As noted, the 20th anniversary of Mick Foley’s legendary Hell In A Cell match with The Undertaker at the WWE King Of The Ring 1998 pay-per-view milestone recently passed.
With that in mind, the WWE Hall Of Famer recently appeared as a guest on Chris Jericho’s Talk Is Jericho podcast for an in-depth interview. Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview.
On the bumps he took that night: “I told a couple of the biggest lies of my life that day. You know people have speculated that I knew the cage was gonna break the second time and the truth is that’s way too dangerous going through the cage on a chokeslam like that. It was supposed to tear. The big bump, the only thing is I had this image of being stuffed down a rabbit hole, it would give a little bit and then Taker was gonna push me down that hole and the big visual to me was I was gonna be hanging upside down. You know my arms are flailing and this and then the bump itself, it’s just I gotta be able to rotate, land on my hands and knees. Maybe a little riskier you know your wrist, your knee but nothing real major and I got approval for that and then I said, ‘hey what if I came off the top?’ and Vince said: ‘Absolutely not.’
Click Here: parramatta eels shirt
“I went into sell-mode and I went, ‘if I’m gonna drop an elbow off there and someone’s gonna move you would probably — I didn’t say probably, ‘you would let me do that, right?’ You know it’s leading the question and he goes, ‘I guess.’ I said, ‘it’s the same thing I’m in total control’ and then Taker looked at me and said, ‘you’ve been up there right?'” I said, ‘absolutely’ and both he and Vince said, ‘you feel comfortable?’ I said, ‘yeah absolutely.’ The truth was if I had gone on top of that cell… no way.”
On looking back at his mindset going into that legendary evening: “I don’t curse much out loud, I curse in my thoughts and what I was thinking when I got up there was, ‘you’ve gotta be f’ing kidding me.’ If I could have thought of a way to climb back down without destroying my career I would’ve done it. I also didn’t realize being a bottom-heavy guy who maxed out at like four pull-ups in sixth grade then I got considerably heavy. I had a tremendous time trying to get up that cell. Two of my fingers lost feeling for like two weeks just clinging on that thing and if you look at it my feet are just… I couldn’t get a foothold. Which is why every subsequent cell match has had footholds cut out. It was bad enough trying to get up there the first time, trying to get up there that second time after I had gone through the table. I don’t know how I did it.”
Check out the complete episode of Talk Is Jericho featuring the Mick Foley interview at Omny.fm.