10 Great WWE Moments We Came Agonisingly Close To
6. Dean Ambrose Vs. Mick Foley
Mick Foley last appeared in a WWE ring, in a physical capacity, at the 2012 Royal Rumble to perform a comedy routine with Santino Marella. The joke was as broad as it gets: both men wear things on their hands, and so attacked one another wearing those things on their hands.
It hardly informed Foley’s awesome, brutal in-ring legacy, but it was a depressingly fitting end to it all the same: in his latter years, younger fans would be forgiven for thinking Foley was only a comedy character throughout the Attitude Era. A visible, shuffling shell of his former self, he made several of these lame cameo appearances as both the product and his aura became PG.
This almost wasn’t the end.
WWE engineered a confrontation between Foley and a then unheard of Dean Ambrose over WrestleMania XXVIII weekend. This dishevelled, unhinged stranger was unsettling in his proximity to Foley, whom he accused of destroying a generation with his dire escalation of pro wrestling violence.
A failed medical meant we never did see what promised to be a fascinating sequel to Foley’s wars with Randy Orton and Edge, only exacerbated in emotion through Foley’s husk of a body and Ambrose’s documented, CZW insanity—but the alternative was better.