I wrote this from the perspective of a kayfabe fan. If you’ve never heard the term kayfabe, it’s an old carny term. It means to go along with the routine. Basically carnys are trying to scam you, and so they all work as a team. If they’re in character, maybe one pretends to be an average carnival goer, such as yourself. They pretend to be just part of the crowd. And if they see you’re being roped into a scam, they walk over, and rope you in further using the disguise as not being part of the scam to gain your trust. Then encourage you to fall for more scams.

Well in the old days of pro wrestling, it was presented as a legitimate competition. The scam was it’s all rigged, and it’s predetermined. Who wins and loses is all based on what will scam you out of the most money. Back then nobody realized this pro wrestling was all just a carny work.

And so I’m writing this unpopular opinion examining the character(s) that Mick Foley portrayed from the perspective of someone who’s been taken in by kayfabe. But when you think of what’s happening here, if you thought it were real, then Mick Foley would have SERIOUS mental health issues. And I’m presenting the stories told through the eyes of a kayfabe fan. Which is unpopular because nobody wants to think of the ramifications for what it would all imply.

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So he starts off in the early 1980s, wrestling in small towns in upper state new york. Wrestling in small time wrestling shows organized by the guy who trained him.

He doesn’t have the self confidence to be himself, and doesn’t want to bring shame to the Foley name. So he uses a temporary name until he feels he’s good enough to ditch it. He wrestles a handful of matches, before his trainer gets him an oppertunity to wrestle as enhancement talent in the WWF against The British Bulldogs.

This match was brutal, and even after retiring, he STILL listed this match as one of the hardest times he’d ever been hit in the head. This coming from the guy who’s a meme on reddit for having fallen off the hell in a cell in nineteen ninety eight. But we’ll get there eventually.

This match with the bulldogs is one of the hardest he’d ever been concussed, and I’m saying it’s the first of many pivitol points for his mental state.

As often times it does, this “oppertunity” went nowhere. The WWF just needed two nobodies to lose to their champions without hurting the credability of their other stars. A blink and you’ll miss it moment of Cactus Jack being on WWF tv in the 1980s.

So he keeps at the local circuit, eventually making his way to Japan after getting a reputation as being the guy who can do really violent things without it affecting him.

About this time in the early 1990s, WCW had become a nationally televised wrestling product, but a clear distant number 2 to the WWF. However the owner was Ted Turner, who had a grudge against WWF owner Vince McMahon over business deals gone bad in the 80s.

So Turner was trying to crush the WWF through WCW. Which meant WCW was willing to take wild chances. Mick Foley by this point had been punishing his body for almost 10 years on a nightly basis. He caught the attention of WCW, who signed him based on his wild man antics.

Now Mick was in a number 2 company, nationally televised and had a chance to make a name for himself on a national level. Mick knew he didn’t stand a chance to compete on star power or good looks against the likes of Sting, and Ric Flair. So he took a different approach. Do things nobody else can do. Be completely different than anyone else in all of professional wrestling. Become can’t miss television programing by being like nothing else you can see anywhere else from anyone else. And he did this by becoming car crash tv, with his body being the car crash. He took chairshots, he took dives, he lost teeth, he fell on concrete, he worked with brutes that tore his ear off, he hung himself by his neck and let his body dangle, he put his body through hell with a smile on his face to convince the audience that this guy was nuts! And it worked.

As his wild and violent antics reached new audiences, WCWs ratings rose. But Cactus Jack got hit in the head too many times, and got Lost in Cleveland. Joined a cult of homeless people. It was a whole thing. Then he remembered he was a WCW wrestler, so he came back.

There was one problem. Mick Foley’s violent style didn’t fit the Turner networks family friendly image. So a few years later, he was let go. Then he went to Japan, won King of the Deathmatch. Got even MORE violent, came back to America, joined ECW, played with fire, Foley’s hero Terry Funk got burned, and it made Cactus Jack swear off the hardcore lifestyle. He wrestled the next few months doing headlocks. Lots and lots of headlocks. Long boring safe headlocks. In front of an ECW crowd. The same crowd that cheered when New Jack stabbed a 16 year old legit, who later died of complications of both obesity, and complications of his stabbing. The ECW cheered that level of violence, and here was Cactus Jack intentionally pissing them off with non-violent manuevers.

Then Mick Foley left the public eye for a few months, lost even MORE of his sanity, and changed his name to Mankind. Now he lived in boiler rooms, ripped his own hair out, called out for “Mommy”, which was in reference to a fat man who at the time was keeping his own psychopathic son locked in the basement ashamed of his own grotesque burned image for the past 30 years. This fat man was named Paul Bearer, and he had spent the last 30 years mentally gaslighting his stepson for murdering his own parents and half brother, his son, knowing full well that his son was alive and well. I know. I know. Wrestling is awesome.

And now with this emotional and mental manipulator playing the role of his mommy, he kind of just had a full mental breakdown. Completely lost any resemblance to rational thinking.

So he did what any overweight guy missing teeth, missing an ear, body covered in scars, and lacking any sense of rationality would do. He gained confidence, put on some tye-dye, and became a ladies man from the 1960s. Owwww! Have MERCY!

Then he started battling his own multiple personalities. Mankind had evolved to being the slob version of him in sweatpants on a lazy sunday afternoon, who stuffs his pants with his best friend, a sock puppet who he sticks in other peoples mouth, and sucks up to his boss by eating ravioli and fist fighting an alcoholic who shows up to work drunk driving a beer truck splashing beer everywhere.

Like I said, wrestling is awesome.

He also is Cactus Jack. A violent self abuser who inflicts as much destruction on himself as his opponent.

And unlike most people with multiple personalities, they don’t come and go over time. He once wrestled one match, three different times, as three different versions of himself.

Then comes the part everyone knows him for. The Hell in a Cell was a match type that was meant to be nothing more than a chain link fence surrounding the ring as a visual. The idea being that if a cage surrounded the ring on all sides, and had a roof, no one could get in or out. And that went horribly wrong.

There had been a few Hell in a Cell matches before this, with the highlights always coming from dropping partway down. In the first one Shawn Micheals climbed about HALFWAY up the wall of the cage, and then fell off. Because nobody would ever fall from the top right? Thats a 20 foot fall. That’s insane. So naturally before the match, Mankind says to himself “What if we START the match on TOP of the cell??? That’d be pretty crazy, right?” It certainly was. And he certainly was. He gets thrown 20 feet off a makeshift chainlink fence, which was already buckling under the weight of both him and the Undertaker. He falls through a table, which he basically just bounced off onto a concrete floor with no padding, into the side of a guardrail that did not budge.

It took medics 10 minutes to make sure he wasn’t dead, and his mental reaction to that is…“Ya know what? I’m gonna head back up there. Give that a second go. It’s like chumbawumba always says. I get knocked down, but the medical team confirms my breathing and heart rate is stable, get me to my feet, I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down!”

What? You never heard the unabridged version of that song? Moving on.

So he gets back on top of the cell AGAIN. And as dangerous as the first fall was, now all hell breaks loose. Or rather all hell in a cell breaks loose! Ah, wordplay! What I’m trying to say is that a tragic disaster nearly happened which was inches if not millimeters from ending Mick Foleys life live on PPV. When he woke up, he was in the ring, eyes, mouth and nose filled with blood, knocked out tooth in his nose, and he had the appearance of smiling because he was pushing his tounge through a hole which had just been ripped in his skin just under his bottom lip. The image of him dying in the ring, EMTs attending his now pale corpse, Undertaker standing on top of the cell clearly unsure what he should be doing, and Jim Ross on commentary speaking in hushed concerned tones. Is something I thought would be the most haunting thing I ever saw on WWF television, with the most emotionally gut wrenching presentation I’d ever seen. Everyone watching knew the show was a show. We all knew it was all a production. This was all part of the show…but at the same time we all knew THIS wasn’t part of the show…and now he’s sitting up and smiling into the camera with a tooth in his nose. This motherfucker. It’s the only time that for me the lines got blurred. Is Mankind crazy? Or is Mick Foley crazy? Either way we’re cheering for mental illness right now.