Mick Foley’s Hall of Fame wrestling career spans nearly 30 years with multiple world championship runs, memorable feuds and stints in some of the biggest wrestling promotions in the world.
But the one match nearly every wrestling fan associates the “Hardcore Legend” is his notorious Hell in a Cell match with The Undertaker at King of the Ring in 1998. Not only was Foley thrown off the top of the cell, but he managed to get back up, fight his way to the top of the cage again and get slammed through the roof down to the ring below (which was not planned).
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Thursday marked the 20-year anniversary of the match, and in a recent interview with Chris Jericho on his Talk is Jericho podcast, Foley revealed some of the lesser-known facts from behind the scenes of the event.
He admitted he didn’t remember much from after the match itself, but did recall a brief interaction with Vince McMahon before going to the hospital.
“You have no idea how much I appreciate what you have just done for this company but I never wanna see anything like that again,” McMahon told Foley.
Foley also said he wasn’t entirely truthful with McMahon when he and Undertaker were planning out the match.
“I told a couple of the biggest lies of my life that day,” Foley said. “You know people have speculated that I knew the cage was gonna break the second time and the truth is that’s way too dangerous going through the cage on a chokeslam like that. It was supposed to tear. The big bump, the only thing is I had this image of being stuffed down a rabbit hole, it would give a little bit and then Taker was gonna push me down that hole and the big visual to me was I was gonna be hanging upside down. You know my arms are flailing and this and then the bump itself, it’s just I gotta be able to rotate, land on my hands and knees. Maybe a little riskier you know your wrist, your knee but nothing real major and I got approval for that and then I said, ‘hey what if I came off the top?’ and Vince said, ‘Absolutely not.’”
“I went into sell-mode and I went, ‘if I’m gonna drop an elbow off there and someone’s gonna move you would probably — I didn’t say probably, ‘you would let me do that, right?’” he continued. “You know it’s leading the question and he goes, ‘I guess.’ I said, ‘it’s the same thing I’m in total control’ and then Taker looked at me and said, ‘you’ve been up there right?’”I said, ‘absolutely’ and both he and Vince said, ‘you feel comfortable?’ I said, ‘yeah absolutely.’ The truth was if I had gone on top of that cell… no way.”
