Have a Nice Read! (Have a Nice Day!: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks - Mick Foley)

Member Name: IainWear

Product:	Have a Nice Day!: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks - Mick Foley
Date:	21/11/04 (84 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A genuine love of life!

Disadvantages: Too wrestling centred

I’ve long been an avid reader, devouring books at a speed that has surprised friends and amazed colleagues in the past. But, no matter what I was reading, I was always able to put a book down at any point and come back to it later. I simply couldn’t understand what people meant when they call a book “unputdownable” as I’d never found my self in that situation.

That was until I discovered “Have a Nice Day”, the autobiography of the wrestler Mankind. I’d had it on order for some time, and the bookstore called when, quite by chance, I was outside about to collect an ill friend from work. I picked up both and, like a good friend should, promptly ignored her in favour of the book when I got home. And for the rest of the day, I virtually ignored her as the book went everywhere with me – to the bathroom, to the garden for a cigarette, to the kitchen when I made dinner. Finally at 5 am the following morning after about fifteen hours solid reading, I finished it, and was able to put it down. Only to wake about six hours later, pick it up and start all over again.

At first glance, it’s essentially just a book about wrestling. Mick Foley decided at a fairly early age that wrestling is what he wanted to do for a living and that’s exactly what he did. He had to work hard to do it, and he had to suffer for his art. He had to work for pitiful amounts of money and he had to be told time and again that he wasn’t good enough to reach the very top of his profession. Against all this, he succeeded, largely through a combination of hard work and extreme dedication to his chosen business.

But it’s not just a book that will appeal to wrestling fans, even though this is the market it was aimed at. After all, I was a WWE fan when the book was released, which was why I bought it. I’m no longer a fan and I haven’t watched any wrestling for a while. Yes this book still has the power to fascinate me. This can be boiled down to one simple reason: passion. More than anybody’s biography I’ve read, Mick Foley has loved every minute of what he’s done. Sure, there have been some rough times and he’s been seriously hurt in doing the job he loves. Several times, in fact. But Mick Foley is a man who loves his life, loves his job and absolutely adores his family.

It is this passion that makes “Have a Nice Day” so easy to read. Although the focus of the book is on Mick Foley’s career as a professional wrestler, this is essentially a love story. It’s a story of one man’s love for his wife, his children and his life generally. Particularly when he talks about his children, you can almost feel the love coming from the page. But he does other emotions just as well, and his words when he speaks of Owen Hart, a close personal friend and colleague who was killed whilst the book was being written, it’s enough to bring a lump to the throat.

Generally speaking, the whole book is written in a very accessible way. He doesn’t get too technical with wrestling terms and he explains so that anyone who isn’t a wrestling fan could understand. Most importantly, he uses pretty simple language all the way through, so getting involved with the story isn’t difficult at all.

Despite being the first and, so far, only book I’ve been unable to put down, it’s not all good news. More than in any other autobiography I’ve read, money is mentioned a lot. I realise that Foley sees several years on low earnings as a part of paying his dues, but it does get a little distracting hearing so much about it. It seems as if that was where his main focus lay, particularly before he met his wife.

The second major problem is that the focus on wrestling makes it tough for anyone who isn’t a wrestling fan to get into, particularly the number of in-jokes he has at the expense of another wrestler, Al Snow. There’s less about Mick Foley’s younger years than is usual in an autobiography, almost as if his life only started when he began wrestling and everything that had happened up to that point was obsolete. Certainly there are some mentions of his school days, but very little about his parents, especially his mother, and it almost feels as if he wasn’t born until he was a teenager; such is the scarcity of material on that period.

However, if you’re a wrestling fan, this is exactly the kind of book you should be reading. In terms of wrestling as a professional sport or as professional sports entertainment, however you look at it; Mick Foley has done pretty much everything there is to do. He has wrestled in small independent shows and he has held titles in all three of the major nationwide wrestling promotions that existed when the book was published in 1999.

As far as up to date information goes, it seems horribly dated now as the world of sports entertainment has changed a great deal over the last five years. But for a recent wrestling fan, this would be a revelation, packed as it is with information and stories about how things used to be. For someone who has been a wrestling fan for a while, or even for someone like me, who was a fan 5 years back who has now lapsed, I’d be surprised if you haven’t already read this. You should – you’re missing out on so much otherwise.

Given the age of the book, it can be fairly hard to pick up. But new copies can be found for £4.31 on Amazon. A second hand copy is far easier to track down and I have seen copies recently for sale for £3.75 from Green Metropolis and, for even better value but maybe not such good quality, from £3.19 at the Amazon Marketplace and from as little as 99p on eBay.

Although a little dated in terms of information now, this book was ground breaking at the time, with Mick Foley being the first wrestler to release a biography. These days, you can move for them on the sports book shelves of major bookstores. But sometimes they say that the oldest ones are the best and that has never been truer than in the world of wrestling books. If you only ever buy one book about wrestling, this should be the one.

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