Over the years, King of Queens star Kevin James has incorporated a fair amount of athleticism into his on-screen performances. It likely doesn’t surprise you to learn that James played organized sports. Football was James’s favorite, and he dreamed of going pro. However, he was also on his high school wrestling team for a little while. It was during that time that he went toe-to-toe with a classmate who would one day become a WWE Hall of Famer and one of the company’s most beloved superstars.
While attending Ward Melville High School on Long Island in the early 1980s, James heard that the wrestling team was looking for a heavyweight. He’d never wrestled before, but he was a strong kid, so he decided to give it a try and was immediately paired up with another guy in his weight class named Mick Foley—better known to the wider world as Mankind, Cactus Jack, and Dude Love. “We used to have some battles. I would kind of throw him around a little bit,” James told Sean Evans in a 2021 episode of Hot Ones. “That’s where the demented mind was developing. I remember him jumping off his roof into, like, cardboard boxes. And he was just doing these weird things, and he’s the nicest guy ever,” he continued.
James was number one on the team for the majority of the time that he wrestled, but a back injury opened the door for Foley to take his place. The two later attended SUNY Cortland together, where James played football before dropping out to pursue a career in entertainment. Foley, of course, kept his focus on wrestling and worked for some of the biggest promotions in the business moving forward, including WCW, ECW, and the WWE. Although the pair lost touch after college, they eventually reunited for an interview with Katie Couric in 2013, sharing fond memories of their early days together.
Following James’s appearance on Hot Ones, Foley took to Instagram to pay homage to his former teammate. He even went as far as to credit James with inspiring his career, writing, “I really enjoyed seeing my buddy Kevin James’ comments about our days on the same high school wrestling team. Without those experiences wrestling Kevin, there’s NO WAY I would have entered into pro wrestling.”
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