On Insight with Chris Van Vliet, Mick Foley answered one of the most common questions about his career: in the Hell in a Cell match, what hurt more, the fall through the cage or the chair shot to the face?
“Chair to the face. I stopped kidding myself. I stopped wearing the bottom flipper. Because my feeling is, I know it’s not a good look,” Foley said. “My son, Huey, broke it to me this way, like eight years ago, ‘Dad, don’t take this the wrong way…’ and first of all, you know no sentence ends well [when they say that]. [He said] ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but you still kind of cool with your top teeth missing. Now you look like a crack addict.’ I said, ‘Son, I believe you were thinking of a meth addict, but point well taken.’ But my feeling is like, I know it’s not a good look, but it’s my look, and I earned it. So I don’t mind at all.”
The Story of the Tooth
Foley then recounted the story of that tooth, which was knocked in during the match and kept in a glass of milk. It was later repaired by a dentist who, Foley learned 20 years later, was the one on call in Pittsburgh that night. The tooth lasted about eight years before it needed to be removed.
“They started turning [a different] color. And you probably heard how people, guys in our business, will say, Well, I would do it, but would my character? And so my version of that is, I don’t mind having gray and blue gnarly teeth, but would Santa have gray and gnarly? No. So I pulled one out with a ball peen hammer and a pair of pliers. Because even though dentists will let children keep their teeth, for adults, it’s considered medical waste… I took one of them out, but I’ll admit the other one was too tough.”
Interrogated in Amsterdam
His famous dental work once led to him being interrogated at an airport in Amsterdam, an event Jay Lethal witnessed. “But yeah, I got interrogated in Amsterdam. I mean, if you have Jay Lethal on, ask him. My memory is that guns were at the ready. I finally was like, ‘Do you have a computer?’ And they said, Yeah. I said, ‘Can you Google Mick Foley Hell in a Cell.’ That’s my tooth.”
Foley said he has come to appreciate the match’s legacy. “I had a love-hate relationship with it… I realized, wow, this is even before I started really doing the conventions. I’m so lucky to have anything people remember me for after the fact, let alone, probably two or three things.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit Insight with Chris Van Vliet with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription. You can find the show on Chris Van Vliet’s YouTube channel and all major podcast platforms.
