"I wanted to be where the blood and guts were, Jimmy"

Mankind: "I was eight years old at Minnesaukee Elementary School playing a game of 'kill the guy with the ball' and in chasing one of the other students, I made a leap for his legs and the back of his foot kicked me in the lip. And I didn't know what happened; I knew it hurt, Jimmy, I knew it hurt bad, but all of a sudden people started looking at me in a different way like there was something wrong with me. I looked down at my Chicago Bears sweat-shirt -- back in the days when they were two and twelve, in the waning days of Dick Butkus -- and my Chicago Bears white sweatshirt had suddenly turned red and children were running from me, scared, ah, I was bleeding, I was in pain and I was loving it. Because I felt like I'd finally found something in my life that I could do better than everybody else. Handle pain. Someone said 'Oh, that's just vampire blood,' and then saw the open wound from which the blood was flowing.

I've still got that shirt, Jimmy, and I remember thinking: Wouldn't it be nice if I could do something in my life where I could do this all the time? Get that attention every night? Stockbrokers can't do it. Teachers can't do it. The President of the United States can't bleed for a living. But pro-wrestlers can! It's the first time that I realized that I had a calling in my life and I followed it right down the line. That's all I wanted to do. My brother and I watched them all: Chief Jay Strongbow, Bruno Sammartino, the Valiant Brothers, that's what we wanted to be. Then I broke his nose by backdropping him into his bedroom wall and Mom said no more wrestling, but she didn't say no more dreaming."

Jim Ross: "Well, Mick Foley continued to pursue his dream, but he paid a heavy price, the emotional scars of his strange childhood are still evident."

Mankind: "You know, I want to tell my son, when he gets to be fifteen, not to be the guy that eats strange things. I never exactly brought it upon myself; other people in their cliques, for lack of a better word, they would gang up on me because I was different, looked different. They were throwing worms at me. Bending down in athletic class, doing my hurdler's stretch, and there was a bombardment of worms being thrown at me. So what do you do to retaliate? You throw the worms back? At seven or eight people? It's not the fact they were hurting me, they were wounding my pride. They were looking at me like I was garbage.

So I picked up the largest specimen, Jimmy, and I sucked it down. To show them that their attempts to hurt my pride would not be sucessful. I thought, Jimmy, that I'd show them, but then sure enough the story became as everything in life does and it no longer became 'Well, Mickey Foley ate one worm because some kids were picking on him' it became 'Mickey Foley eats a plate full of worms every day.' Do you think I got many dates after that, Jimmy?"

Jim Ross: "Probably not."

Mankind: "Do you think girls wanted to kiss a boy who had worms on his breath? I'm a good kisser! But I never got the chance to show it. What am I gonna do, practice on myself, Jimmy? I never had the chance to show the world I could love and could be loved, because they ruled me out because I had a strange appetite for strange things. I'm not going to say I didn't accept money to eat other strange things, but the fact is that damage had been done and I went through my entire high school days without date number one. You don't think that scarred my soul? Well maybe you're not looking deep enough.

It was 1983 and upstate New York with its endless rolling fields might be a nice place for a lot of boys, but not when Jimmy Snuka and Don Muraco were in a cage in October in Madison Sqaure Garden -- that's where I wanted to be! I didn't want to ride horses along a field, I didn't want to fish for trout in a stream, I wanted to be where the blood and guts were, Jimmy. So I put out my thumb, Jimmy, and it took sixteen or seventeen hours, but I made my way to the Garden. It took just about all the money I had in the world, but I got a front row seat and I saw the move that would change my life, when Jimmy Snuka came off the top of the cage. And I saw people stand up, and I saw people cheer, and I know I wasn't the only person whose life was changed in that arena. And I realized, Jimmy, that I wanted to do the same thing. I wanted to hear people cheer for me because of some act of bravery that I commited. I wanted to see children cry out of love for me and the things I could do inside a ring."

- Teil 2 des Interviews folgte in der darauffolgenden Woche