Mick Foley was known as a wild and daring wrestler throughout his career, but in a recent episode of his “Foley is Pod” podcast, the legend details the price he’s been paying for some of his more incredible stunts.
During the latest episode of his podcast (via Wrestling News), Mick Foley discussed going to get neurological work done in 2012, when he was planning to return to WWE following a stint with TNA. However, while getting tests, Foley noted that those tests revealed massive damage the superstar had suffered during his in-ring professional career.
“He said, ‘We’ve been looking over your MRIs and your X-rays,” said Foley, before going on to reveal that he even lost three inches of height due to the damage. “You’ve got too many issues. You got muscular, neurological, skeletal, and even if we are able to help from a neurological standpoint, there’s nothing we can do with those other things.’ I’m looking at all these things I did during the course of my career and I mean, I’m paying a steeper price than I thought imaginable. I thought oh, yeah, of course my hips are going to be sore, my knees are going to be hurting, I’m going to be arthritic, but now I’m curved around like this, you know? I know saying tough times are relative. There’s other people who say, ‘I would trade lives with you. I’m getting up at 6am. I’m working two jobs to make ends meet.’ Nonetheless, this was pretty devastating for me and so I was going back to WWE in a really tough, dark place. It was a tough time for me. The concussions. Seeing the fallout. Seeing how much I lost in height.”
Mick Foley would go on to say that his MRI results were referred to as “a bad MRI” from his doctors, and that a separate doctor recommended that he never wrestle again. While Foley did pride himself on being able to perform in any way in the ring, he said that multiple doctors telling him to never wrestle again was all the convincing he needed to finally step away from the profession.
“I met with Dr. Cantu. I came back two weeks later,” Foley said. “He looks me in the eye and he says, ‘You should never wrestle again.’ I looked him in the eye and I said, ‘I can work an entire match around my left knee’, and I’m so proud of that. It’s almost like if I can’t have Here lies Mr. In Your House. No one came through bigger when it mattered less on my epitaph that I want, that I can work an entire match around my left knee because it showed me that doggone it, I was still one of the boys. Dr. Cantu looked at me and he said, ‘Mr. Foley, when we met two weeks ago, you struck me as a bright young man.’ It was his word, young. He said, ‘Since then, I’ve been reading about you. You have a lot going on for you.’ He looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘If you want to get another neurologist to clear you, that’s your business, but I’m telling you, you should never wrestle again.’ What that did, it was essentially a matter of throwing in the towel. There was somebody taking the bat out of my hand and I felt this enormous sense of relief. I really did.
“Literally a day, maybe two, after I talked to Dr. Cantu, it’s a day or two after the first meeting. I got a call from John Laurinaitis. He said, ‘There’s an issue with your impact test.’ So I did go back to that doctor as well, who also told me I should never wrestle again. So I’m thinking, that’s it. It’s not a knee. I walk around better than I used to because I had my hip replaced and my knee replaced. There’s no brain replacements. This is not something I wanted to toy around with.”
