On the first episode of Foley is Pod since the passing of Bray Wyatt and Terry Funk, Mick Foley had a lot to say.
A lifelong disciple of professional wrestling who has been in or around the business for five decades and counting, Foley has a unique perspective on the careers and passings of both men, as he's been a featured member of both of their careers inside and out of WWE.
Discussing Wyatt, who shockingly passed away at 36, Foley lamented the loss of someone he considered both a “genius” and a genuinely nice guy.
“I thought he was a genius, I really did … I thought so highly of him,” Mick Foley said via Wrestling Inc. “When my children were all watching, and I would watch too, I would watch it — kind of in the background, and I would multitask — it was really Bray Wyatt that would make me put all my stuff down, and I would just sit and stare at that screen, and I was transfixed. I think that's the way so many people were when they watched him. Aside from everything he did in the ring, he was really a great presence backstage. I think the world would have realized sooner or later that this was a really nice man.”
Turning his focus to his own unique interactions with Wyatt during his all-too-brief but historically significant career, Foley explained how he influenced the soon-to-be WWE Hall of Famer, including how he handed down one of his signature maneuvers, the Mandible Claw, when the “Easter of Worlds” became The Fiend.
“When he was at TV, he told me that he'd been working on something and he'd been doing these promos in a rocking chair, and he alluded to the promo I cut on Randy Orton … I only did it once, and it's there for the taking. It made me so proud to see him in that rocking chair and that I may have influenced that in some way,” Mick Foley said.
“I think the biggest thing for me in Bray's career was Paul Heyman calling me up and saying, ‘Cactus, we'd like to give Bray Wyatt the Mandible Claw.' And I said, ‘I love it,' and then he said, ‘We'd like you to take it…' I loved that even more. Every once in a while, after a big match, he would pull me aside and point out the match where he got an idea from.”
While the revelation that Foley gave Wyatt the Mandible Claw isn't particularly shocking news, as it sort of happened on WWE TV back in July of 2019, it is interesting to learn that the former Universal Champion would occasionally reach out to Cactus Jack to discuss matches and how the Hardcore legend influenced his decision-making. For a performer like Foley, who can no longer wrestle due to a litany of health issues, this certainly meant a lot.
Mick Foley is similarly complementary of Terry Funk.
Elsewhere on Foley is Pod, Mick Foley discussed one of his own personal heroes, Terry Funk, and the match they had together at IWA Japan Kawasaki Dream, which Dude Love considers a real “passing of the torch” moment from one hardcore icon to another.
“We didn't talk about the match at all. That's why if you watch the match … at one point I think it was the most widely-watched bootleg — or just the most widely-watched match on VHS — of all time. It's probably still up there. It made quite an impact,” Foley recalled.
“When Terry and I were getting ready, he just came into my dressing room, looked at me, and goes, ‘You know I wouldn't do this for many people?' And he wasn't talking about putting people over, in general, but what he was about to do for me in Japan. [It] was something he was giving out … he was making me over there.”
Now, for fans out of the know, Funk's match with Cactus Jack wasn't just a Hardcore match, a Barbed Wire match, or even a No Ropes Barbed Wire match. No, the finals of the King of Death Matches tournament was a No Ropes Barbed Wire Exploding Barbed Wire Boards and Exploding Ring Time Bomb Death match, a title as brutal to remember as the action in the ring was to watch. While fans who haven't delved into Japanese wrestling may be more familiar with Foley's time teaming with Funker when he was going by Chainsaw Charlie, if you want to watch two luminaries of the genre work at the height of their greatness, this match was truly unforgettable and a worthy send-off to a true original.