Mick Foley recently talked about a wide range of topics on his Foley is Pod, available via AdFreeShows including how he came up with the idea of pulling hair out of his head:
“I think it wasn’t until I actually made the debut that I shaved the divots out of my hair and decided Mankind was going to pull his hair,” he revealed.
“I’d been around people with emotional difficulties. Even back when I was a lifeguard, one of the children had big tufts of hair missing because she was a hair puller. Obviously, that’s a lot of pain. If someone who takes to pulling their own hair out, they are suffering emotionally on a big level. I thought, ‘Yea, that’s who my guy is.’”
“So he would express frustration when he didn’t get a pinfall by pulling out his hair. First of all, we taped or glued some clips of hair to the mask. That didn’t work. It didn’t look realistic. I had long hair at the time and it wasn’t particularly well treated, so there were a lot of dry ends. I found if I just pulled rapidly, instead of yanking from the skull, if I pulled the hair itself, that after six or seven of these, it was visible, and then it would float. It was this great thing where the floating is gentle like a butterfly in nature, but it’s being done by a madman who just pulled out his own hair. So even as the hair was floating through the air, I was now back on the offense.”
Quotes via WrestlingNews.co