WWE Hall Of Famer Mick Foley is no stranger to pain but now he has narrowed down the injuries he has suffered over the years and named his top five!
Whether it was getting his ear ripped off in Germany, throwing himself to concrete floor after concrete floor with his patented Cactus Jack elbow, or most famously of all, being thrown off and then through the Hell In A Cell in 1998, Mick Foley’s body has paid time and time again for his daredevil antics in wrestling.
Speaking during a chiropractic adjustment with Dr. Beau Hightower, Foley began with two injuries whose descriptions alone would make a mere mortal wince with agony:
“Well, the most grisly would be the right ear that you can see it doesn’t look like the left ear. Lost that bad boy in Munich, Germany 20 years ago. I never had developed cauliflower ear when I lost it, but that’s probably the number one injury.”
“[The most painful injury] was a torn abdominal muscle. I was ashamed when I found out I hadn’t broken my pelvis because that’s what it felt like to me. So I did not know at the time that torn abdominal muscles ruin careers for football or hockey, because you lose the ability to explode, you know from the midsection. Now luckily, in wrestling, we can work around injuries.”
Mick Foley continued his grisly countdown, finishing off with the time he nearly lost both his pinkies:
“My hip. I’d been told early on that, but by virtue of the fact that I was diving off ring aprons onto the concrete, that I was going to pay a price and I’ll be honest, had I known it was going to be that severe — from probably 2004 through 2017. It was really, it was a pretty difficult existence.”
“I would get on a plane and I would ask for a bottle of water right away, and I put the bottle of water full underneath my hamstring and I would roll it just to try to get the nerves firing up. So I would say the right hip, and then the right knee, which was awful. It was locked, I think it may be 18 degrees, maybe 27. I don’t know.”
“But anyway, what happens with that is you stop walking correctly. Between the right leg locked up and the hip giving me so much trouble, you end up walking side-to-side to eliminate the pain in the nerves, and then you are basically waddling without realizing you’re waddling. So that’s four and then for number five, we’ll just go with almost losing my pinkies both of them in a match in 1995.”
Those pinkies were nearly lost from the hands of Mrs. Foley’s baby boy when he tried to repeat the stunt that had already cost him his ear:
“This was my first ever no rope, Barbed Wire Japanese Deathmatch, and they’re definitely into the real stuff in Japan. You can’t fake them out by trying to fake them out. I tried that same move that cost me my ear. Looking back, maybe I should have taken that item off the menu after losing the ear, but I did it in the barbed wire, and the wire didn’t hold my weight and it ended up snagging me.”
“So when I went down — there’s a photo of me sitting on the floor with both my pinkies caught with the wire. So that was one of the things it’s just… it just almost does away with your small fingers. So it was not — it was a deep hole but not, you know, comparatively, it seems like a minor injury. But it was pretty graphic at the time. So that’s my top five.”