Mick Foley’s WrestleMania Matches – Ranked from Worst to Best

source// wwe.com

In many ways, Mick Foley’s legendary professional wrestling career is the greatest story in the game. He was the real people’s champion, the guy we saw on our TV screens that made us think it could be possible. He wasn’t a bodybuilder, he wasn’t built like an adonis, he wasn’t really larger-than-life. He was the professional wrestler we so desperately needed.

He also got more character development than most during his time in WWF/E. He entered as Mankind, but also performed as Dude Love, Cactus Jack and just good old Mick Foley. He won championships and was involved in some of the most memorable moments in professional wrestling history. I would wager that his infamous Hell in a Cell match against The Undertaker is still many people’s go-to match when trying to introduce new people to this wonderful sport.

Which makes it all the more surprising that Foley’s WrestleMania career comes wth little fanfare. He only took part in six Manias, three of which were tag matches. He appeared in the main event of the Showcase of the Immortals, but even that was a four-way battle. Truthfully, his WrestleMania moment didn’t come until long after his best days had gone.

Even so, Mick Foley is as important a professional wrestler as there has been, and his WrestleMania back catalogue deserves a look at.

6. Vs. The Big Show – WrestleMania XV

Despite Mankind and Big Show being two of the most legendary names in modern professional wrestling, their middle of the card battle at WrestleMania XV existed purely to further the story for the main event. The winner of this match would get the privilege of going on to referee the top match between Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock. 

As it transpired, neither man would receive that most illustrious of awards. Mankind won the match via disqualification, after Big Show chokeslammed him through a pair of chairs. This was a pretty dumb move, and Vince McMahon came out to berate Show and his stupidity. This led to Mr. McMahon getting knocked out for his troubles. 

As the match itself only mattered in relation to the main event, there was absolutely nothing of any note to the bout. Two men worked within themselves in order to get to the finish, the extremely dumb finish, to advance a different story. If you missed this match, you missed nothing.

5. W/Vader Vs. Owen Hart & The British Bulldog – WrestleMania 13

For a while, it seemed like Owen Hart & The British Bulldog were going to be WWF Tag Team Champions forever. They held the belts for almost 300 days, an absolute lifetime to an 11-year-old fan. The tag team cupboard was fairly bare at the time, meaning their challengers at the biggest show of the year in 1997 were the fairly ramshackle team of Mankind and Vader. 

It’s indicative of how poorly these two legends of WCW (at the time) were thrown into a tag team title match at WrestleMania when The Sultan and Ahmed Johnson received actual story-driven matches. The whole thing wasn’t helped at all by the fact that all four men were heels too. Would Rocky Maivia not have benefited more from defending his IC title against Mankind or Vader? 

Anyway, booking questions aside, the match was absolutely fine. The bout ends in a double countout, fairly usual nothingness booking of the times in an attempt to ‘protect’ everyone. The match did get Mankind over as a hell for leather brawler though, and in some way may have worked towards his eventual acceptance as a super babyface. The stiffness of Foley and Vader mean the match is pretty hard-hitting and fun, but the inherent pointlessness of it drags it down.

4. Vs. Triple H Vs. The Rock Vs. Big Show – WrestleMania 2000

The first WrestleMania of the new millennium saw Mick Foley make his one and only appearance in the main event of wrestling’s biggest show. For most this would come with a great deal of celebration and adulation, but Foley’s appearance leaves something of a confused, mixed taste in the mouth.

You see, he had been retired a month earlier by Triple H. Now of course, this is professional wrestling and the word ‘retirement’ rarely has any meaning, but most tend to leave it longer than a month before returning to the ring. This cheap feeling was exacerbated by the overriding belief that Foley was in the match for the benefit or the McMahon family and wrestling’s constant obsession with symmetry. Foley allowed Linda to get involved, and suddenly there was a McMahon in every corner.

All of which sounds like an argument against Foley being in a WrestleMania main event, a claim that could not be further from the truth. Out of the four men involved, nobody deserved it more than Mick Foley, and he was a performer that professional wrestling !*$% well needed in a WrestleMania main event. It’s just a shame that it came in these circumstances.

The match itself was a lot of fun, with Triple H retaining the title due to McMahon shenanigans. Has anyone used the term McMahonigans to describe that yet?

3. W/Chainsaw Charlie Vs. New Age Outlaws – WrestleMania XIV

I was hugely into this feud as a teenager. The introduction of Cactus Jack was a big turning point for me as a Foley fan, and for a long time Cactus was my favourite wrestler in the entire world. When the New Age Outlaws tossed Cactus and Chainsaw Charlie off the stage as they lay prone in a dumpster, I was on the edge of my seat waiting to find out what had happened to my heroes.

All of this led to a Dumpster Match between the two teams at WrestleMania XIV, with the tag team titles on the line. Looking back, it was this feud that gave the Outlaws the credibility that they needed at the time. Foley and Funk were willing to bump big time for BA Billy Gunn and the Road Dogg, making them look legitimate in the process.

The match between the two teams at WrestleMania XIV certainly wasn’t a technical classic, but neither did it need to be. It was a violent plunderfest typical of the time, with two of the all-time greats going up against two young upstarts. Cactus and Charlie pulled out the win in the end, but their joy was shortlived as the Outlaws regained the titles the next night on RAW. 12-year-old me was gutted.

2. W/The Rock Vs. Ric Flair, Randy Orton & Batista – WrestleMania XX

Foley returned to the big stage for the first time in four years at WrestleMania XX, lining up alongside The Rock (back for the first time in a year) to take on Ric Flair, Randy Orton and Batista. This match was a vehicle for the blossoming Orton/Foley feud, one which would truly put Orton on the map. It was this feud that gave birth to the Legend Killer.

Foley and Orton would put on some great matches, but in many ways it is the novelty factors at play in this bout that made it as fun as it was. In Foley, Flair and Rock you have three legitimate all-time greats, and Orton and Batista were clearly on their way to being major players in the company at this time. Has there ever been a WrestleMania match in the middle of the card with more world championships within it?

Foley would eat the loss here, taking an RKO from Orton to continue their beef. Considering the ring rust on his team and the relative inexperience of the opposition (minus Flair of course), this match exceeded all expectations.

1. Vs. Edge – WrestleMania 22

Professional wrestling is a strange thing. By WrestleMania 22 Mick Foley had retired and returned on a number of occasions, but it seemed that he was done. His involvement was limited to authority angles and special guest referee spots by this point. It would be one of the latter that would lead to him finally getting his WrestleMania moment.

Edge had cashed in his Money in the Bank briefcase on John Cena to finally win his first world title, only to lose it in the rematch, only for Edge to lose his subsequent rematch. The ref for that match? Mick Foley. Sure, it wasn’t the most creative way to spark a WrestleMania feud, but both men were determined to steal the show and steal the show they did. 

As far as plunderfests go, this had it all. Both men were busted open, thumb tacks were introduced and slammed into, ol’ Barbie got an airing and the whole thing ended with a flaming table and an apron spear. Only in wrestling can an iconic moment involve two men going through a table that is up in flames.

One of the great things about the match is that the spots made sense. There was no plunder for plunder’s sake, with both men giving the crowd a reason to care about the violence outside of the mere existence of the violence. In many ways, this is an underrated exercise in professional wrestling psychology, something that Foley was without doubt a master of.

This was also far and away Mick Foley’s finest WrestleMania match.

share one of yours in the comments below.

10 Wrestlers Too Crazy for WWE

source// wwe.com

One has to be a little bit crazy to take on the grueling schedule and immense physical pain that one suffers as part of their job in professional wrestling, but every once in a while, there are those wrestlers so absolutely crazed that their prospects for ever making it to WWE are diminished significantly. That, or they have to undergo significant changes in character to make it to the grandest stage in wrestling, oftentimes setting aside the elements of their act that earned them fame and recognition.

Some succeed in spite of leaving their craziness behind. Others faltered, their weaknesses as wrestlers exposed without the facade of hardcore to hide behind.

Still, others embraced their crazy selves, perfectly content with traveling the world and brutalizing opponents with chairs, forks, tables and other plunder.

Regardless of which side of the proverbial fence they fall on, there is one thing they all have in common: they were too crazy for WWE.

With Dean Ambrose prepared to headline WrestleMania 32, his shift from death match wrestler to WWE Superstar complete, relive some of the most violent, balls-to-the-wall wrestlers to ever lace a pair of boots. Most never achieved the notoriety in wrestling’s greatest promotion that The Lunatic Fringe has.

One has.

10. Sabu

Dubbed “Homicidal, Genocidal and Suicidal” for his willingness to sacrifice his body while punishing his opponents, Sabu earned a reputation for being one of the most chaotic wrestlers on the planet. He was also must-see, a performer whose extraordinary risks were absolutely captivating. Above all, Sabu was violent. His body was scarred from years of crashing through tables and competing in barbed wire matches. He specialized in hardcore matches, those bouts in which he could use weapons and high spots to camouflage that his body was a mangled mess of bruises, broken bones and torn muscles.

Unfortunately for him, the call from WWE asking him to be part of the ECW revival on SyFy would force him to change his style and in the process, expose his flaws.

At that point in his career, Sabu was a grizzled veteran who needed the spectacle of his high-flying assaults and hardcore style to mask the fact that he was well past his prime. His work had become sloppier than ever and without the plunder present in every match, a Superstar once labeled “extraordinary” had become extremely ordinary.

Sabu had to change his style to fit the WWE mold in 2006. Sure, he still used the occasional table but everything that had helped make Sabu a sensation among die-hard wrestling fans a decade earlier had been stripped away and the result was a failure of a run with the biggest wrestling company on the planet.

9. Bruiser Brody

One would never know it from looking at him, but Bruiser Brody (real name: Frank Goodish) was a man of great intellect. That was never portrayed on television, though. Instead, he was a wild and chaotic brawler, the godfather of what would eventually become hardcore wrestling. During the height of his popularity, he made occasional appearances in the World Wide Wrestling Federation under Vincent J. McMahon but as the New York territory shifted from the old school days and into a more family-friendly, widely accepted form of entertainment, tolerance for Brody’s act lessened significantly.

He would remain immensely popular, working countless territories including Fritz Von Erich’s World Class promotion, Bob Geigel’s Central States Wrestling and Verne Gagne’s American Wrestling Association. He even had a stint with the National Wrestling Alliance. But he never achieved the success in New York that he never experienced the success in New York that would have launched him into households across the globe, his wild and violent style too much for McMahon and company.

8. Abyss

Abyss is to modern day wrestling what Abdullah the Butcher was to his era. He is a menacing and despicable wrestler, one who will not hesitate in the slightest to pick up a barbed wire baseball bat or lay down a bed of thumbtacks to inflict pain upon opponents. Unlike The Butcher, he is not a niche wrestler. He can hang with the best wrestlers on the planet, as he has done countless times in TNA. Whether he was battling Kurt Angle or bumping around the squared circle for AJ Styles, Abyss proved himself far more than a brawler.

Unfortunately, his resume of blood-soaked wars has cost him an opportunity to shine under the bright lights of WWE. At age 42, and with a body wracked with injuries and daily pains from the grind of his physical style, he is not quite the worker he once was.

Today, he functions best in a tag team environment, where his body can take half of the pain and punishment it once did. Considering the fact that his body has been beaten down so long that he almost has to lean on the hardcore style, the time for an Abyss run in the greatest sports-entertainment empire ever has come and gone.

7. Sandman

The Sandman was one of the pillars of the original ECW, a cane-swinging, beer-drink, chain-smoking son-of-a-gun whose “Enter Sandman” theme song by Metallica and captivating entrance was 99-percent of his act. A truly awful traditional wrestler, hardcore wrestling was his crutch. It masked his obvious weaknesses and allowed him to become one of the most buzzed-about stars in the industry during the mid-to-late 1990s.

When WWE came calling in 2006 for the ECW relaunch, the Metallica was gone, the cigarettes disappeared and he was left to flounder in singles and tag team matches that exposed him.

The Sandman as fans knew and loved him would never exist in Vince McMahon’s company. It was too extreme, too crazy for the brand of entertainment the once-visionary promoter preferred. In a sense, Sandman was neutered for the masses, much to the dismay of fans who once were so passionate about his revolutionary character.

6. Kevin Sullivan

Depending on the time and territory, Kevin Sullivan’s character regularly bordered on the satanic, the occult or the masochistic. For pretty obvious reasons, it is no surprise he never had a sustained run in WWE. There are some who dislike his ring work, others who never really invested in his unique brand of villainy. Others loved the darker, almost supernatural edge he brought to his act. He was one of the first to really introduce that element to the sport, a predecessor of The Undertaker.

Unfortunately, there was never a time at the height of Sullivan’s in-ring career where Vince McMahon understood the value of that crazed, deranged character. It would not be until The Phenom made his debut at the 1990 Survivor Series that he would get the importance of a character that stretched the realm of possibility and believability.

Sullivan’s strange and unconventional method of storytelling, and his dark and disturbing persona, proved far too crazy for WWE.

His higher ranking position in WCW throughout the 1990s did not help matters.

5. The Original Sheik

In 2007, World Wrestling Entertainment inducted the late Original Sheik into its Hall of Fame. An influential wrestler who is recognized as one of the godfathers of hardcore wrestling, the celebrated performer (real name: Ed Farhat) more than earned the induction. This, despite the fact that he had only wrestled a handful of matches for Vincent J. McMahon in the late 1960s. Those matches, mostly contested against Bruno Sammartino, and including a Death match, introduced The Sheik to the northeast and exposed him to a new audience unfamiliar with his exploits.

Unfortunately, his crazy brawling style prevented him from enjoying a sustained run in the promotion.

He would continue to enjoy success in Detroit, his home city, and Los Angeles, where he battled the great Freddie Blassie in many a hardcore bloodbath. His legacy would forever live on in his nephew, Sabu, who would carry on the family tradition of violent brawls in arenas across the globe.

He may have been too crazy for WWE but unlike others on this list who either became watered down shells of themselves, were forced to alter their style styles completely or had incomplete careers as a result of not competing for Vince McMahon’s company, Sheik thrived. His influence on the industry will live forever and will be on display at WrestleMania 32 when Dean Ambrose battles Brock Lesnar in a match that he would undoubtedly be proud of.

4. James Mitchell

Whether he went under the name of The Sinister Minister in ECW, Father James Mitchell in TNA or Daryl Van Horne in Smoky Mountain Wrestling, the performer known for his high intellect and compelling promos is a favorite of the Internet. The way he carries himself, the conviction with which he spoke and the expanded vocabulary that he used helped elevate his performance beyond that of the typical yelling, belligerent manager. He was cerebral, his words chosen carefully and fit into every line of his promos. He was a step above most of the people he worked for intellectually, which means he could talk about things and people without his employers having any clue.

Which made him an incredibly dangerous performer.

As Van Horne in SMW, it was not uncommon for him to throw in a reference to a sexual act or even name drop an adult film star. As both The Sinister Minister and Father James Mitchell, he flirted with good taste while discussing religion. In fact, it was only during his time in WCW as James Vandenberg that he was subdued, mostly because he was never allowed to cut a promo longer than absolutely necessary to get charge Mortis’ feud with Glacier over.

Mitchell was far too big of a risk, far too “crazy” for WWE, who never felt the urge to bring him into the fold no matter how talented a talker he was or how valuable he could be when it comes to getting young talent over.

3. Mick Foley

Today, Mick Foley is a world renowned wrestler, a performer whose lovable personality is as celebrated as his three world championships and countless classic matches. He is also known as “that guy who flew off the cell,” fair to his reputation or not. What today’s fans tend not to remember are the incredibly violent matches that Foley competed in prior to arriving in Vince McMahon’s company. His wars with Terry Funk, which went as far as to include explosives, were the stuff of tape trading legend. Die hard wrestling fans would seek out the matches, then sit in mesmerized silence as they watched Foley (under the guise as Cactus Jack) sacrifice his body for the sake of building his legacy.

Foley would have to drastically adjust his style when he signed with WWE. The crazed and maniacal Cactus Jack disappeared and in his place was Mankind. While Foley would continue to inject hardcore into the company, it was slightly more subdued than before. And it certainly was not as frequent. He would be forced to approach each match with a more cerebral take, using crowd psychology and character traits to get over rather than barbed wire and fire.

Sure, the street fights and Hell in a Cell matches are memorable but they are the exception rather than the rule when reliving Foley’s WWE stint.

2. New Jack

New Jack was as violent a wrestler as there was during the 1990s and into the new Millennium.

As one-half of The Gangstas, he instigated protests in Tennessee and the surrounding areas, members of the NAACP unhappy with the way they were portrayed and the violence they brought to the shows. From there, they made the jump to ECW, where New Jack fit right in with the hardcore nature of the promotion. Notorious for slicing his opponents open with knives or elongated razors, he earned a reputation as one of the craziest wrestlers in the industry.

His involvement in the Mass Transit Incident, in which he was directly responsible for the bloodletting of an unlicensed, underage young man whose documentation was falsified. Regardless of whether the kid should have been in the ring or not, he did not deserve the bloody results and hospitalization that came from the punishment dealt to him that night.

That New Jack has gone on to admit to wanting to kill Vic Grimes for injuries suffered during one of his infamous balcony dives, then tried to make good on that desire while in XPW, proves just how unstable he is.

Is it really any surprise that, even during the height of the Attitude Era, Vince McMahon and company never bolstered their roster by signing New Jack?

1. Abdullah The Butcher

Abdullah the Butcher is the definition of a niche wrestler. By no means does that diminish everything that he accomplished during his years as a competitor, or the fact that he was a great special attraction. But Abdullah was never anything more than a crazed and bloody-thirsty wrestler who got over on his ability to brawl around ringside, act like a crazed madman and open wounds on his opponent’s foreheads. He used his trusty fork to draw blood.

He never exhibited anything even remotely close to a penchant for actual wrestling. He had one thing he did really well, and made a lot of money while doing it, but that one thing did not fit the tone of WWE’s product. It worked on the territorial level, where Abdullah could move from one place to another, keeping his crazy violent persona fresh. On a nightly basis, working for Vince McMahon, his craziness would have worn thin quick and his weaknesses would have been exposed.

Just as they were with Sandman and Sabu two decades later.