WWE Hall of Famer Mick Foley recently talked about a wide range of topics on his Foley is Pod, available via AdFreeShows. During it, he spoke about his reaction to Vince McMahon wanting to initially call him Mason the Mutilator before they came up with Mankind:
“Vince said, ‘In this business, we’ve had crushers, we’ve had destroyers, we’ve had executioner’s, but we’ve never had a mutilator.’ He gets that bass in his voice, ‘Mutilator, that’s what you are.’ Then he gives me the name Mason.”
“He alludes to the Manson name but tells me that we can’t go there, and I don’t want to go there. I was very uncomfortable with being Cactus Jack Manson. I did it because I really had no other choice. I felt Mason the Mutilator is one of the worst things I’ve ever heard. It sounds to me like something that would be in a bootleg version of an old Fish card game. It just sounds awful.”
“He said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘I like it a lot, but what if.’ Those were the three biggest words. ‘But what if instead of being Mason the Mutilator, I was Mankind the Mutilator?’ He says, ‘I don’t think I understand it.’ I said, ‘This way when they’re talking about the future of mankind and the destruction of mankind, it means two different things. You know, it’s talking about me and the people’, and he’s writing all this stuff down on a yellow legal pad.”
(h/t to wrestlingnews.co for quotes)
