Cactus Fucking Jack and all I get is one minute with J. J. Fucking Dillon? Whoa, it felt good to get that off my chest. How about one more? Okay. I was Cactus Fucking Jack and all I get is one minute with J. J. Fucking Dillon. Four “F” words in one paragraph-Diamond Dallas would be so proud.