10 Times WWE's Fake World Got Dangerously Real
6. Royal Rumble 1999
In various interviews conducted over the years, Mick Foley has provided a harrowing account of the ravaged state in which wrestling has left him.
Speaking with TSN’s Off The Record in 2010 - at which time Foley had just finished up as an active competitor - Foley revealed that, in his day-to-day existence, he felt like he was “submerged underwater” as a result of his extensive history with head injuries. He had “not felt sharp” for a long time. Under the belief that he could still go, he attempted to get medical clearance ahead of a worked shoot programme with Dean Ambrose premised on the unreachable, dangerous precedent Foley had set in his career. Foley, to Ambrose, had “ruined a generation”. It was all too real: Foley was so broken that he was disqualified from returning. A world-renowned neurologist refused to clear him, and he had suffered skeletal damage so severe that he had shrunk by three whole inches.
By 2020, as revealed to ESPN, he was caught in a nigh-on impossible situation. He needed to manage his pain through light exercise, but the solution was as arduous as the problem. Completing 10 push-ups in one day felt like he’d been “in a car accident”.
The Rock wasn’t solely to blame for this, very obviously - he was acting in accordance with WWE creative and profound neurological damage is suffered over years and years - but the events of the 1999 Royal Rumble certainly didn’t help. Then again, Foley might still feel this way if he’d ended his career in WCW.
Rock, in his bid to make an indefatigable man quit, brained Foley relentlessly with a spree of vicious, unprotected chair shots to the back of the head - several more than was agreed-upon.
It was an effective device - Rock evolved into a main event killer heel ahead of his WrestleMania XV programme with Steve Austin - but it was an unsettling scene, a seesaw that elevated one man’s career and helped to ruin another’s physical wellbeing.