Mick Foley ranked his top 5 worst injuries while having a chiropractic adjustment by Dr. Beau Hightower.
The WWE Hall Of Famer is known for the dangerous bumps and the damage he did to his body throughout his career. The list is losing his ear, torn abdominal muscle, right hip, his knee, and nearly losing both pinkies.
“Well, the most grisly would be the right ear that you can see it doesn’t look like the left ear. Lost that bad boy in Munich, Germany 20 years ago,” said Mick. “I never had developed cauliflower ear when I lost it, but that’s probably the number one injury. [The most painful injury] was a torn abdominal muscle. I was ashamed when I found out I hadn’t broken my pelvis because that’s what it felt like to me. So I did not know at the time that torn abdominal muscles ruin careers for football or hockey, because you lose the ability to explode, you know from the midsection. Now luckily, in wrestling, we can work around injuries.”
“My hip,” he continued. “I’d been told early on that, but by virtue of the fact that I was diving off ring aprons onto the concrete, that I was going to pay a price and I’ll be honest, had I known is going to be that severe — from probably 2004 through 2017. It was really, it was a pretty difficult existence. I would get on a plane and I would ask for a bottle of water right away, and I put the bottle of water full underneath my hamstring and I would roll it just to try to get the nerves firing up. So I would say the right hip, and then the right knee, which was awful. It was locked, I think it may be 18 degrees, maybe 27. I don’t know. But anyway, what happens with that is you stop walking correctly. Between the right leg locked up and the hip giving me so much trouble, you end up walking side-to-side to eliminate the pain in the nerves, and then you are basically waddling without realizing you’re wobbling. So that’s four and then for number five, it will we’ll just go with almost losing my pinkies both of them in a match in 1995.”
The pinky injuries occurred during the Barbed Wire Deathmatch with Terry Funk.
“This was my first ever no rope, Barbed Wire Japanese Deathmatch, and they’re definitely into the real stuff in Japan,” Mick said, referencing his 1995 King of the Deathmatch Tournament win. “You can’t fake them out by trying to fake them out. I tried that same move that cost me my ear. Looking back, maybe I should have taken that item off the menu after losing the ear, but I did it in the barbed wire, and the wire didn’t hold my weight and it ended up snagging me. So when I went down — there’s a photo of me sitting on the floor with both my pinkies caught with the wire. So that was one of the things it’s just… it just almost does away with your small fingers. So it was not — it was a deep hole but not, you know, comparatively, it seems like a minor injury. But it was pretty graphic at the time. So that’s my top five.”
H/T to Fightful for the transcription