Friday 20th April 2007
8.05am – a couple of miles outside of Durham
Dear Not-so Hardcore Diary,
How do you tell the wrestling fan in a crowded train station platform? He’s the one in the signed Mick Foley shirt rocking out to Drowning Pool’s ECW anthem ‘Let The Bodies Hit The Floor’ on his mp3 player alongside all the businessmen in suits!
It’s a surreal experience standing among the first class business types – I am NOT in first class – my less civilised section of the train is the next carriage so I’m expected to stand alongside them all while we await our impending arrival. I’m used to having wannabe upper classers turn their nose up at me; after all I’m usually unshaven and tatty looking even when I have work meetings. Pride in my appearance hasn’t really been a trait of mine since my pretty boy school days. It’s a good job the feeling of being looked down on doesn’t bother me much because in four hours time I’ll arrive at a several hundred pound per night swanky London hotel to interview the aforementioned genuine wrestling legend that is Mick Foley and I‘m pretty sure I‘ll get the similar stares that suggest I don‘t belong there. At least I can be at ease knowing that I’ll probably be dressed better than Mrs Foley’s baby boy.
Interviewing Foley is an absolute dream come true for me. He’s certainly the biggest name I’ve ever had the opportunity to interview. He’s also been very influential on my interest in both wrestling and writing. It was the Royal Rumble pay-per-view in 1999 when my childhood interest in wrestling was rekindled at the age of 17 and the match responsible – you guessed it Rock v Mankind ‘I Quit’. The infamous match, showcased on the equally infamous documentary Beyond The Mat, saw Foley crash from a balcony onto a set of speakers and take just shy of a dozen chair shots, most of which he took while handcuffed! From that night on my interest was not only rekindled, it was multiplied and it ignited a passion in wrestling that, despite briefly fading away somewhat a couple of years ago, burns as fiercely as ever now.
Foley’s next major influence on me was when I read his first book. Have a Nice Day inspired me to take a serious interest in something I had been dabbling in and that was writing. I had wrote a number of poems, initially as a way to pass the boredom while at Sixth Form College. The more I wrote, the more I took pride in what I did and I approached each piece with more enthusiasm than the last. I have hardly wrote any poems in recent years, the irony of writing this now is that I have to write a poem on the way back from London for my friends’ wedding tomorrow, at the request of the bride…that’s if I don’t sleep all the way home of course. My writing nowadays is almost always wrestling or MMA related. I have toyed with the idea of writing a novel; I even have a few very different ideas for a plot thought out. I’m pretty sure it’ll be a long time before I really turn my focus to a genuine attempt at a fictional novel, although I’m determined to give it a go one day. Whether it will ever make it to publication of course is a very long shot and I’m fully aware of that. My writing has dried up lately due to my fairly new job where I put in a lot of hours and I’m usually too mentally exhausted to tackle the written (or should that be typed) word after a long hard day at work. It will actually be six months to the day tomorrow since the last edition of Fye-nal Analysis was posted anywhere. I’ve wrote for wZw, the promotion I commentate for, in recent months and I’ve done a few DVD reviews but general wrestling discussions has been few and far between over the last six months. Strangely enough, this piece itself is hardly wrestling related.
The reason for the piece is two fold really. I wanted to knock out my feelings about meeting Mick Foley – something which I don’t think I’ve explained very well so far – as a way to document the day that I anticipate will be one of my favourite ever…if I ignore the ten hours of travel and the several hours of waiting to travel I’ll have to endure! The second reason is much simpler; it’s a way to pass the time on the train to London!
I’m struggling with things to write about now to be honest, I’ve only managed to relieve about 45 minutes of boredom and I’ve only travelled from Durham to York. I am hopeful, maybe naively so, that there will be a spare microphone of some sort when I get to the interview as I only have one to conduct the interview and that’s on my commentary headset. A nice clip on microphone was supposed to arrive in the post earlier this week but it never did. I even had a postman friend of mine rummaging through my post at the sorting office at 6.30am this morning to see if it was there so I could pick it up before I left for the station but there was no sign of it unfortunately. As I typed that last sentence I received a text message from said friend (Speedy here‘s your annual shout out mate) saying that the microphone just showed up on the van with the late post…typical eh?
Anyway, back to Mick Foley. I met Mick briefly before when he was special guest referee for the main event at a wZw show in November 2005. It was before my days as the company’s commentator and I lined up for my modified Cactus Jack shirt, nowadays displaying the name Mick Foley on instead of the moniker he sported in WCW, ECW, Japan and anywhere else he worked before his Mankind days in WWE. I was delighted to get my copy of Have a Nice Day signed and also get Speedy’s copy signed (two shout outs in consecutive paragraphs…you‘re on a roll here mate). I wanted to tell my favourite hardcore legend how much of an influence he has been on me on that night but there was obviously quite a queue and I didn’t want to hold it up by what many would have perceived as brown nosing, even if the sentiments would have been far more genuine than the impatient Foley fans queuing behind me would have probably believed.
I don’t believe this, it’s a third shout out for Speedy! He’s just text me with an excellent question, at least I think it’s excellent and I hadn’t thought of asking it so I’m going to have to fit it in somewhere. The question was “did you put forward any ideas for WrestleMania 23 and were you disappointed that you weren’t a part of the show?”. I think I’ve got some good questions for him myself but it’s the hardest interviewed I’ve ever planned for. After reading three wrestling books from the man it’s hard to ask questions that he hasn’t already covered in great detail in at least one of the books. I know not everyone will have read them but I find it quite redundant to ask him questions that anyone can find the answer to in your local WHSmith. I wanted to ask him questions that were as original as they could be and I hope I pull it off; time will tell. I do have a few filler questions on there but I doubt I’ll get to ask all of them anyway so some of the less important or less interesting questions will almost certainly be omitted when we sit down and go through the questions.
I’ve just realised that writing this has not only passed the time away for well over an hour, it has also distracted me from feeling nervous. That feeling has just crept over me as I wrote the last line to the previous paragraph. It’s time to put the laptop away and chill out as someone will be sitting next to me from the next stop for the rest of the journey and I currently have my bag and coat casually thrown on the mystery travel partner’s seat. I don’t know if there will be a further entry into the Not-so Hardcore Diary on the way home as I am travelling back on the bus, not the train and I’ll have to fit any entry around getting some sleep and writing a poem for my friends’ wedding. Those two are definitely listed in order of priority to me.
Friday 20th April 2007
11.35pm – back home, Peterlee, Co. Durham
Dear Not-so Hardcore Diary,
What a day it’s been. Ten hours of travelling, too much fast food for my weight loss program, no smoking on the journey down or back and getting hassled by a beggar in the coach station. But despite all that, one hour out of a very long day has more than made up for it all.
When Mick arrived (that’s right, we’re on first name terms baby) he asked me how far I’d travelled. When I told him it was three hours by train he was shocked and couldn’t believe I was travelling for six hours just to interview him. I politely told him I was actually travelling for 6 hours on the bus home so that would be 9 hours in total, not including the hour to and from Durham. Imagine his Long Island accent as he says “Well I guess we‘ll have to give you something memorable and special to work with if you‘ve travelled all this way!”.
I’m still not sure whether I was pleasantly surprised or a little disappointed that Mick was blatantly out dressing me. He looked a lot hipper than I had anticipated. We sat down and spoke briefly about how he had an upset stomach and was tired and I feared that I wasn’t going to get him at his best for the interview. He admitted it was partially his own fault as he stayed up half the night reading William Regal’s book and we discussed it’s merits for a while before I set everything up while Mick ordered lunch.
As we were about to start I explained the whole microphone situation and said I would try to get everything using my commentary headset to which point he promptly grabbed the headset and placed it over his ear and a half. I’m not going into the interview itself; that’s for you guys to listen to exclusively at Wrestle Zone UK. After about fifteen minutes Mick’s food arrived and I asked him if it was OK to finish off with a couple more questions which he was happy to do and then I got an offer I couldn’t refuse. Mick asked me to sit with him while he had his lunch so he could fulfill his promise of signing a few books I had brought with me and posing for a couple of pictures. My picture with Mick is going to take pride of place in a frame now with my signed Mick Foley shirt. Speaking of the shirt, I was given another very pleasant surprise when he told me the significance of my shirt. He said the ‘Mick Foley’ shirts were only ordered in one batch of 144 and he has since gone back to having ‘Cactus Jack’ on the front of his dead or alive t-shirts. He said not only was it one of a small batch of 144, but he had dozens of them left at home and therefore I had a very rare t-shirt, signed by the man himself which means as Mick put it “it’s a rare collector’s item”. Man, this day had shaped up nicely! After almost an hour with the Hardcore Legend I was about to set off on the long boring journey back home. While having a post-interview cigarette outside the hotel Mick was looking about to see if he could spot his next interview appointment arriving. He waved across the road, wished me a safe trip and when I thanked him again for the interview he said “No, thank you for travelling all this way to interview me”.
The man who was more responsible than anyone else for me having an interest in wrestling and a passion in writing could have turned out to be a fraud. I could’ve ruined all my perceptions about the guy by meeting him in person and being bitterly disappointed with the man behind the Mankind mask. There are very few people in this world that I have looked up to from afar the way I have looked up to Mick Foley over the last eight years. The Hardcore Legend turned up for the interview feeling tired and unwell and yet he was an absolute gentleman; friendly, chatty, courteous, humble and made me feel very at ease from start to finish. It was an honour and a privilege to meet the man properly, to chat with him in depth – both before and after the scheduled interview – and I am delighted I was given the opportunity to do all of this.
Given the money I had to spend on getting to the interview, the ten hours of travelling, the lack of opportunity to enjoy a cigarette or ten for large parts of the day, the stress of worrying how I was going to pull off an audio interview with only one microphone – from a commentator’s headset no less – the fast food meals ruining my weight loss program, not being able to find the time, energy or motivation to write that poem I mentioned for the wedding which is in 12 hours, wearing a big coat on a hot London afternoon and having to carry from heavy bag around everywhere I went, it would seem there were far more negatives than positives on the trip in general. So now for the big question. If I had known then what I know now, would I have still jumped at the chance to interview Mick Foley? Absolutely! I’d do it all again tomorrow if I could but instead I have a wedding to attend to.
I would like to thank Faye for arranging the interview through Gary. I definitely need to thank Gary for trusting me with such an important task and I of course need to thank Mick for being open, honest, friendly and an all round great person to meet and chat with.
fye@wrestle-zone.co.uk
