Seeking Goldberg Money, Mick Foley Takes His Licks from Toshiaki Kawada

This is not the best of Mick Foley's post-retirement matches, but it is the one where he's playing against type.

Hustle

This is probably as close to a “nothing” match as we’ll cover on BIG EGG, but it’s an important one, for me, because it’s my first Toshiaki Kawada match. Hustle, the post-UWFi brainchild of unparalleled wrestling genius Nobuhiko Takada, was an extremely popular promotion on the forums I posted on in the 2000s because it was a freakshow, Takada’s interpolation of sports-entertainment style wrestling aided by an unfathomable amount of money. HUSTLE 1 featured Bill Goldberg, who was still under WWE contract at the time. This show, HUSTLE 3, was also supposed to feature Goldberg, but he pulled out of the show (and wrestling altogether) after WrestleMania XX, so instead of Goldberg vs. Kawada, Hustle fans were treated to an altogether unlikely Triple Crown title bout, as Mick Foley happened to be available a month after his incredible match against Randy Orton at Backlash 2004.

Only he probably shouldn’t have been. According to an interview he did with Monthly Puroresu in 2021, Foley and Goldberg had the same agent, and when Goldberg pulled out, that agent suggested Foley, who’d just torn a ligament in his knee and couldn’t walk or stand. When the idea of “Goldberg money” was floated his way, he agreed to the match and set himself the goal of not embarrassing himself.

I didn’t know any of this when I saw the match for the first time. What I had to go on, back then, was an extremely good press conference promo where Foley, enraged at some perceived disrespect, went off on Kawada, shouting “I’m the king of the deathmatch!” while Dangerous K looked at him a bit mystified, but mostly unimpressed. That would carry over to the match itself, where Foley largely gets rocked except for when he’s extending the match by threatening Kawada with a barbwire bat, reneging on his promise to wrestle straight and only succeeding in hitting Taichi with the bat in the process. 

In looking back on the match, Foley says that it wouldn’t make either his or Kawada’s best-of DVDs, but that he succeeded in doing something passable. I agree. When I put the match on this week, I was expecting something more, maybe an inroads to talking about what appealed to me about Kawada, but there’s really nothing here that opens that particular door: it’s just Kawada wearing out Mick Foley, who is dressed as Cactus Jack but, unlike against Orton, does not wrestle like Jack. He is Mick Foley. He is a human being. Against one of the grumpiest, meanest bastards in the history of professional wrestling, he crumbles. 

So let’s talk about what makes this match work, even if it’s not great. That’d be Mick Foley, of course. I’m not suggesting that he carries Kawada, but Kawada doesn’t exactly care about what Foley has to offer on offense or as a presence, so what you’re watching is a man taking a beating, plain and simple.

Luckily, taking a beating is kind of Mick Foley’s thing. It is the core of his being as a wrestler. It is the story of his career, the crux of basically every great match he ever had. Heel or babyface, Cactus Jack, Mankind, or Dude Love, what remains consistent about Mick Foley is that he is generally outclassed by his opponents. Sting is more muscular. The Rock is better conditioned. Vader is more brutal. The Undertaker is spookier. Triple H is more technically proficient. But nobody can take a beating like him.

His matches are basically an extreme version of rope-a-dope, where he takes an absurd amount of punishment in an effort to get his opponents to chase him into deeper and deeper waters, where they’ll fall prey to the kind of violence he’s largely unaffected by. He can take more falls to concrete, more chairs to the head, more barbwire, and more thumbtacks than you can, but it’s hard to recognize that when you’re the one who kicks off the violence by splitting this amusement park-loving nice guy open with an unprotected chairshot. 

Toshiaki Kawada doesn’t play along with this, so, for 12 minutes, what you get is a sadist kicking the shit out of a masochist, until the masochist can’t take it anymore. I’d love to see the version of this match where a healthy Foley follows up one of his career best performances with a brief jaunt down the king’s road, but the human body has its limits, and Mick Foley was always on the verge of finding it. He is, as always, an exceptionally giving opponent, but without the ability to really meet Kawada offensively or take too many bumps like the one that sees him spill over the guardrail to the floor, there is too much distance between their styles to negotiate something truly memorable.

It’s less of a letdown than it sounds. If you’re new to Hustle, that’s kind of the deal: you’re not here for workrate, you’re here for Goldberg shouting that he’s going to eat chicken, or for Great Muta getting a girl pregnant with his mist and becoming the father of Akebono, or for Takada, who at one point cut such a serious figure that Lou Thesz strapped him up with his own world’s heavyweight championship, playing a literal dictator. Hustle isn’t legendary for matches where someone is gutting it out, but here’s Mick Foley, doing just that. It’s an interesting sidequest for a wrestler you’d assume was largely beyond interesting sidequests – not the first time he figured out how to mortgage his failing body in his post-retirement life, but the one that’s most against type.