Let’s face it. Mick Foley is known for doing crazy shit. That has been his super power forever. From the Japanese death matches to his feud with Terry Funk in ECW to the three faces of Foley in the WWE.
His most outrageous moment though was him being used as a human crash test dummy during the Hell in a Cell match against The Undertaker at King of the Ring pay-per-view on June 28, 1998. I remember watching, reporting on it live and being stunned at how brutal things got especially when Foley was “thrown” off the cage and being choke slammed through the roof of the cage to to the ring below. This is what the premiere episode of Dark Side of the Ring was about, although I am not sure why.
At the time, the match divided fans. Some loved the thrills they experienced and defending the booking and the staging of the match. Others like myself didn’t want and still don’t want anyone to put their actual life on the line just to entertain me. Wrestling a normal match is dangerous enough. Just running the ropes the wrong way or landing the wrong way can put you on the DL for months and months. Taking things that far as Foley and the WWE did was way beyond what I expected or wanted. That isn’t really discussed in much detail though as perhaps the producers feared criticizing Foley too much which is weird because that’s the hook of the entire episode…or should have been.
Foley, who was in attendance at Madison Square Garden when a bloody Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka jumped off the top of a steel cage onto a prone Don Muraco, had his moment of infamy, the Superfly moment he longed for. But what was the cost?
Foley is the focus of the episode as the producers pick his brain trying to puzzle out why someone would do such a thing to their own body?
“Perhaps if I cannot make people love me maybe I can disgust them,” said Foley describing his need to be in the spotlight growing up.
As it unfolded the episode was more about Foley’s mindset as a performer and his hardcore legacy, his entire wrestling legacy not necessarily why the Hell in a Cell was so controversial, a match whose stunts have been repeated so often they aren’t that shocking in today’s wrestling world, except for that dive off the top of the cage at the start. That is still quite insane.
We hear a lot from his family, his friends about what a maniac he can be once he steps foot in any wrestling ring and why he was such a Terry Funk fan at the start, everything that would lead up to the Hell in Cell match but until his stint in the WWE as Mankind, it is Foley’s career on fast forward.
“I didn’t enjoy the pain. I enjoyed the fact that I could take it and sell it in a way that was…fun?” says Foley with that familiar cockeyed grin on his face.
Foley blames Funk for giving him the cage dive idea..but as a joke. Foley admits he couldn’t get the idea out of his head. The Undertaker appears by voice reiterating that he didn’t want to do the spot at all but Foley and Vince McMahon were “onboard” with is so that was that. Foley leads us through the match but we have seen this commentary all before in so many interviews since then. The episode drifts from there to that ‘I Quit’ match with The Rock where Foley got hit like 123,999 times with a steel chair in the head. Yeah, nothing to do with Hell in a Cell.
Based on all of the controversies and infamous moments in the history of wrestling I am not sure why the producer elected to do another in a long line of “This is Your Life, Mick Foley”. The Hell in a Cell match although historic isn’t really portraying any “dark side” of wrestling. It is not like Foley was forced to do it or there was some conspiracy around it. I enjoyed the look back but I don’t understand why the producers elected to spotlight this story other than they obviously love Mick Foley and who doesn’t? Oh, yeah. Al Snow.
