Mick Foley On What Hurt Worse Between Falling Through Hell in a Cell or Chair to Face

WWE Hall of Famer Mick Foley recently joined Insight with Chris Van Vliet, discussing his infamous Hell in a Cell match against The Undertaker at King of the Ring 1998. Foley took some insane punishment during the match, being tossed from the top of the cage through a table and also falling through the top of the cage and into the ring after a chokeslam.

Foley pondered that he might not have had his moment of beating The Rock for the WWE Title if not for his performance in Hell in a Cell. Below are some highlights from Insight:

Mick Foley on How His Career Would Look Without Hell in a Cell

“Even though it wasn’t the end of my career, it put an exclamation point, and it gave me the moment. There are football players who are known literally for one play. Basketball player Willis Reed, great career. He’s known for playing two minutes in game seven with an injured ligament in his knee. Joe Montana’s career, great, great quarterback. But it’s the catch, I think they just called it a catch. I don’t know if I would have had one of those moments, you know, beating The Rock for the WWE title was a great moment for WWE and for me, but I’m not sure if that would be something that would be passed on to the next generation. That’s what stuns me about the cell is that half of the people who talk to me about it, and this is like, where I don’t write it down, but I would estimate half of the people that talk to me about that match were not born when it took place. There’s even a story I’ll mention from time to time, and I did it on the 20 Years of Hell tour, saying it was really powerful when my wife said my kids wanted to watch the Cell match. I said, ‘How do they even know about the Cell match?’ And she said, ‘Well, kids are talking about it in school.’ I said in preschool? But it’s something that parents have handed down, and it’s the go-to for wrestling fans to show their non-fan friends who don’t understand what it’s about.”

On What Hurt Worse Between Falling Through the Cell or the Chair to the Face

“Chair to the face. I stopped kidding myself. I stopped wearing the bottom flipper. Because my feeling is, I know it’s not a good look. My son, Huey, broke it to me this way, like eight years ago, ‘Dad, don’t take this the wrong way…’ and first of all, you know no sentence ends well [when they say that]. [He said] ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but you still kind of cool with your top teeth missing. Now you look like a crack addict.’ I said, ‘Son, I believe you were thinking of a meth addict, but point well taken.’ But my feeling is like, I know it’s not a good look, but it’s my look, and I earned it. So I don’t mind at all. And plus, you know, Jay Lethal and Kurt Angle could attest for the fact that I was, I would say, was more than an interrogation in Amsterdam, where apparently I was suspicious, because these teeth, one of them was knocked out. The other was knocked in and chipped in half, but they put the other tooth back in. When I got back from that match, it was in a glass of milk to keep it vital. And on the 20th anniversary of the cell, when I did my show in Pittsburgh, the dentist or orthodontist, whatever it was, who was on call said he was there that night. They said, we’ve had an accident at the Civic arena, and the first thing he asked me was, how long did they last? About eight years. I was like, yeah, yeah. Then they started turning [a different] color.

“And you probably heard how people, guys in our business, will say, Well, I would do it, but would my character? And so my version of that is, I don’t mind having gray and blue gnarly teeth, but would Santa have gray and gnarly? No. So I pulled one out with a ball peen hammer and a pair of pliers. Because even though dentists will let children keep their teeth, for adults, it’s considered medical waste. I was like, No, I don’t want to lose these. I want to make jewelry. I took one of them out, but I’ll admit the other one was too tough. And then my son found a dentist. But yeah, I got interrogated in Amsterdam. I mean, if you have Jay Lethal on, ask him. My memory is that guns were at the ready. I finally was like, ‘Do you have a computer?’ And they said, Yeah. I said, ‘Can you Google Mick Foley Hell in a Cell.’ That’s my tooth. So you can tell, if this was 15 years ago, I probably would not want to talk about the cell. You know, I had a love-hate relationship with it. And then, as you get older, I think it’s in the same way that Adam West accepted that he was Batman, guys who feel like their career was pigeon-holed because of an iconic role. Even Norman Bates, Anthony Perkins, couldn’t get work, you know, outside of a few like knockoffs and sequels. But you come to appreciate it. And I realized, wow, this is even before I started really doing the conventions. I’m so lucky to have anything people remember me for after the fact, let alone, probably two or three things.”

As previously noted, Mick Foley recently released a video message directed at United States President Donald Trump last month, imploring the President and fellow WWE Hall of Famer to “stop the madness” going on in the country involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).