In 1993 I met a beautiful Guatemalan woman named Claudia. She’d long black hair, a warm attitude, and an accent that mixed Guatemala with the Louisiana where she was raised. We went on three dates, one each weekend, and on the third we were married in a potluck wedding. There’s a whole story behind that for another time.
We married far too quickly. We barely knew each other, and it became clear we’d little in common, different friends, beliefs, backgrounds, and interests. Claudia and I became strangers in the same house, and a fourteen-year-old stepson didn’t make things easier. We all tried, and we couldn’t find much common ground. Until one day I was flipping channels and stumbled onto a wrestling match.
Grown men and steel chairs
I’d a vague sense that wrestling was fake and a little unsavory, but I stopped to watch. I’d wrestled a bit in high school, Greco-Roman style, and this was nothing like it. Claudia came up behind me and asked what I was watching. “I’m not sure. Wrestling, I think. But when I wrestled, we didn’t use steel chairs like that.” She sat down beside me and was instantly enthralled. She loved the drama built around the matches, the opera of it.
From that day on, we watched wrestling several times a week. Each evening we sat together and watched grown men hit each other with chairs, climb ladders, and fight in steel cages. It became the thing we shared, the common ground we hadn’t been able to find any other way.
Mankind
Which brings me to Mick Foley. He wrestled as Mankind, running out in a leather mask and acting as if he were insane. One night he fought the Undertaker in a cage match, one of the most brutal things I have ever seen. Foley scattered thumbtacks across the ring, the two fought on top of the cage, and the Undertaker threw him forty feet down onto a table. Paramedics came to haul him away, and he got up and the match continued.
Claudia and I watched everything after that. She became ill and largely bedridden but still loved it, cheering her favorites, Mick Foley, the Rock, Steve Austin, crying when they lost and screaming when they won. When she passed away in 2005, I stopped watching on television and started going to the live shows at the Staples Center, six or seven of them, until life got busy and wrestling faded from my mind.
What I learned from him
Years later I found Mick Foley’s book, Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks, and read it in a single weekend. His story is fascinating and his writing kept me hooked from the first page to the last. Later I bought the documentary about his career and watched it too.
Mick Foley is an inspiration, and here’s why. He started at the bottom, driving hundreds of miles every weekend to train with the best, working his way up until the WWE finally signed him. He built something unique. But he was far more than a wrestler. His book became a runaway bestseller selling millions of copies, and unlike nearly every celebrity, who use ghostwriters, he wrote it himself in longhand on dozens of yellow legal pads.
He wrote more books, wrestled until his body gave out, became a stand-up comedian, and gives his time and money to a range of causes. He is, by every account, a kind and generous person.
The next time you feel like you cannot make it, like your work is too hard, think about Mick Foley. He began with nothing but determination and built a remarkable life through work and persistence. Read his book, watch his documentary, and you’ll come away inspired. It might even make you better at whatever you do. It did that for me, and it came to me, of all places, through the wrestling that finally gave Claudia and me something to share.