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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.