My guilty pleasure: 'Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood & Sweatsocks' by Mankind

NPR is running a story series called “My Guilty Pleasure,” in which big time authors write about a book they love to read that doesn’t really square with their authorial reputation. Man, I just found one of these for myself: the absolutely amazing Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks, by Mankind (also known as: Mick Foley), his mind blowing account of his unlikely ascent to professional wrestling super-stardom.

The only book I’ve seen listed on here so far that sounds like it might have something like the outsider cred of a Mick Foley’s masterpiece is the most recent offering, which I caught on the radio, driving home from the Lehigh Valley. Charles Bock’s pick of The Dirt by Motley Crue sounds like it might stand up alongside Foley’s paean to pain.

When Foley’s book came out it shot to the top of the bestseller list and stayed there for some time. No one really saw that coming. Vince McMahon, genius that he is (and he really is), had the idea one day that maybe if his most famous wrestlers wrote autobiographies people would buy them and that would make the WWF even more famous.

Books? By wrestlers? What?

Even more ingenious, he picked Mankind (at that time, the character name of Mick Foley), to be the first recruit. Why? Who knows. The guy was known for raging around like a savage, doing nutbar promos and taking more pain than anyone else in the business. He did not, however, come off as an intellectual. Yet Vince picked him and Foley responded with intense enthusiasm. In fact, he insisted on writing it without a ghost writer. He said he could do it himself.

I had long drifted away from professional wrestling as a real interest by the time Mankind captured the imagination of WWF fans worldwide. In middle school, I’d been really into it, but by the time Raw is War was sweeping TV ratings, I’d moved on to debate and theater and my jobs and failing to win over girls. Still, I saw this book and had a feeling about it. I’d never really stopped liking wrestling, but I couldn’t fit it in anymore. I knew wrestling reflected something special about America. One of our underground artforms that will never get accolades from the academies and is better off for it. I remember reading a review of the book by a serious reviewer, maybe in The Washington Post, but I’m not sure. He said, basically: look, I know no one is going to believe me, but this is an impressive book and a compelling read. Mick Foley is an amazing character.

It took me over ten years, but I knew I’d read the book one day. I have now. It’s 700+ pages flew right by.

By the time Mick Foley was finished filling composition books by hand with his memories, he had a book some 50,000 words longer than the publisher wanted, cliche ridden, totally self-serving and frankly one of the most intriguing books I’ve ever read. It falls squarely in the folk art tradition: someone who really doesn’t have a history with a form but leaps into it one day with such honesty and enthusiasm and realness that you just can’t help but get swept along.

And it’s hard not to be swept along by Foley’s story. Here’s a guy who figured three things out early:

1. he loved getting a reaction from people,
2. people reacted to blood and pain and
3. he could handle a lot of bleeding and a lot of pain.

Natural conclusion: pursue professional wrestling. So he did. His is the story of the long slog. Paying dues upon dues upon dues until at last, at long last, he gets the big payoff at the end and the recognition he deserves as truly one of the greatest that wrestling has ever seen or will see again.

Let me close with one paragraph from Chapter 18:

Busting an eyebrow is the little known and little exercised act of creating a gash over the eyebrow by punching downward with the point of the knuckles. When done correctly, it is as effective at creating realism as anything in the business. When done incorrectly, by stressing force over technique, it does nothing but raise welts. There were only a few people whom I trusted to bust me open, and Harley was one of them. Oddly, even though I have the reputation for being a Hardcore Legend, I was surprisingly inept when it came to eyebrow busting. One night in ECW in 1997, I tried to open up Tommy Dreamer, and I was failing miserably. After I bounced punches off his nose, cheek, and forehead, he looked at me and asked painfully, “Please stop hitting me.”