Mick Foley Admits He Worries About His Long Term Cerebral Health

The amount we know about CTE in contact sports is a million lightyears away from what we knew a decade ago, never mind in the 90s, when wrestlers such as Mick Foley took unprotected chair shots, and myriad other forms of blunt force trauma in the name of entertainment.

Now, in conversation on the Talking Tough podcast, Foley has admitted that he worries about his long term cerebral health, saying:

“Yeah, I do. I do worry, a lot. I think we’re all in the same boat… It’s hard to make that decision, it’s hard to realise you’ve lost that step before other people realise you’ve lost it. It’s also tougher, still, for a wrestler because, unlike baseball, basketball, or anything to deal with MMA, and boxing, like, once you’ve lost that something, you’re never the same person again. But in wrestling, guys go on to sometimes come back a little better at controlling the crowd, and working a match in ways that they could not do. I mean, in more positive ways than when they did have 100% of their physical attributes. And so, it becomes really difficult to convince a wrestler that their best days are behind them because we all feel like we have one more great match left in us, if that makes sense.”

Foley spoke about his cerebral health after discussing his infamously brutal I Quit match with The Rock at WWE Royal Rumble 99: “Unfortunately, one of the times where I felt like The Rock was really The Rock and I was really Mankind was that I Quit match from January 1999, which went way past the point it should have,” said Foley “So, we were trying to do something special that night and we went a little overboard. We don’t have a lot of people who ask about that match because it’s really uncomfortable, it’s not fun to watch.”

H/T: Wrestling Inc.