Mick Foley recently talked about a wide range of topics on his Foley is Pod, available via AdFreeShows.
During it, the WWE Hall Of Famer talked about the infamous “dumpster ride” he and Terry Funk took on an episode of WWE Monday Night Raw in early 1998 thanks to the New Age Outlaws. Here are the highlights:
How the stunt did not look painful enough:
“And then dropping the elbow into a dumpster that seemed to be filled to the brim with the packing peanuts. We could have relied on some cardboard boxes in there, you know? That’s a lot of packing peanuts in there, brother. What I should have done, what I should have insisted, was that instead of Terry and I staying down for the count? I think it would have been good if I came up with guns blazing, “bang bang,” and get taken out with a nice — not that I’d advocate a chair shot to the head now, but in keeping with them times — a chair shot to the head, or maybe boom-boom, nailing both me and Terry. Giving us reason to be selling something that otherwise did not look devastating enough to have us both down for the period of minutes.”
Talking Vince McMahon out of doing it himself:
“Vince McMahon had to be talked out of taking the dumpster bump earlier in the day (laughing). He wanted to do it himself (laughing). I was like, Vince, you own and run this company. We don’t know what’s going to happen. What happens if you’re badly hurt? ‘Mick, I would never want any of you to do something that I wouldn’t be willing to.’ I pulled him over to the side, I was like, it’s my gimmick. You’ll kill my gimmick if you’re taking the same bumps.”
How the bump didn’t match the response to the story:
“I’m glad he didn’t. Plus, if we’d seen how bad it looked… it didn’t look bad-bad, but it didn’t look good enough to merit the attention it received, where the show was essentially shut down almost, and people were crying as if they’d seen the last of us. Sunny did a great job of conveying her concern. It just would have been better suited for something that looked more devastating.”
Knowing it wasn’t good when he wasn’t hurt:
“It’s still a dumpster, it’s still something that hasn’t been done before. We still don’t know how it’s going to turn out. There was like a rope for us to hold onto, so we wouldn’t just be thrown about inside of it. Our initial reaction was… that didn’t hurt enough to look good. I know that’s a terrible way of looking at it, but I was not a master illusionist. Usually if something looked like it hurt, it’s because it did. It didn’t hurt enough to look good, and I think the visual evidence
Quotes via 411 Mania
