Mick Foley sat down with Stew Myrick and Justin Simmons of “Sports Guys Talking Wrestling” while he was in Austin, TX on his “Nice Day Tour” which just kicked off this month. The only New York Times Best Selling Author to be thrown 15 feet off a steel cage shared what inspired him to do a tour regarding his groundbreaking book and cites Bruce Springsteen as a motivator:
“Well, 20 years is a nice round number. The people who were in their late teens and early twenties. Late teens early twenties was my demographic. Like Rock for example about three or four years younger than mine. That’s just the way the demographics now. So those people are now are in their late 30s, early 40s and the book still means a lot to people and I knew Bruce Springsteen was doing a tour where he was telling stories from a book he had just written but it was different because it was Bruce telling the stories and I read that. I read a review and I was like, ‘Maybe I should do that with my book?’ And therefore people aren’t going, ‘Well, what’s he going to talk about? Is he gonna talk about current events, is he gonna tell jokes?’ It’s like, ‘No. I tell you stories you already know.’ My hope is that would bring people in instead of keeping them home, but the jury’s still out. We got three shows and things are going really good and people are having a good time and because the book is so extensive, I can do different stories on different nights so people could conceivably come to three or four different shows and not hear the same show twice.”
Foley also spoke as to what was the most rewarding aspect of the writing process for him back twenty years ago when he just considered writing the book a cathartic experience.
“Well, the reason that this book is so special is no one thought it was going to sell, myself included. And so it was more about gaining some closure in my career and I wrote it in 50 days by longhand, it was close to 200,000 words and it seemed crazy that a wrestler was writing his own book and nobody thought it was going to be successful and then fans, it was like, they clearly had some help from WWE, but it was something they wanted to read and they made a difference, they carry it with them. I hear stories all the time about why this book was special to them. I’ll open it up, 18, 19 years later, in this case, 20 and you’ll see that it was like the big gift for Christmas 1999 and the parents have put an inscription in there. It just touched a lot of people and I think that it specifically found an audience with people who didn’t feel like they fit in. Of course, a lot of other people read it but it really resonated with young men and women who did not feel like they had a place and then they suddenly felt like they did.”
(Transcription credit should go to @DominicDeAngelo of WrestleZone)
You can listen to the entire episode of “Sports Guys Talking Wrestling” below:
RELATED: Mick Foley: There’s Never Been A Better Time To Be A Fan Or Wrestler
