As 8 p.m. crept nearer, the small crowd that gathered in Goldstein Auditorium made up for its size with its loyalty and excitement.

The crowd – full of Mick Foley fanatics dressed in T-shirts bearing his likeness and catchphrases and some who tried to dress in garb emulating in-ring attire – chanted the World Wrestling Entertainment superstar’s last name.

Foley, a three-time former WWE World Champion and eight-time WWE Tag Team Champion, spoke last night to much of his Syracuse University fan base, detailing stories from his career on the wrestling road, his opinions on politics and his feelings on censorship. Much of the night, though, served more as a stand-up routine. Foley shared his humorous anecdotes with the crowd, always leaving it on the edge of its seats as he led his audience to a punch line.

When the wrestler walked on stage to the sound of his WWE entrance music, the excited crowd erupted into a standing ovation.

Yet Foley seemed unimpressed.

‘I’m a novelist,’ Foley said, referencing his out-of-the-ring writing career, ‘and I expect to be treated as such.’

And he left the stage, demanding a more appropriate entrance.

The crowd seemed confused, but quickly realized that Foley was joking, as his TV persona often is. Foley ran back on stage, this time to the entrance music of another WWE wrestler, Billy Gunn. Foley ran past the podium and shook his moneymaker at the crowd to the beat of song, which uses the lyrics ‘I’m an ass man / Yeah I’m an ass man.’

The crowd laughed, as it did for much of the night.

‘It was great,’ said Sam Roberts, a sophomore film drama major, as he waited in the autograph line after the show. ‘He’s got a great sense of humor, and he’s a great talker.’

Foley shared stories of pranks he and other wrestlers pulled on one another and the perks that came with being a celebrity.

One story involved the ability to cut to the front of a roller coaster ride at a Six Flags amusement park.

‘If you don’t feel tentative about cutting a line people have been waiting on, you’re a prick,’ Foley said.

But instead of getting a negative response, Foley said the crowd started chanting his name as he walked by them.

‘I thought, ‘My God, I’ve made it,” he said. ‘The same people I’m screwing over are chanting my name as I screw them.’

But unfortunately for Foley, his large stature prevented him from fitting on the coaster ride.

‘The walk away from the chanting crowd was one of the saddest things you’ve ever seen,’ Foley said. ‘I was like Willy Loman in ‘Death of a Salesman.”

But Foley also addressed more serious issues, including steroid use in his profession.

‘Wrestling has had a tough time with deaths and the emphasis on size,’ he said. ‘It was weird, though, when baseball players would come around and be bigger than us. I’m all for testing. It’s not going to affect me. The real problem is painkillers. Drugs are obviously a huge, huge problem, but I don’t know if the war on drugs is being fought the right way.’

‘You can see that there’s more to him than just some guy who wrestles,’ said Daniel Chermak, a freshman English and textual studies major. ‘He has his own opinions.’

His everyman personality helped Foley become such a star in this industry of larger, more in-shape competitors.

‘I’m a huge fan,’ Roberts said. ‘He has a natural ease on stage, and he’s just a funny guy. He can relate stories, and he doesn’t seem like he’s bigger than anybody, like a celebrity. When you see him here, you realize that he’s a real person and it’s not just an act. It’s exactly what I expected.’

Published on March 21, 2004 at 12:00 pm