On Insight with Chris Van Vliet, Mick Foley named his hardcore match against Randy Orton at Backlash 2004 as his all-time favorite.
“My favorite match was Backlash against Randy Orton… if he has a new favorite, I don’t want to know about it. He’s probably had better matches. But the idea of being in that spot, people ask me, you will just say you made somebody. No one person makes anybody. It takes a lot of people… it’s still up to him to knock it out of the park. And he did,” Foley said.
Foley said he canceled a speaking engagement just to be fresh for the match. “I actually canceled a talk at a community college so that I could come in the night before… I like people to be able to read between the lines… But in this case, I think it’s beneficial to know Randy came up to my room, and for only the second time my entire career, I had an A through Z plan… I don’t know if we could have had that type of match if I’d gone through that speaking engagement.”
He also credited Michael Hayes for getting them more time for the match. “And the other key factor is that Michael Hayes heard some of the things we want to do. He goes, ‘You’re going to need more time.’ So instead of rushing through, we had time to let things breathe. And it just felt really good,” Foley recalled. “My luggage was delayed for four hours. I did throw up in the parking lot of Tim Hortons in Edmonton, because my brain had jogged a little bit, but I made it back in time for Raw the next night, and it was like the fans looked at him like he was a completely different guy… Now, they turned him babyface in two weeks, which I thought was a big mistake, but it was hard not to like somebody who’d been through that type of ordeal.”
His Other “A-to-Z” Matches
Foley noted this was only the second match of his career that he planned from “A to Z.” The first was a match in FMW. “The street fight with Triple H. So when two of my five favorites are on that list, maybe I should have done more that way,” he said. “The only other one that was A to Z was when I got to Japan… It was Wing Kanemura, and he was a good worker… he had like five notebook pages written out in English. And I’m a guy who likes to have a lot of say… when I looked at this thing, I just, I like it. If you watch that match with Wing Kanemura, I had zero input in the creativity, but then it’s up to you as a performer to pull everything off.”
He also shared his memory of the thumbtack spot in the Street Fight with Triple H at the Royal Rumble 2000. “First of all, we weren’t supposed to do the tacks. Mr. McMahon said, No thumb tacks. And as soon as he walks away, Triple H says, Did you put the tacks under the ring? I was like [yeah]… it was like, Yeah, we’re going to go for it. And I thought to myself, Okay, okay, you could lose an eye, but imagine the pop. I just closed my right eye as tightly as I could, turned my face, and so there were a few sticking in there.”
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.
