Mick Foley made an appearance on Throwing Down w/ Renee & Miesha to discuss his feud with Randy Orton in 2004.
During it, he recalled pitching the program with Orton to Vince McMahon and the angle where Orton spit in the face of the Hardcore Legend. The actual angle took place in 2003, but it later led to a Handicap Match at WrestleMania 20 and their hardcore match at Backlash.
“Back in 2003, I called Vince McMahon with an idea. I said, ‘I’ve got this idea for me and Randy Orton.’ He had a yellow legal pad and he was taking down all these notes. By the time the meeting was over, we had this idea for me and Randy. It was all about me being the first guy to walk away from a match, just to have a crisis of confidence and basically, I guess chicken out would be one expression. Vince didn’t want me to do it.”
“Stephanie called me up and said, ‘We’re gonna have Evolution attack you.’ I said, ‘Why? What happened to me stepping out on the match?’ She said, ‘My dad doesn’t think the fans will ever forgive you.’ I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to call your dad.”
“I called Vince and he said, ‘I think you just worked so hard. I’d hate to have the fans rebel on you that way.’ I said, ‘Vince, you’re a big fan of westerns, right?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Go back and watch Shane and tell me how good that movie is if he accepts the challenge the first time, because the entire movie is predicated on this guy finding that deep, dark part of his soul that he thought he left behind.’”
“They went with my idea, but I had to talk Randy into spitting on me on camera. He did not want to do it. Then he finally said, ‘What if I just pretend, like I won’t really spit on you?’ I said, ‘Randy, this is one of the most important moments of your career. You need to dig down as deep into your lungs as you can and the people need to see that residue’ Proving he was a gamer, when it came time to do it, you would have never guessed that he was hesitating on that. He just dug it down deep. He launched that loogie and it was hanging all over me and it was awful, but it was exactly what we needed. So I think that that entire storyline was among the very best things that I’ve ever been part of.”
H/T to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription