Mick Foley

By Joel Stein

Mick Foley, a.k.a. the wrestler Mankind, is the author of Have a Nice Day and appears in the documentary Beyond the Mat.

Q. Now that you've retired, will you get some teeth put in?

A. Hell, no. The only person that matters in my dental decisions is my wife, and she thinks I look sexy this way.

Q. You keep a sock in your tights to asphyxiate opponents with. Is that the only sock down there?

A. I've never felt the need to artificially enhance what I've been given. I'm not fooling my wife. She's very aware of my physical limitations.

Q. You once beat someone with a Leonard Cohen CD. Were there no James Taylor albums?

A. Taylor's got enough publicity.

Q. Do you remember this wrestler who was doing Lenny from Of Mice and Men? He held a rabbit and petted it really hard.

A. Was that Evad, who was supposed to be Dave but he couldn't pronounce it because he had dyslexia? When we borrow, we try to borrow from literary greats like Steinbeck.

Q. You wrestled in Japan, where they use barbed wire, thumbtacks and explosives. What is wrong with those people?

A. You're talking about people who willingly flew their planes into battleships. I guess the stuff I did was considered noble. I considered it paying the mortgage.

Q. How angry are you that you lost your whole ear in a match, and Evander Holyfield got all that sympathy?

A. He was making like $32 million, and they stopped the fight. I was making $320, and we went on. He wears that little tiny chunk out of his ear like it's a badge of honor. That's not an injury.

Q. You lied to fans that you lost your teeth in a bout when you really lost them in a car accident. How can you live with yourself after fooling wrestling fans?

A. I think fooling wrestling fans is the whole point of doing this.

--By Joel Stein