It’s been a decade or so since I tackled Mick Foley’s sequel to the enchantingly irrepressible Have a Nice Day, Foley is Good (and the Real World is Faker than Wrestling), and I haven’t seen any WWE programming since WrestleMania XX eight years ago. However, I enjoyed Foley’s first two memoirs so much that I felt obligated to tackle his third, even if it meant that I would be reading about angles, matches and even a couple of young wrestlers that I knew absolutely nothing about.
As I began to breeze through the opening pages of The Hardcore Diaries, I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake in purchasing it. Unlike Foley’s previous autobiographies, this one is tightly focused on just one storyline, the hardcore legend guiding us through the evolution of one particular angle from his first flash of inspiration all the way up to its payoff several months later at the ECW One Night Stand pay-per-view. Yet despite never having seen the match that the book builds up to, before long I couldn’t tear my attention away from Foley’s zealous and brutally honest musings.
Not having been written with the benefit of hindsight, The Hardcore Diaries offers its readers ‘live’ access to Foley’s thoughts throughout the development of his ‘Edge and Foley versus Terry Funk and Tommy Dreamer’ ECW angle. At times he’s convinced that his idea is going to attain “wrestling immortality” for all those involved, yet at others he’s wishing that he’d never limped out of retirement to debase his legacy as the input of others has left his vision for One Night Stand so diluted and embarrassingly anodyne.
This book offers extraordinary insight into the inner workings of WWE, delving into the scripting process (and the politics that go hand in hand with it) in as much depth as some of the most illuminating wrestling exposés, but with a much more personable feel that Foley’s writing – and it is Foley’s writing, not some ghost’s (as is evidenced by a handful of editorially-overlooked typos) – can’t help but engender. The trade-off is that many of the diary entries lack the structure and direction of Have a Nice Day and Foley is Good, Foley’s thoughts often going off on as many tangents as an Al Snow promo.
As the diary entries themselves couldn’t sustain the book’s word count on their own, they are complemented by a superlative selection of Foley’s blogs written in the time between the publication of Foley is Good and The Hardcore Diaries. These are tactically strewn throughout the book, offering the reader a little reprieve from Foley’s frustrations about his ECW angle (and more often than not, those derailing it; Mr McMahon amongst them) and allowing the one-eared Long Islander to broach a number of ostensibly unrelated topics, such as his (then only mooted) dalliance with TNA; his ventures into the world of fiction; the good friends that he’s gained through his charity work; and, most memorably, his harrowing trips to Iraq and Afghanistan. The latter unwittingly proves to be one of the book’s highlights (or, indeed, lowlights), as Foley describes his unwillingness to adopt a desperate young child who’s been horrifically injured in an (entirely avoidable) domestic accident. It’s in moments like these that Foley sets himself apart from his peers – there is no pretence; no self-aggrandising agenda. He knows deep down that the right thing to do would be to adopt this child, take him back to States and use his good standing to try to help him salvage something of a life, but instead he just says “I can’t” – knowing full well that he really means “I won’t”. Why? Because for all of his hellacious feats; all of his championship reigns; and all of his uncanny abilities to win cheap pops through anthropomorphosised socks and location-based flattery, Mick Foley is only human - and that’s what makes his sincere scribblings such a pleasure to read.And so it seems that, even if you haven’t kept up with WWE programming for a very long time, Foley is still good – and the real world is still faker than wrestling; heart-breakingly so, in fact. We may now live in a world overpopulated by superstar autobiographies, most of which contain so little of note it’s astounding that they’ve managed to fill up a whole book, but Mick Foley has now managed to fill up three hefty hardback tomes - and I get the feeling that we’ve still barely scratched the surface with him.
