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WWE Hall of Famer Mick Foley was recently on the Cigars, Scars and Superstars podcasts where he sat down for a chat with Terri Runnels and her co-host and daughter Dakota Runnels. Foley, who is notorious for his frugality was asked why he never bothered to get his teeth fixed, despite multiple teeth missing.
Foley responded,
“The two top teeth are like a trademark look. Even when I met Collette, she preferred the way I looked without them. I believe she threw the adjective sexy at me and that wasn’t something I was used to hearing. So, I would only put the tooth in when we were fighting. I had them at the time I had an ’84 Chrysler Lebaron. They still had the ashtray back then and I would keep the teeth in the ashtray. ‘I’ll put the teeth in,’ and it was literally, ‘Fine if that’s the way…fine.’ ‘It is the way it’s gonna be, alright.’ The other two were casualties of the Hell in a Cell match and so they were put back in.”
Foley then continued,
“They were knocked out in the Hell in a Cell. They were put back in, right? Over the course of time they started decaying and rotting. They weren’t new. They were the same teeth that were knocked out, but they were inserted back into my mouth. When I got back from the Hell in a Cell match they were in a glass of milk….what’s odd is that when I did the 20 years of Hell show in Pittsburgh, twenty years to the date, the dentist that put them back in was in the audience. He was on call and they said, ‘There was an accident. A wrestler’s coming in with teeth.’ There was not only those two. I have two more teeth that need to go twenty years after the fact. There are four teeth that are impacted.”
Foley then talked about his portrayal of Santa Claus and how that affected how he saw himself,
“As I started putting a lot of work into the most accurate portrayal of St. Nicholas that I could, I found myself saying, ‘I don’t mind having rotten grayish blue teeth, but Santa would.’ I couldn’t justify a portrayal that obviously included discolored teeth. It was one of those things that I wanted to, and some of you who watched Holy Foley saw, I gave my daughter one of my teeth as a piece of jewelry on a necklace. She has this. You’re either in or your not. There’s no half way as a dad (laughter). A child gets to keep their baby teeth. As an adult it’s called medical waste. I was like, ‘I want to keep those teeth.’ The one I was able to get out without much trouble and it was about the third day I was working on the other one with a hammer that my son Dewey came down and said, ‘Look, I have a friend whose father is in the dental field and he’ll let you keep your teeth,’ so I was able to make it out of that. Dewey is my youngest son. He’s a little firecracker and teller of truth and he said, ‘Dad, don’t take this the wrong way,’ and you know when someone begins a sentence with, ‘Don’t take this wrong way,’ it’s not gonna work out well. It’s like in the wrestling world when you say, ‘With all due respect’ or in the South when you say, ‘Bless his heart.’ Now you’re about to bury that guy. He goes, ‘Dad, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re still kinda cool. Now you look like a crack addict.’ I said, ‘Son, I believe you’re talking about a meth addict, but I get your point.”
Foley then proceeded to show the Runnels his teeth in detail.
Later Foley began to speak of the recipient of his tooth jewelry, his daughter Noelle,
“Noelle is doing a variety of things. Opportunities opened up because of Holy Foley. Her body was just not cut out for the wrestling business. It wasn’t. We went to the emergency room twice in the final week of filming. She dislocated her knee several months earlier. She wasn’t going to be able to keep up.”
Foley also talked about a recent encounter with developmental talent and how they reacted to his never smoking marijuana,
“The fact that I did not smoke marijuana made the other guys – and word started getting around, ‘I think this guy really is crazy.’ What? They’re like, ‘You have it in the car.’ I’m like, ‘No, no I don’t.’ Never have. Never smoked. Never have. ‘He’s legitimately insane.’
Foley was filled with wrestling related stories and shared a hilarious memory involving “Stone Cold” Steve Austin,
“I’ll jump ahead to ’96 and share a little Steve Austin story with you. involving Dewey and noise. We were in Bangor, Maine at a house show and they had wooden bleachers, a lot of noise. One of those 2,000 seaters where the atmosphere is great. Stone Cold looks out and he sees Dewey holding his ears. Dewey in ’96 would have been 3 and a half. Noelle was a year and a half old and he was like, ‘Oh damn…he’s been holding his ears the whole time?’ I said, ‘Not when you wrestled. He held his nose,’ and Steve popped big time. Big time! I remembered it for years.”
(Transcription Credit: Michael McClead, WrestleZone)
Foley shared more memories and tales from the world of professional wrestling. Readers can listen to Cigars, Scars and Superstars in its entirety below.
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Mick Foley
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Mick Foley
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Mick Foley
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