Countdown To Lockdown (14 page)

Try it. You’ll like it.

They never even knocked. Hughie and Mickey just burst through the door, catching their mom and dad at a most inopportune time, seeing their father in a way they had never imagined him. Yes, my children walked in on me and my wife while we were right in the middle of … watching the original
Rocky
, and saw their father … sniveling, choked up, fighting back tears.

It might have been understandable if they’d caught me in the middle of the fight scene; as I’ve already mentioned, that moment where Adrian closes her eyes in the big fourteenth round always gets to me. Even though it hadn’t actually gotten to me in about ten years. Yes, for all my talking about
Rocky
as my all-time favorite movie, I hadn’t actually seen it in ages. But Colette and I resolved to watch
Rocky
in its entirety before setting out to see
Rocky Balboa
in the theaters. The film had been getting incredible buzz, and we wanted to be filled with the Rocky spirit before heading out to the cinema.

I guess I wasn’t prepared for my little trip down memory lane; scenes that previously hadn’t affected me at all now tugged at my heartstrings. Like the scene my kids walked in on. The one where Mickey
(the curmudgeonly manager, not my son) pays the Rock a visit. When I was eleven, or twenty-one, or even thirty-one, it seemed like the visit was merely a vehicle for Stallone to yell “What about my prime, Mick? At least you had a prime!” Suddenly, in my forties, the scene seemed like an incredible metaphor for vulnerability, acceptance, and forgiveness, practically an allegory for potential world peace.

My little guys wanted in. Wanted a piece of the Rock, so to speak. At first I resisted, thinking they would only laugh at my fragile emotional state or lose interest after a few minutes. With my luck, Mickey would be farting “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” under his armpit just as Stallone started his “I can’t do it, I can’t beat Apollo” soliloquy. Yes, my son really can fart “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” under his arm.

But the little guys surprised me. Their interest never waned. And they were cheering on our hero as he struggled valiantly to beat the count in the big fourteenth round, thankfully so caught up in the action that they missed out on the spectacle of their hardcore dad very nearly losing his battle with tears the moment Adrian closed her eyes.

They were so caught up in the excitement that they thought Rocky actually won the big fight. It wasn’t until several days later, while watching
Rocky II
on DVD, that they learned the sad truth — creating the perfect parental opening for a discussion on moral victories and the importance of trying one’s best. Fortunately, my kids have a dad with one of the worst win percentages in the history of modern sports entertainment — the living embodiment of that old adage “It doesn’t matter if you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.”

“Movie night,” a weekly staple of the Foley family viewing diet, became “Rocky night” and then “Rocky every other night,” before briefly morphing into “Rocky twice a day, every day” as the little guys and I (my older kids have never seen a single
Rocky
movie) breezed through Stallone’s Balboa oeuvre in less than a week. Colette bailed on me after
Rocky III
, perhaps finding the homoeroticism of Rocky’s half shirt and the uncomfortably long hug shared by Stallone and Carl Weathers in the California surf to be a little much to take. Funny how
the first two movies seem so timeless, yet
III
and
IV
didn’t fare quite so well over the long haul.

It was during this full-blown Rocky renaissance that our home was invaded by swarming reality-show production teams, each working eight-hour shifts, meaning the cameras were fixed on me and the family from the moment I woke to the time the final light went out and every “Good night, Mary Ellen; good night, John-Boy” (1970s
Waltons
reference) had been said.

I know I said in my last book that participating in reality shows was not for us — and I meant it. Just as I mean it now when I say reality shows are not for us. But man, that’s a tough path not to cross, given all the potential benefits waiting on the other side. At the time, Hulk Hogan’s laundry hadn’t gotten quite so dirty and certainly hadn’t been aired quite so publicly. Though I don’t know Hogan well, I did tell him I was sorry for all the trouble he was going through. The two crews from A&E were part of our lives sixteen hours a day, for eight long, exhausting, but exciting days. It was a great experience, paid fairly well, and most important, spared me the nagging what-ifs: What if we’d tried it? What if it had been a hit?

We tried it, we liked it, and everyone involved seemed to like it, too. Marcus Fox had directed
The Osbournes
,
The Newlyweds
, and other successful entities in the reality world and therefore knew a hit when he saw one. He thought he had one with us, his
Wrestling My Family
cast, thinking he had the modern-day Huxtable family on his hands, a functional but slightly quirky cast of characters.

There was Dewey, the oldest child, an underachiever in school, who honestly felt that owning twenty-three pro-style major-league baseball hats was about seven too few and was determined to become the first pitcher to star in the majors without throwing a single fastball. Nothing but junk for the Dewster.

Noelle, the little girl who cried in
Beyond the Mat
, was nearly grown up — a young woman looking for more freedom than her mom was willing to give her. Her on-camera look of surprise, disgust, and
humiliation when Dad handed her a twenty to go clothes shopping was a thing of beauty.

Colette, the mother and loving wife, whose decision to have two children in her forties occasionally comes back to haunt her. She loves those children dearly, but oh, what she wouldn’t give for a little break from the hectic pace she’s set. And then there are the two little guys.

By now, I guess it’s common knowledge that A&E didn’t pick up the show. Yes, the network that green-lit
Billy the Exterminator
passed on
Wrestling My Family.
Ouch.

I just wish it could have aired once — just the pilot. If only for the Rocky scenes. If only to see the phone calls from “Rocky.” First, let me explain that in the world of my little guys,
blood
is not a noun. It’s an action verb. The definition, more or less: “to cause bleeding.” As in Rocky Balboa leaving a message informing two small children that he was going to be stopping by “to blood you a little bit.”

I’d really just meant it as a joke — a way for my kids to say, “Come on, Dad, we know that was you.” Except they didn’t know it was me. I may only do three good imitations, but Rocky is one of them. The other two? Terry Funk and Vince McMahon. The Vince imitation is really good.

The unintended consequence of my little message is that my children were terrified. “Rocky’s coming over,” Hughie said. “And he’s going to blood us!”

My wife pulled me aside. “Great work, Mick. Your children now think Rocky Balboa is coming over to beat the crap out of them.”

“Well, what do you think I should do?” I asked.

“Have Rocky leave another message, telling them he’s only kidding.”

I walked out the front door and placed the call.

“Hi, you’ve reached the Foleys,” the machine said. “Please leave your name, number, and a short message, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.”

“Hello, Hughie, Mickey, this is your good friend Rocky Balboa. And I just want you to know that I would never ever blood you guys.”

“Hello, Rocky?”

It was Hughie, thinking he was in fact talking to the real Rocky Balboa. “Are you going to blood us?” he asked.

“Of course not, little buddy. You know why? Because Rocky Balboa is a friend of yours.”

“When are you coming over?”

Think up a lie, Mick, think it up quick. Think of the Grinch and Cindy Lou Who. “You know, Hughie, the Rock is in training right now, so he’s kind of busy.”

“What time will you be here?”

“Um, well, your friend Rocky is going to be training for quite a long time, like two or three months.”

But the questions kept coming. I was running out of things to say. So I just started quoting random lines from the first movie.

“It’s a cold night out here, you know?” Even though it was about seventy-five degrees. “Good night for a basketball game.”

WWE had called me during our first day of filming, offering me a main event match at
Vengeance
, about five weeks away. A five-way match for the WWE title, each entrant being a current or former world champion. A five-way? I thought I could handle that. Plenty of opportunities to take creative restaroonies. Plus, through the magic of WWE repackaging, I was now ready for a Pay-Per-View main event. The repackaging had apparently been so magical that I didn’t even realize it had taken place.

A nice little reality-show story line had just fallen into our laps. I would do a little training at my old buddy Mikey Whipwreck’s gym. Perhaps a Rockyesque training sequence, provided I didn’t have to run, climb steps, do one-armed push-ups, or hug a muscular black man in the pounding California surf for an extended period of time. As part of the show, I visited my orthopedic guy, Dr. Segreto, for a full range of X-rays. I probably could have used an MRI or two as well, but I’m guessing those might have run afoul of the A&E budget.

I actually have a couple orthopedic guys, Segreto and Dr. Legouri, who I first saw when I was twelve, his first patient of the day on the very first day of his practice. His first patient ever! He put me in a cast up to my elbow for a broken thumb I’d suffered two weeks earlier, the victim of a Little League injury behind home plate, back when my knees were still capable of lowering my body into a crouch. Actually I think I could still get into the crouch. Getting out would be the tricky part.

Segreto was concerned about the buildup of arthritis around my knees, the same way Legouri had been years earlier, when he’d called his staff over to marvel at the thirty-four-year-old guy with the eighty-year-old knees. As it turned out, not wearing knee pads for the last three years of my full-time career wasn’t the best move I could have made.

But he reserved his greatest concern for the state of my pubis and ischia bones in the pubic symphysis area — or lower pelvis, for those of you who feel uncomfortable with that particular phraseology. I had often wondered about the long-term consequences of dropping elbows off of ring aprons onto concrete floors. Ironically, when I used the move almost weekly at the Sportatorium in Dallas (which actually had a wooden floor, not concrete) in late 1988 and most of 1989, “the consequences” had been the name of that move. Not that the name ever really caught on. Usually it was just called a flying elbow on the concrete, back in my near Bob Beamon–like days when I could put my opponent upward of fifteen feet from the ring apron and still make some kind of contact. Maybe it was a forearm or palm of the hand, but at least I was traveling some distance on the move.

By the time I left full-time wrestling, the move was almost a vertical one; just a 300-pound frame dropping straight down, accompanied by the thud of ass covered in sweatpants, hitting the concrete.

Most reasonable onlookers predicted a hip replacement in my future. Sure, my hips hurt, but not as bad as my neck or back, and
certainly not as bad as my knees. To tell you the truth, I thought destiny was going to look the other way when it came to hundreds of high-impact elbow drops. Yes, I thought Mother Nature was going to give me a pass. And while it’s true that I do vividly recall specific momentous elbow drops that resulted in temporary numbness in the area of my weenie, until I saw those X-rays it had never really dawned on me that the consequences of that particular move would be concentrated in the
inner
and not the
outer
part of the hips.

Dr. Segreto had never seen anything like it. The repetitive trauma had apparently caused multiple small fractures with resultant additional bone growth in the area. According to him,
no one
had seen anything like it, making me something of a one-man control group for studies on the long-term effects of launching one’s body onto concrete. By the time I got to WWE, in 1996, the elbow was for TV and Pay-Per-View purposes only, but by that time most of the damage had already been done. The bone, through constant impact, had been chipped away at — the fragments floating freely in my system like the meteoric waste of some great interplanetary explosion … a condition Segreto warned could eventually lead to paralysis.

Luckily, over time, these types of injuries heal themselves, reversing the aging process, leaving little sign that … wait, what’s that you say? Time doesn’t heal these particular skeletal wounds? They’re only going to get worse? Oh great. I can’t wait.

Wrestling My Family
seemingly had everything going for it. Humor. Warmth. A wrestling comeback match. That threat of paralysis. Everything you could ever want. Everything, that is, but conflict.

I’d had a few concerns when A&E first expressed interest in the show. “I don’t know,” I’d told Marcus Fox, our director, during our initial phone conversation. “I don’t really yell the way most of those reality guys do. Our family doesn’t really get in big fights or anything.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Marcus said. “That type of thing is passé. A&E is looking for a new type of family.”