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Have a Nice Day! A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks By Mick Foley Regan Books, 511 pages Nonfiction The Rock Says ...: The Most Electrifying Man in Sports- Entertainment By the Rock with Joe Layden Regan Books, 292 pages Nonfiction

If Foley's memoir, purportedly written by him on 760 pages of loose-leaf notebook paper, demonstrates that genuine struggle and agony remain compelling even in the business of fakery, "The Rock Says ..." tells a different story. The sometime World Wrestling Federation champion known as the Rock -- earlier Rocky Maivia, before that Flex Kavana and earlier still Dwayne Johnson, his given name -- is a charismatic, strikingly handsome performer with a finely honed sense of ring shtick. But this ghostwritten autobiography is pretty much what you'd expect from the newborn genre of hardcover wrestling memoir: a mélange of appreciative anecdotes about the Rock's family and friends along with boastful recountings of his bouts that could have been extracted from WWF press releases. Both books have lingered on or near the New York Times bestseller list since they were published last fall, and if that tells us something it's probably trite: Wrestling, like publishing and life itself, is full of crap and full of surprises.

What the WWF's immensely successful foray into book publishing -- in collaboration with HarperCollins celebrity editor Judith Regan -- cannot explain is why a seemingly normal human being like Foley needs to wear a leather mask and get thrown onto cement floors for a living, or why so many Americans are enthralled by that. On one level, it's a dumb question. Wrestling has become the primary Information Age vehicle for the ancient traditions of circus and popular theater, and it isn't just reverse-snob academics who think so. It's right there in the Rock's book: "We're producing a live play, a highly physical, male-oriented soap opera, and [WWF president] Vince McMahon is our director. You have to look at it and judge it in that context."

That said, it's also true that the 1990s saw a tremendous renaissance of what could be called redneck culture, as wrestling, stock-car racing and country music all exploded in popularity. You could almost say that American mass culture has split into two zones of influence, and that everything outside the black zone is pretty much the redneck zone. While wrestling still attracts a mainly white demographic, it sure as hell crosses those racial and cultural boundaries more than Jeff Gordon or George Strait ever will. (The Rock, for example, is of Samoan and African-American ancestry.) The peculiar genius of McMahon deserves its own book, but one of its key elements has been his consistent refusal to recognize the traditional limits on the wrestling business. Branching into publishing was no more bizarre than incorporating himself and his family in the WWF's running story lines (as nefarious heels, of course) or pushing what had always been wholesome Saturday morning showboating into NC-17 lewdness and violence.

Both McMahon's WWF and his principal rival, Ted Turner's World Championship Wrestling, have long admitted that match outcomes and the backstage plotlines known as "angles" are carefully scripted. But the blood shed when the script calls for a star like Mankind or the Rock to be opened up is real enough, as is the risk of serious injury. In the most infamous "shoot," or unscripted event, of recent years, WWF performer Owen Hart died last May after an aerial stunt went awry, sending him plunging 90 feet into the ring of a Kansas City, Mo., arena.

As a "good worker" known for his ability to take a "bump" (i.e., a horrendous beating), Foley has had his ear ripped off and four teeth knocked out and has suffered eight concussions, several broken bones and countless lacerations -- without even going into the muscle tears, dislocations and burn injuries. As the world of '90s wrestling has become increasingly baroque, his characters have been strangled with barbed wire, impaled on beds of nails and scarred by explosives. He has come home so often wearing the "crimson mask" (that is, with his face covered in blood) that his wife calls his post-match cleanup ritual the "Norman Bates shower." He once drove his kids to visit their grandparents, he writes, with his scalp still full of glass shards.

As a self-interrogating memoirist, Foley may be a few chops short of Frank McCourt, but through all his tales of mayhem he remains an agreeable raconteur, always happy to spin a yarn or crack a joke at his own expense. Given his greatest area of skill as a wrestler -- which is, as he puts it, "taking an ass kicking" -- a sense of humor is probably a prerequisite. Before McMahon hired him to play the slobbering, demented Mankind character, Foley had spent years as the shaggy, lumberjackesque Cactus Jack, traveling from West Virginia to Japan to Burkina Faso and sometimes earning as little as $25 per pounding (when he got paid at all). If the catalog of names, places and injuries is likely to numb nonfans, wrestling aficionados will devour Foley's exhaustive recall of his nights working for the Continental Wrestling Association (Memphis), World Class Championship Wrestling (Dallas), the ultraviolent Extreme Championship Wrestling (Philadelphia) and any number of smaller "territories."

Next page | "Please don't forget to bring my ear in the plastic bag"