Mick Foley revealed on Curtain Jerkers with JBL and Conrad Thompson that the moment Vince McMahon ended his career (or what was supposed to be his final match) came when Foley told him he could not remember where he lived.
The conversation happened in Vince’s office in October 1999. Foley had gone to Vince to tell him he needed to retire because of mounting physical problems, including mobility issues and what he described as memory difficulties from years of hard bumps.
“I said to Vince, I said, I think I need to retire. Okay, why? I said, well, I’m having trouble mobility wise. Kids playing soccer, if they don’t kick it right to me, I can barely move side to side. He talked to me about my weight, and I said, Vince, I can’t remember where I lived some of the time. Right there, he goes, ‘You’ve just had your last match.'”
Foley said he had also been contributing to the problem by compensating for his reduced mobility in a way that made things worse. “I also started leading with my head to make up for the lack of mobility, and that was a mistake, and I was paying the price for it, because I was kind of forgetting things.”
“Had it not been for Steve having the neck injury, that would have been my last match. And then there was a sense, like, can we pull together for the good of the team? He met with me and Hunter, I think at the Garden, and asked if I thought I could have at least one more good match in me.”
Foley said the resulting program with Triple H was exactly what both men needed. “Hunter was already a huge star, but he’d done it on a tag team level, and within a group with DX, and he was looking for that opponent he could walk through hell with, and I was looking for somebody who could raise me up and let me ride off into the sunset with something I could really be proud of. We did the first one at the Garden, second one in Hartford, Hell in a Cell, and it was really a great, it was just a best case scenario for both people.”
The interview comes as Foley has returned to the national wrestling spotlight. He is now signed with AEW and was involved in a segment with MJF on the Double or Nothing pre-show on May 24, a program that had been discussed as far back as August 2024 when Foley revealed the two had a secret meeting in which MJF pitched what Foley called “six great weeks of TV.” He also took a bump at GCW’s Immortal Clusterf*ck during WrestleMania weekend in April, his first since suffering a concussion during training in 2024 that had shelved the MJF plans. Foley said publicly after Double or Nothing that he was “genuinely happy” to be part of AEW.
If you use quotes from this article, please credit Curtain Jerkers with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
