10 Wrestlers So Good They Changed Vince McMahon's Mind
3. Mick Foley
Mick Foley had a good face, in structure and expression.
He was handsome in a dreamy way - those deep, brown eyes - but that mangled ear and premature grizzle lent him a badass aura, too. His face, in fact, visualised the fascination within the characters he played. He wasn't a grotesque freak - so why did he do the ungodly things he did? What torment drove him?
Vince didn't see it that way, on first impression.
"I don't like his face," he told Bruce Prichard, rather succinctly, which accounted for the character reinvention from Cactus Jack to the masked Mankind. Or 'Mason the Mutilator', the mercifully abandoned Such Good Sh*t demo version. Foley's masochistic work, laced with the credibility and balance of sadism, did so much to instantly elevate his main event-ready opponents. Foley impressed Vince almost as quickly; his psycho bumping and the canvas it represented coaxed the in-ring artistry from the Undertaker, who used that awesome debut series as inspiration and motivation to unleash the dormant super-worker within.
Foley in the years since elevated Triple H, Randy Orton and Edge to become perhaps pro wrestling's greatest ever star-maker.