WWE Hall of Famer Mick Foley recently spoke on his podcast, “Foley is Pod,” about a variety of professional wrestling topics including he real story of how he came up with the Cactus Jack name and why he was billed from Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
“I think in ’82 or ’83, I ordered some kind of wrestling game out of the back of Pro Wrestling Illustrated or one of the George Napolitano magazines. It would come to your house and it was like the first of the wrestling board or strategy games. They did not use the wrestlers’ gimmick names, but they would be close enough so that you knew who they were talking about. The move sets would be very similar to, like Dusty Rhodes, they would have a different name. Instead of the bionic elbow, they might call it a titanic elbow, but it’s clearly Dusty’s move set.”
“There were a few optional cards where you can create your own characters. My dad’s name was Jack Foley so I created a character named Cactus Jack. At that time, like a lot of teenagers, you know, 16 and 17 years old, I wasn’t having an easy time communicating with my dad, but wrestling was that bridge as it has been to so many people. It’s such a wonderful thing about wrestling. For everyone who dislikes it or dismisses it out of hand it’s like, then you’re dismissing the entire intergenerational relationship that wrestling improves, and I believe in that wholeheartedly. So we watched wrestling together. We played this wrestling game where he was Cactus Jack.”
“The second part of the equation is that my friends would never really feel comfortable in my house because my dad was the athletic director and was seen as something of a disciplinarian and a hard ass, I think it would be safe to say. I told my friend, ‘No, no, he’s not like that. Like at home, it’s completely different. He likes to be called Cactus Jack’, specifically because I want to see the look on my dad’s face when my friends came over and called him Cactus Jack.”
“So the Cactus Jack name was a way to honor my dad, a way to hopefully put one of my friends in a really awkward position, and it was also like the most generic name I could find. From the Kirk Douglas role in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first movie, it was called The Villain, and now in recent re-releases, it’s known as Cactus Jack because the character was so much fun. The name Slade, Cactus Jack Slade. I just took that name and borrowed it from that movie. I was Cactus Jack Foley, so my original autographs have Cactus in quotation marks, ‘Cactus’ Jack Foley, and I was just going to be Cactus Jack until I felt like I’ve learned enough to become Dude Love, and I knew that could take a while. I was pretty realistic about that.”
“So at Clarksburg, West Virginia at the Clarksburg Armory, the ring announcer Hank Hudson asked me my name. I said, ‘I’m Cactus Jack’ He said, ‘Where are you from?’ I said ‘Bloomington, Indiana’, which is where I was born. Hank happens to work full time. His real job is in a post office. He goes, ‘There are no Cactuses in Indiana.’ He said, ‘What about Tucson, Arizona’, and then he goes, ‘Wait, I think there’s a Truth or Consequences, Arizona’ and then he corrects himself within seconds and he goes, ‘Actually that’s Truth or Consequences, New Mexico’, and I went, ‘That’s it.’ It’s a real place and I’ve stayed there. It’s such a great name. It used to be known as Hot Springs because of you know, fabled Hot Springs I bathed in just this past summer.”
“I think the deal was that Bob Barker came to town and they agreed to change the name to Truth or Consequences, or ‘T or C’ as the locals call it. I told that fib for so many years that the good people of Truth or Consequences came to accept me as one of their own and actually put my photo in the trophy cabinet even though there was no record of me ever having stepped foot in ‘T or C’ until just a few years ago.”
You can check out the complete podcast below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
