RATTLESNAKE SPEAKS OUT
Stone Cold Steve Austin knows that he wasn’t the best technical wrestler in the business. At 6-2 and only 250 pounds, he wasn’t even close to the biggest. He wasn’t the handsomest or most muscular, either.
Most exciting? Now there -- Stone Cold would give any wrestler who ever stepped into the ring a run for his money.
All he did, better than anybody, was put fannies in seats.
“I did sell a ton of tickets to the matches, and I did sell a ton of merchandise. In the wrestling business, it doesn’t really matter how many times you were champion. It’s how many tickets you sold. For whatever reason, I sold more tickets than anybody else. I broke pay-per-view TV records. That’s my legacy. That’s the thing I’ll hang my hat on,” says Austin.
He’s the main reason that 15,000 people will pack Toyota Center for the World Wrestling Hall of Fame induction ceremony on Saturday. They will watch Austin, maybe for the last time in his role as a wrestler, take his place among the legends of the business he loves.
“I grew up 100 miles south of Houston on down Highway 59. I grew up watching Paul Boesch’s Houston Wrestling. I fell in love with the business when I was 7 or 8 years old. All I ever wanted to be was a professional wrestler. Wrestling was the biggest thing in my life. It made my heart beat and my blood flow,” he says.
He loved wrestling even when things were rough, when he was making no money (paying dues and starving), when he was fired from promotions and his career seemed stalled.
He broke into wrestling in 1989, after seeing an ad for a wrestling school in Dallas. He had long, flowing blond hair and not a clue where wrestling might take him, but a lot of desire and a fierce competitive streak.
“I was by no means an overnight success. What success I eventually did attain was the result of hard work. I always had a competitive nature. I learned the mechanics of wrestling really well and really fast. I learned how to have a good match, but I didn’t have the right gimmick.,” he says.
He foundered in smaller wrestling promotions, calling himself Superstar Steve Austin, Stunning Steve Austin and even one of the Hollywood Blonds and a member of the Stud Stable. Nothing caught the fans’ attention. He was a worker, a jobber, a mechanic — someone that bigger stars beat on their way to championship matches and bigger paychecks. .
In 1995, when Vince McMahon offered him a job with the World Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling Entertainment), Austin still didn’t have a clear idea who he was.
“They brought me up there strictly as a mechanic. There were no plans to make me a star,” he says.
A year later, it, the gimmick he was searching for, happened. He shaved his head and became Stone Cold Steve Austin, the ultimate renegade and anti-hero. His character didn’t give a flip for authority in general, and Vince McMahon in particular. Together, they began a run that shattered every box office and TV ratings record in wrestling history. Every night, in the biggest arenas around the world, the show ended with Stone Cold giving the Chairman of World Wrestling Entertainment a Stone Cold Stunner, followed by Austin toasting the crowd by slamming two cans of beer together and pouring them over his face.
Although he continued to appear on TV wrestling, injuries caught up with Austin and his last year as a full-time wrestler was 2004.
“I was in the wrestling business for 14, maybe 15 years, I really stopped counting. But the first seven years, as far as paying my dues and learning the game, really don’t count toward the Stone Cold part. I was really hot for only a few years. I draw a comparison with myself and Gale Sayers, the football player. He was a great running back for only a short time. But he was so incredible that he didn’t need a 14-year career. He is remembered for the few spectacular years that he did have.
“What drove me was the emotion. When I was hot, we were sold out seven days a week. I fed off the energy of having those people cheer for me. Vince McMahon loved to be hated, and the people loved me. … I didn’t want to quit wrestling. I didn’t walk away on my own. Injuries ended it for me.”
When his name is announced as the newest member of the WWE Hall of Fame, for the first time as a wrestler, he will step to the microphone — and have no idea what he’ll say.
“I’ve been trying to come up with a speech. I’m so thrilled and excited about this. But going up there and talking about myself the real person, not Stone Cold Steve Austin the wrestler, is a whole different ball game. You wouldn’t think that Stone Cold, the character, would ever get emotional, but I am a pretty emotional person. … Wrestling was a large part of my life, and it’s hard to draw one straight line, or one train of thought, through it. So I’m going to make the best of it and just wing it.”
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