Foley Is Good

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Foley Is Good: And the Real World Is Faker Than Wrestling
First edition cover
Written by: Mick Foley
Central Theme:
Synopsis:
Genre(s): Autobiography
Series: Mick Foley autobiographies
Preceded by: Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks
Followed by: The Hardcore Diaries
First published: May 8, 2001
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Foley Is Good is the sequel to Mick Foley's first auto biography, covering from the end of 1998 to the end of 2000, following after Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks. Unlike the first book, which was more personal, crude, and laid back, the sequel book switches gears to Mick discussing more political and social commentary, how his first book's release went from a literary and legal standpoint, and contains more information about his politics, religious views, and is generally just more mild in subject matter in general.

It was later followed by The Hardcore Diaries.


Tropes used in Foley Is Good include:
  • Blatant Lies: Mick recalls how enraged he was by how wrestling was portrayed as the absolute opposite of what it was by those willing to edit factual statements, his own included, into what became utter lies due to omission of certain details thanks to underhanded editing.
  • David Versus Goliath: When Mick took Brent Bozwell III to task for his criticism of wrestling, his take on what he discovered of Brent's actions was that he deliberately focusing on professional wrestling in order to invoke this trope, as picking on any other target would make him look like the bad guy due to public backlash. He also noted Brent was deliberately playing up wrestling as the Goliath in order to make himself the more sympathetic David, despite Mick noting how Brent's criticism had a lot of flaws at best and outright lies at worst.
  • Did Not Do the Research: When CNN journalist Margaret Carlson derided The Rock as a "a white skinhead hateful wrestling guy.", he has this sarcastic rebuttal:

Thataway, Margaret! You go, girl! Except for one little point. Um, Margaret, I don't know how to break this to you, but, um . . . The Rock is black.

  • Game-Breaking Injury: He retired from regular wrestling because of this. Specifically, since Hell in a Cell 1998, it was becoming very clear, despite all the punishment he endured up to that point, his back was going to permanently give out sooner or later and not recover, and since he knew this trope was inevitable, he decided to retire before he was paralyzed for good.
  • Hypocrite: Given the book covers more political views by Mick than his previous one, he has some scathing critique of certain people as mentioned in the Moral Guardians trope who were quick to castigate wrestling for being a terrible influence yet they ignored far more graphics material from many other media that, by their own definitions, made it immoral trash.
  • Lighter and Softer: Discussed in two ways. Mick covers the tail end of his regular wrestling career, where injuries from the early half caught up with him and forced him to tone down his hardcore style. The book itself is, by Mick's own admission, adherence to the trope, as Mick admitted he wanted to tone down the earthiness and crudeness from his last book, especially given it covers some material that required he be more thoughtful and reasoned about.
  • Moral Guardians: Mick, while admitting to a degree many had legitimate points during the tenure of the book duration (1998-2001), he took many to task for fudging the number of "immoral" things they saw on Raw, outright lying or making clever use of half-truths to portray TV wrestling as much trashier than it really, and pointing out while he didn't disagree it could be a bad influence on children, he countered, being both a parent and a veteran of the industry in question, that only a terrible parent would purposely ignore the rating of the program and pay very poor attention to their children's television viewing habits, which was a bigger cause of encouraging immoral behavior than it was the fault of the children who were not stopped by responsible guardians from watching such material.
  • Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: Humorously, before publication of his first book, he recalls all the legal stuff he had to go through to get it approved for publication, as the legal team looking over it want to be sure it was not a potential source for libel. One thing he was amused by in particular is if his description of a few men as well-endowed was true, and his reaction was all "and how could any man be insulted by being said they had well-endowed genitals?".
  • Rant-Inducing Slight: Mick has an epic one when he recounts his own character assassination by Brent Bozwell's Parents Television Council, during which the PTC tried to imply people like Mick made things like the Columbine murders happen:

By deliberately choosing to feature my image eleven times, I very strongly feel that he is telling the public that "on that sick show, Mick Foley is the sickest; of all the things that poison our children, Mick Foley is the most poisonous, and of all the filth out there, Mick Foley is the filthiest."'
How dare you, Mr. Bozell, how dare you! And how dare you try to turn the tragic losses at Paducah, Jonesboro, and Columbine High School into your own personal gains. Because I guarantee, Mr. Bozell, I'm a hell of a lot closer to the situation at Columbine High School than you are.

  • Reality Ensues: Mick explains this happened to him when he realized all the damage he had taken over the years, which he had otherwise not had affect his daily life, started visibly diminishing his ability to do simple things like play ball with his own children, and that's when any semblance of him being able to separate his real life and career vanished entirely.
  • Shown Their Work: Mick recounts how incensed he was by what he considered biased and poor research into the actual level of violence, profanity, and other inappropriate content by critic Brent Bozwell. He then proceeds to demonstrate just how much research he did to skewer Brent's errors.
  • Take That: The subtitle of the book And the Real World Is Faker Than Wrestling is a shot at all the people he blasts in the book who lied about what wrestling is to serve their own agendas.
    • He even has this rather amusing bit of snark about the officer of the Vice-President of the United States:

And everyone knows that a dummy can't be vice-presi—oops. Dan Quayle just shot down that theory in a pile of burning wreckage.

  • Title Drop: Mick does so at the very end of the book:

I am a thirty-five-year-old man with a wife and three children who has done his best to entertain for sixteen years through a strange blend of blood, sweat, tears, black ink, and bad jokes. I may not be perfect, and I'm certainly not God, but neither am I the poisoner of minds or the killer of children. I am Mick Foley, and Foley is . . . Good.