On this week’s “Foley Is Pod,” Mick Foley talked about getting the idea to do the ‘Hangman’ spot which resulted in losing his ear, and discussed matches being planned in advance vs in the ring.
Mick Foley talking about where he got the idea to do the ‘Hangman’ spot that eventually ripped his ear off in Germany in 1994:
“As far as the Hangman, I had taken note of it the first time in a magazine where Exotic Adrian Street and Randy Savage, and it was Randy who did the Hangman. I never saw Randy do the Hangman one single time in WWE or WWF. But it was a photo of the Hangman,” Foley said.
“Then it was the movie, ‘I Like to Hurt People.’ There were a lot of wrestlers in it. It told the story about a guy who had been decapitated using the Hangman. Then I saw Don Muraco do it in a really creative way as a count out. So he was counted outside the ring.”
“Back then with the VCR, you pause and frame by frame it. You have to make it look like it’s part of your natural motion. You have to, in flying motion, use your body’s momentum and that bottom arm to twist that second rope over that top rope and now you’re hanging. I was doing this as far back as ‘86 because it was one of those things that I could do that required timing and momentum, not pure athletic skill.”
“Prior to Germany, I had been stitched up on late night hospital visits about four times for that same move, and I’ve probably been patched up another five or six times backstage.”
Foley talking about matches being planned in advance vs being called in the ring:
“I’ll tell you that I had three matches in the entirety of my career that were planned out from A-Z, and two of them were in the top 5 matches of my career,” he said.
“Although that wasn’t the way I preferred to do it, I had a lot of success when I did it that way. Honestly in today’s environment with the high-def and the cameras up in your face and having to do complex things, I don’t see how you could just call it in the ring. I think that’s a bygone era.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit “Foley Is Pod” with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
