Tags
1999, a tale of blood and sweatsocks, countdown to lockdown, foley is good, have a nice day!, mick foley, scooter, the hardcore diaries, the rock, tietam brown, TNA, total nonstop action, vince mcmahon, WCW, winston churchill, world championship wrestling, wrestling professional wrestling
My favourite author and my favourite wrestler are the same person.
No, really. While that may have shot my credibility full of holes, I’m not saying that The Rock’s terrible in-character autobiography is the book I base my life around.
I’m talking about Mick Foley. For those not in the know when it comes to rasslin’, Mick Foley is a thumbs-up-givin’, barbed-wire scarred risk taker who helped defined wrestling in the mid-to-late 90s.
At the height of his popularity in 1999, he wrote a preposterously lengthy and startlingly brilliant autobiography called Have A Nice Day!: A Tale Of Blood And Sweatsocks (*****) covering his college years dividing time between wrestling school and real school right up to his first world title win.
It surprised everyone by becoming a New York Times #1 bestseller, and surprised even more people by being fantastic. Mick has an easy-going, conversational writing style and a goofy sense of humour which marry up perfectly with a genuine rags-to-riches tale.
Less heartwarming, less palatable but still very good, Foley Is Go(o)d (****) finds him including as an appendix a long essay in the defense of wrestling. It actually makes for fascinating (and educational, honestly) reading, but more enjoyable is the accounts of the closing overs of his full-time wrestling career.
For his first novel, Mick wrote the dark, moving Tietam Brown (*****) about a mutilated, abused young man who meets his first love. It’s unremittingly bleak, but at times quite beautiful, and Foley’s writing talents definitely translate from non-fiction into fiction. The book bombed, which is unfortunate because he really has got a knack for it – shame that his only other novel, Scooter, centres on baseball and as such may as well be about quantum physics for all my interest in it.
I once met Mick briefly at a stand-up show and said I’d wanted to bring a copy of Tietam with me to sign. His look of shock was depressing, because it really is the best thing he’s written.
After a part-time wrestling comeback in the mid-2000s, Foley returned to autobiography with The Hardcore Diaries (**), as Mick joked, tying him with Winston Churchill in number of self-penned memoirs. This time he specifically focused on a specific period of time, when he had many creative differences with World Wrestling Entertainment and its head honcho, Vince McMahon.
This time round Mick, always a lovable, cuddly figure despite his history of falling through burning tables and barbed wire, comes across as a little bitter in a book that devotes too many pages to his charity work and makes it appear like he hates his wrestling contemporaries. It’s the only one of his autobiographies I don’t own – I got it from the library and I’m pleased I did.
Mick bounced back with yet a fourth memoir, Countdown To Lockdown (***). Freed of his contract with WWE, Mick lets rip – although by all accounts Vince would let him write anything he wanted anyway. It’s a fascinating insight into Mick’s separation from WWE.
The book recounts Mick’s creative renaissance in Total Nonstop Action Wrestling in a feud with Sting, his old WCW rival from nearly 20 years before. It ably demonstrated how good he still was with some creative freedom and a live mic even 15 years after his prime.
Wrestling may never be respected – but anyone who’s a skeptic about the industry, anyone who’s already a fan, or anybody who just loves a real Rocky-style underdog story playing out should check out Mick’s books – Have A Nice Day! for something real, Tietam Brown for some pitch-black, coming-of-age fiction.