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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here.
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Please Welcome Hardcore Santa to the Ring
Katherine Cusumano
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By now, Mick Foley’s beard will have grown just long enough. If he has done it right, he will have bleached it three times to achieve the downy white of a true Santa Claus. He will have laid out his custom-made burgundy coat with its curly ivory trim and gold sash, and he will have cracked his cricked crocodile spine in preparation to don the suit.
And if he has done all this, Mick Foley, the first-ever World Wrestling Entertainment Hardcore Champion, will take his seat beside a tree strung with lights and hung with big reflective orbs. A child will sit on his knee, and it will take everything in Mick Foley not to let out a big HO-HO-HO, but he won’t do it because he knows it’s simply too much. No, Mick Foley will listen, quiet, as the kid tugs on his beard (it’s real, but one must be certain) and leans toward his ear to reveal his one Christmas wish. Mick Foley, who has become an enthusiastic Santa impersonator since his retirement from professional wrestling, has come to receive communion of this small joy.
What it comes down to is this: Mick Foley wants to believe.
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It has been almost exactly a year since I stumbled into professional wrestling, which makes me just about the last person in the world to have discovered professional wrestling. I entered a bar and a group of my friends were watching an All Elite Wrestling broadcast on a TV overhead. I knew nothing about it, but I was strangely transfixed. It was the pageantry of it, the punches pulled and slick sweaty bodies in spangled singlets bumping against each other — combat as cooperation rather than competition. It was the erotic, operatic excess. Why isn’t the whole world talking about this? I wondered, before realizing that, in fact, they were, or at least, at one point they had been. I wondered how something so big had existed beneath my notice for so long.
Most of all, it was the fuzzy, unstable boundary between what is real and what is not, between what happens inside the ring and outside of it. Because, yes, professional wrestling is not real in the manner of other sports, in that the outcome of each match is, yes, generally decided in advance. If you know even just a little bit more about professional wrestling than I did at this point, then what you probably know is: isn’t it fake? Wrestlers execute high-flying gymnastics that are choreographed like film stunts. For this reason, it has a hard time dodging the allegation that it is not real, but to say that it is fake is to miss the point entirely. Professional wrestling is theater. The guys in the ring are flesh and blood and bone.
There was no better illustration of this than Mick Foley. Foley, who performed alternately under the names Cactus Jack, Mankind, and Dude Love, was not a great technician. He was not particularly nimble. But he would do nearly anything to get over. Mick Foley dropped shoulders-first onto concrete floors. He leapt out of rings rigged with explosives. He sprinkled thumbtacks over the surface of the canvas and asked his opponents to throw him down on their glittering points and then do it again. It’s not that he sought gratuitous punishment. It’s more like he wanted so badly to believe in his own theater that he made it true through sheer force. If wrestling is about selling an illusion, then Foley was attempting to bring reality and illusion into closer alignment. “I did think to myself, what if I created a style that had no loopholes?” he says in one documentary. “Where no one looking at a VHS tape, no matter how many times they fast-forwarded, slow-motioned, they couldn’t find the secret? The secret was, I was really getting hurt. Like, ta-da.”
This man, I thought, is playing the game on a whole different level. Instead of trying to elide the performance, make its seams invisible, he was tearing them out entirely.
This man, I thought, is … a genius?
And I suppose this is how I ended up reading Foley’s 735-page-long autobiography, HAVE A NICE DAY! A TALE OF BLOOD AND SWEATSOCKS — a book so thick that when I picked it up at the library I thought, Surely, there has been a mistake. Surely this tome is not the memoir of one Michael Francis Foley. But there it was, in all its exhaustive glory. At the time of publication in 1999, he was 34 years old and just a few months away from his first retirement.
He opens with an account of losing most of his right ear in an in-ring accident during a match in Munich; shortly after, he tells us there’s nothing like “White Christmas” on a hot July afternoon. It’s delightful, this apparent lifelong joy he’s gotten from both wrestling and Christmas, hinting that maybe what he loves is executing a certain kind of magic trick. “It’s strange how often in this business I juxtapose beautiful images with brutal acts,” he writes later. He gleefully describes feeling blood run down his face, and he also has a room in his house devoted to Christmas all year long. During breaks from touring, he made regular pilgrimages to Santa’s Village; he describes riding a ferris wheel with his daughter, whose name is Noelle, and contemplating delivering a well-placed chair shot. (Noelle’s due date was December 25; he says she arrived a little early, on December 15.) For most of his career, he played the heel, the bad guy, the one the crowds rooted against. And then, in his retirement, he decided to play Santa Claus — if not the ultimate good guy, the ultimate arbiter of who’s good and who’s bad.
Unlike the literary memoir, the celebrity memoir promises an unvarnished, unmediated account of a typically inaccessible self. But of course, this is not necessarily what you get. None of us are reliable narrators of our own lives. This promise gets muddied in professional wrestling, which already traffics in its audience’s uncertainty about what is performed and what is legitimate, and especially when you’re talking about Mick Foley, who made more of that uncertainty than most. Again and again, he pulls back the curtain to remind us that when he enters the ring, what you see is real, in all the ways that matter. The point is not to shatter the illusion of his performance in the ring, but to demand that you suspend whatever remained of your disbelief. Because in the end I wasn’t sure that real and fake were the poles that matter, or at least not the only ones; I suspected they might instead be belief and doubt.
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In 2014, the year after his induction to the WWE Hall of Fame (where he was joined on stage by Santa and Mrs. Claus), Mick Foley starred in a documentary called I Am Santa Claus. It follows five Santa impersonators as they prepare for the holidays, alongside Foley’s own transformation into a Santa Claus.
“The whole thing is, can you tell a fantasy and look like you’re telling the truth?” one veteran Santa Claus instructs Foley. And doesn’t this sound so much like professional wrestling? You slip into the costume and start to feel the physical contours of this new self. You construct a persona, only you start to find that you can’t quite tell where you end and your persona begins. In one scene, Foley attends a fitting for a custom Santa suit. “The guys who have real beards, they hurt themselves for the craft,” the shop owner tells him, acid bleach burning their skin in the service of achieving the ideal shade of facial hair. But these guys say whitening their beards also transforms their personalities. They become more patient, more good-humored, quite simply jollier — more like how they imagine a Santa Claus would be. Like they are telling a fantasy and believe they are telling the truth. One of them went down to the DMV and changed his legal name so his driver’s license now reads “Santa Claus.”
This isn’t to say these men actually believe they are each the one true Santa Claus, of course. True belief, in this case, has an expiration date. I was in elementary school when I found a box of letters on a high shelf in my mom’s home office that proved what I was starting to suspect: All this time, she had been Santa. But the trappings of Christmas were real, like the giddy thrill of tumbling down the stairs in the too-early morning light to see our tree’s contents suddenly multiplied, as though by magic. I didn’t grow up in a religious family, but we attended a nondenominational church service on Christmas eve for the ritual of it, as though by going through the motions, we could conjure some other feeling in the place where we should have found our belief.
Maybe belief comes down to the point where real and fantastic converge. In wrestling, Foley argues that developing a psychologically fleshed-out character is way more important than “breaking tables, chair shots, and barbed wire.” (His gimmicks, he maintains, “were simply an amplified extension of a certain part of the real-life personality.”) You could execute the most insane moves night after night, and no one would care if they didn’t care about you. This was the contract: The crowd could suspend their disbelief if you provided them someone to believe in. Then, if you’re Mick Foley, you provide them with something they can’t quite believe. The violence wasn’t the point; it was a means to escalating the stakes for your character. “These days, it seems that hardcore matches have become an excuse to go all over the building and hit each other with cool stuff,” Foley writes, “but in my mind, it takes away from what these things should really be about — intensity.”
There’s this one match that Foley’s fans revisit each summer on its anniversary. It’s called Hell in a Cell, named for the 16-foot-tall steel cage that enclosed the ring. I couldn’t wait to get to this episode in the book. If I’m being perfectly honest, I was skeptical of wrestling in
the beginning — frequently, despite my fascination, I still am — and
then, watching Hell in a Cell for the first time, I think I started to
understand. But for all its capaciousness, here, the memoir draws a blank. Mick Foley does not remember this match because he blacked out just a few minutes in, concussed after falling through the ceiling of the cage and crashing onto the canvas below.
Because he didn’t remember what happened after he landed, Foley watched the tape over and over to reconstruct the events. “I felt kind of like a private eye trying to put together the mystery of my own life,” he writes. It strikes me that this is so much like a memory, to be transformed by its telling. And I’d like to make a larger point about memoir, and about assembling a narrative of your life, an exercise in mythmaking not unlike constructing a gimmick, but I think there’s a more literal point to make here, which is that this is a man whose use of his body has almost certainly undone his brain: (After taking so many bumps, Foley cannot wrestle anymore — or even ride roller coasters or look too long at a screen. So instead, Santa. "You have to find something that makes you feel the way you felt in the ring," he has said.)
But I should say that the match is unbelievably good. I love watching it. It’s also basically impossible to watch. Foley twitches gruesomely when he lands. He spends most of the match with a punched-out incisor in his nostril. When the announcer calls out begging to suspend the fight, it’s not part of the theater — he really means it. And I am not here to judge whether Foley should have battered his body like this, truly; I’m just not sure if I should be watching it. Or if, instead, watching it is the only thing you can do.
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For only the second time, Mick Foley slips on the Santa suit. He’s not sure this is such a good idea — if anything is the opposite of making the season bright, it’s for Santa to get run over by a car on live TV. He’s not sure he can sell it. But, hey, he’s a Santa Claus whose repertoire also includes a character who lives in a boiler room and mutters to himself. And if a wrestler is going to appear on WWE as Santa Claus on this night, it has to be him. No one else can wear the suit.
He’s making his way across the stage. He’s passing out candy canes. He’s so freaking jolly you wouldn’t believe it. So then a white sports car pulls up behind him, and he goes for it — he lunges across the hood as if struck and rolls to the ground.
The crowd greets this with absolute silence. They don’t buy it.
And then the Christmas tree, garlanded in silver and topped with a star, teeters and tips over, pinning Mick Foley beneath it. It’s not clear whether the tree was supposed to fall, but he kicks limply and fumbles to grab hold of its branches, his expression obscured behind pine needles and ornaments, and it’s this moment that the people can get behind. YOU KILLED SANTA! they scream. YOU KILLED SANTA!
The thing about belief is that you have to opt into it. You sit in the darkened theater as the performers unfold a story. You cheer and chant as the rivals face off in the ring. You imagine the faint sound of bells in the distance. The point, I think, is this: What form of disbelief are you suspending?
And so you wait. You wait to be transported. You wait and watch for the moment that makes you believe, knowing that it might never come.
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Katherine Cusumano is a journalist and essayist. Her writing about culture and the natural world has been published in the New York Times, Outside, Literary Hub, and others. She holds an MFA from Oregon State University and lives, writes, and teaches in Portland.
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