THE STONE COLD TRUTH (30 page)

My personal favorite vignette was “the Beer Truck” on
Raw,
in Albany, New York. That deal was tough to beat. I rolled into that damn building with a beer truck, drove it into the packed arena and parked it butted right up to the ring. I got out to a tremendous cheer, and the crowd went crazy when I broke out the hose. I was blasting everybody in the ring, including Vince, with beer from a high-pressure beer hose.
They were selling it like crazy and slipping and sliding all over the place. Anytime you get to blast people with a beer truck, that’s gonna open some eyes.

Then I climbed up on top of the truck and was doing all the Stone Cold stuff, shooting fingers, the whole deal. People were just going out of their minds, because you don’t get a chance to see that every day. It was truly an electric moment.

Another fun thing I did with a vehicle was when Stone Cold crushed The Rock’s brand-new Lincoln Continental with the Stone Cold 3:16 Monster Truck. This was about a month after the beer truck incident, on
Raw,
from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

While they were shooting the beginning of this, I was sitting in the monster truck in a holding garage for two full minutes, and the fumes from that thing were burning my eyes. My eyes were watering really badly and I could hardly breathe. I thought I was going to choke to death.

Then I got the green light to go. I gassed it so hard that all four wheels spun out. The truck was on a carpet, and the sudden acceleration shot the carpet out from under it.

If you’re watching the
Hell Yeah
video, you can see that the cameraman went flying. He was standing on the carpet and fifty feet worth of it shot out from under the guy, and he just went flying.

But I did drive the thing, and I crushed that brand-new Lincoln Continental that was purchased that very morning. Hard to believe, but Vince McMahon bought a brand, spanking-new Lincoln Continental that day at a local dealership just to have me destroy it! A $40,000 investment for a few seconds of entertaining television, but fans still talk about it.

Another time, just to shake things up, I drove a Zamboni—another vehicle I had no experience with—into the Joe Louis Arena. I ran over a few light stands on the way to the ring. That got a pretty good pop, as who doesn’t like a Zamboni driven by a madman?

My car-crashing career was capped off when I smashed and blew up the DX luxury bus on the April 27, 2000,
SmackDown!
taped in Charlotte, North Carolina. That was pretty cool, but since it was
SmackDown!,
a pretaped show, we had special effects. But crashing into the bus was pretty cool. DX had been a little bit too proud of that damn bus. Yeah, I torched it pretty good.

When I attacked Booker T in a supermarket on
SmackDown!,
December 13, 2001, in Bakersfield, California, that was pretty wild too. I needed a little shot right there in my career, and that was something very different—but it was also something Stone Cold would have done to someone who pissed him off that much.

We fought all over that store! We tore the hell out of it. It was classic Stone Cold, with Booker T being a fantastic comedic accomplice. Actually, both of us laughed our asses off and had a good time. And we also had a good time doing spots on each other with the food. There’s no telling what the damage cost WWE. Vince had to write another check in the name of entertaining our fans, but it was a very memorable episode of
Raw.

The expression on that fan’s face says it all; I throw in with Mr. McMahon.

29
Turning Heel

M
y running battle with Vince McMahon ran from 1998 right through
WrestleMania X-Seven
in Houston’s Astrodome on April 1, 2001. Even though I was not the prototype for what you’d call the classic fan favorite, since I was going against the evil, pompous WWE owner Mr. McMahon, I was tremendously popular with the fans.

It was a hell of a run. But I remember when I wanted to turn heel against The Rock at
WrestleMania X-Seven,
I was looking for something big to come out of the match. I was feeling a little stale as a babyface. I felt like the Stone Cold character wasn’t running on all cylinders. The story lines for me seemed to be a little weak.

I wanted to shock people, which has pretty much become a tradition at
WrestleMania.
I wanted to do something they would talk about for a long time to come.

Then it came to me. I would turn on The Rock. And better still, I would accept the help of my enemy Vince McMahon in beating him. All of a sudden, I would become a heel.

A lot of guys like to work as heels. It’s more fun, even though you sell less merchandise as a rule. Of course, if I could go back in a time machine knowing what I know now, I’d never have turned heel at
WrestleMania X-Seven.

But back then I said, “Okay, I want to try something different. I want to challenge myself in a different way.”

That’s the reason you turn heel—to switch gears. I thought it would be entertaining for the fans to have an opportunity to hate me for a while. I thought it was going to be good for business.

I had been so white-hot as a hero. Now that I was starting to level off, I wanted a different type of ride.

I remember going into
WrestleMania X-Seven
in Houston, and cutting my promos against The Rock. I thought I out-promoed the guy, even though Rock’s stuff was awesome. My stuff was just more intense. I felt it—it was real.

Anything I say or do on TV—I mean, it may be a work—but if it’s Stone Cold Steve Austin, it’s real to me. I believe it one hundred percent. I
am
that guy when I’m cutting a serious promo.

Going into that event, it’s in the Houston Astrodome and it’s two top babyfaces, but clearly I was the favorite with that crowd because I lived only a hundred miles from there. It was home. It was Texas.

I remember the end of that match. I was whaling on Rock with a steel chair and then, after a hell of a series of false finishes, I pinned him one-two-three. Vince was the one who came out there and handed me
that steel chair. I was about to make an audible call right there in the middle of the ring because that crowd was so hot, and I was going to turn heel that night with Mr. McMahon. I damn near just said, “Hey, we’re not going to drink a beer together, but …” and then give him a Stone Cold Stunner. The fans would have really liked that, I think, and our feud would have continued.

When I look back, that’s a call I wish I had made in the ring. I wish I had told Vince, “Never mind” when he offered me that beer in the ring. Because I had gained so much of my edge back by the end of that match, the fans didn’t give a damn about me beating the hell out of Rock with that steel chair.

It was a no-disqualification match, so the fans didn’t care. It was a legal move. When I got the win there was a hell of a pop. There were over 67,000 people yelling for me. What I was feeling right then was,
Don’t turn heel!

But hey, that was what we carved into stone, what we had agreed upon. So Vince and I shook hands and drank beer together in front of the fans at the Astrodome, making a lot of them mad at me.

I wish I had called it all off right there in the ring. From that point, I wouldn’t have been so much a “tweener.” It would have been back to, “Hey, there’s that edgy Stone Cold. Whether he’s a good guy or a bad guy, or whatever, he’s going to do exactly what it takes to get the job done. No friends.” DTA, remember?

I never did “feel it” as a heel. I thought we had built a franchise and a character that was everything that the average Joe would aspire to be, an overachiever. My own man. Someone who lived by no one’s rules but his own. I go on my instincts and my guts, and I do what I believe is right. I like that guy.

And then J.R. told me a story about John Wayne. Why was John Wayne never a heel? The Duke was always the top babyface and everyone always knew that. J.R. never felt the heel turn was right for me either, and told me so more than once, but I guess I had to try it.

Normally, the time when babyfaces turned heel in the wrestling business is when they are at their hottest, when they are at the peak of their popularity. That’s when it would make the most impact.

But it seemed like the Stone Cold character transcended that logic. The fans didn’t want to hate me. It just didn’t work. Just like the fans really didn’t hate Rock at the last
WrestleMania,
even though he was supposed to be the heel.

The next night we were going to be broadcasting Raw from Fort Worth, still in Texas, and the fans there almost turned Vince babyface more than they turned me heel. It was almost like the fans were thinking, Vince is saying you can’t beat Austin, so if you can’t beat him, join him. He’s still from Texas, he’s still one of us, he whipped Rock’s ass in a no-disqualification match, so anything goes. Steve got the draw on Rock and hit him with a chair. But Rock wouldn’t have hit Steve with a chair if he’d gotten the chance. Don’t think he wouldn’t have. I don’t know what the hell Steve’s done that was so bad.

The Texas fans justified everything that had happened in their minds and I was not a heel to them. We had some work to do on this concept. We needed to do something shocking.

The next night we did
SmackDown!
in Oklahoma City and I simply used the old Oklahoma-Texas rivalry, and the fact that good ol’ J.R.’s a beloved hometown boy made good. We knew we had to take that sumbitch up to a drastic level, so I beat up J.R. in front of his family, friends and hometown crowd. When we did that, yeah, there was a little rise in the heat that night in Oklahoma City. They didn’t like it. But it still wasn’t that white-hot heat that you want as a heel.

I was thinking, Damn, if it’s not going to be white-hot heat in Oklahoma City when good ol’ J.R.’s busted open like a butchered hog by his buddy—the guy he’s loyally stood up for through thick and thin—what’s it going to be like next week in Boston and New York?

It never caught on. It was one of those deals where everything went sideways. If it had worked, it would have been great. But the people didn’t like it. They were taken completely off-guard by it.

It was like, “Oh, no.”

The irony of that is I was still selling more merchandise than anybody else, even though I was supposedly the top villain in the company. Heroes always sell more merchandise than heels. That was some “market
research” we didn’t listen to, and that’s more my fault than anyone else’s.

The fans were saying, “Okay, we’re going to buy his stuff. He’s a heel, but he’s going to come back around. So I want to go ahead and have his stuff.” And I was kind of taking pride in being a heel and still selling a lot of merchandise. Naturally, I didn’t want my merchandise sales to drop off, because I didn’t want to make less money. But those things really don’t work out together. It was kind of like Bret Hart wanting to be a heel in America and a babyface in Canada. It didn’t work as well in reality as it does on paper.

After I turned heel at
WrestleMania X-Seven,
WWE put a picture of me and the quote, “Why, Stone Cold, Why?” on the cover of
Raw
magazine and sold truckloads of magazines. That was a quote from J.R., but I started impersonating J.R. and making it real whiney sounding—
“Why,
Stone Cold,
Why?”
—just to piss people off.