In the year 2000, Mick Foley's in-ring professional wrestling career was winding down.

Now sure, technically speaking, Cactus Jack/Mankind/Dude Love continued on with his professional wrestling career for the decade, as his final match didn't come until an appearance at the Royal Rumble in 2012, but when it comes to the prime of his professional wrestling career, specifically the portion where he became insanely over as a member of the WWE Universe, 2000 marked the end of his time with the promotion until 2004, when he returned at the Royal Rumble in 2004.

So, with the Royal Rumble one of the signature events, it only made sense that Foley would look to go out with a band wrestling one of the top performers in the game, Paul “Triple H” Levesque, whom he wrestled in a Madison Square Garden Street Fight for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship.

Discussing the match in question with Sean Evans on Hot Ones, Foley explained how its signature spot, taking a Pedigree into a pile of thumbtacks.

While the spot was obviously incredibly dangerous and Vince McMahon wasn't a fan, Levesque and Foley decided to pull the trigger because of the value of the potential pop.

“It's the instantaneous risk-reward analysis. I think it was a God-given gift that would tell me,” Mick Foley told Sean Evans on Hot Ones via Fightful. “So, January 2000, just a few blocks away at Madison Square Garden. I remember Mr McMahon saying to me and Triple H, ‘No thumb tacks.' As soon as Mr. McMahon walked away, Triple H goes, ‘You put them under the ring already?', and I said, ‘Yeah, I got it taken care of.' This was one the last matches of my career and so it was a big moment. I just saw that majestic pile, there were five or six thousand tacks, and I thought about the wisdom of taking that pedigree face first into those thumbtacks. I came to the conclusion that, okay, I could lose an eye, but imagine the pop. [laughs].”

Would Foley's efforts against Levesque have been remembered differently had he lost an eye or worse? Yeah, fans might have another signature Jim Ross call to use in gifs for the rest of time, but fortunately, everyone left the spot relatively unscathed, which is more than Mankind can say for his efforts against The Undertaker in his signature Hell in a Cell match.

Mick Foley reveals the origins of his Mankind character in WWE.

Elsewhere in his appearance on Hot Ones, which, *spoiler alert* saw the WWE Hall of Famer finish off the wings and get to promote that he hilariously has “not much” going on in his life to promote, Mick Foley decided to discuss his initial WWE gimmick Mankind, which was sort of a mix of a Frankenstein's monster and some sort of medieval executor.

While the idea of going from the incredibly charismatic Cactus Jack to a masked monster who needed to be humanized by JR to really come into his own may have caught the confusion of some fans, as Foley tells it, things could have been a whole lot worse.

“Mr. McMahon [went], ‘Have you heard your name yet?' This is only like the third time I met him and I actually had heard the name. It was supposed to be Mason The Mutilator, which I thought ‘That's the death knell of a career right there.' So I had a chance. He goes ‘In this business, we've had crushers, we've had destroyers. We've had executioners, but we've never had…a mutilator,' and I looked at him, and I said, ‘I like it. I like it a lot. But what if…' and what if were the two best words, ‘What if instead of Mason, I was Mankind The Mutilator?'” Foley said on Hot Ones via TJR.

“I started telling him it [the name] can be a double meaning, the destruction of mankind, the future of mankind. That's again going back to Mary Shelley, is the creature who is made evil by society, not necessarily created to be that way. He took it all down, and sure enough when I debuted, there was no mutilator. It was just Mankind. And I'll go on the record as good as… I'll go so far as to say it turned out to be pretty iconic. I don't think I'm here with Mason The Mutilator.”

Is Mick Foley on the money? Would “Mason The Mutilator” have gotten over and had a Hall of Fame career? Eh, probably not, but then again, Foley did get his childhood gimmick, Dude Love, over in WWE, so who knows; maybe his charisma could have overcome darn near anything.