THE STONE COLD TRUTH (12 page)

I haven’t spoken to Kathy since then, but she and my mom still keep in touch. Long ago I had given Kathy a folded-up one-dollar bill for good luck. Just a few months ago my mom told me that she had something for me. I asked, “What is it?” and she said, “You’ll know when you see it.” It was that same dollar bill. Kathy had put it in a little frame and she had wanted me to have it back for good luck.

That was a classy thing for her to do. I would like to be able to sit down and have a conversation with Kathy someday and just say that I am sorry for being such a jerk back in the day, and that I never meant to be a pile of crap. She is a class act.

Kathy is married now with a nice family. I’m really happy for her. I should have learned more from the mistakes I made in our relationship. It could have helped me in my later relationships with the fairer sex. But I could never do anything the easy way. That’s just the way I am.

After I turned heel on Chris Adams in the ring, I seemed cocky and arrogant to the fans who remembered me as a nice kid—so much so that they really began to hate me. My feud with Adams was one of the things that helped draw the houses at the Sportatorium at that time.

You know, it really was a great atmosphere when that place was full. Hell, Elvis played there when he was just getting started in his career. They used to have concerts in that place in the old days.

Then, to add more heat and keep the story going, the bookers in Dallas added Percival Pringle III to the mix—as me and Jeannie’s manager. I remember when I first hooked up with Percy. With the brightly colored costumes he wore, he was a real flamboyant guy. Just the way he looked and talked … he could talk a hundred miles an hour. He was a great interview and a real smart man, and he was a real big wrestling fan from way back.

At the Sportatorium, on one of the inner office walls, there was a framed photo collection showing all the big stars that had been through there. And sure enough, there was Percy Pringle with Rick Rude.

I had followed Percy’s career closely as a fan, and I had always liked the guy a whole lot. And now Percy was
my
manager! I was honored. I was trying to get somewhere in the business and they had hooked me up with a guy who’d had a real good run with so many stars.

I was thinking, God dang, here I am. I got Rick Rude’s manager. This is more like it.

Percy eventually made it to WWE as Paul Bearer, Undertaker’s manager, and remained in that role for many years.

I really enjoyed working with him in Dallas—he knew how to work that old-school manager distraction gimmick. We had some cool matches together. One time we got to tie up Chris Von Erich, the youngest of the Von Erich family, and we busted him wide open. Another time we tied him and Chris Adams up in a cage with some bailing wire or coat hangers and beat the hell out of both of them. Those were some good times. I was still a newcomer to the business, but I was making progress.

The Dallas and Memphis USWA organizations were a great experience for me, but eventually it became time to move on. I needed to make more money and to continue my wrestling education. After my marriage with Kathy was annulled, Jeannie and I started seeing each other more seriously and became a couple pretty quick. That’s when I got a call from World Championship Wrestling.

10
WCW—World Championship Wrestling

I
first saw one of the wrestling business’ insider newsletters, which are also known as “kayfabe sheets” or “dirt sheets,” back in 1989 or 1990. They’d been around for a pretty good while, but I just didn’t know about them. You normally see one in a locker room and it gets passed around.

After I’d been wrestling in USWA for a while, and I was done with the story line that had me feuding with Chris Adams, I started working some singles matches with Jeff Jarrett. That worked for me, as he was the number one babyface there. I was also doing some independent wrestling shows booked by Ed Watt, but I was only earning a few hundred dollars a month.

About that time, somebody wrote something good about me in one of those insider newsletters. Grizzly Smith, an agent for WCW who was the father of Jake “The Snake” Roberts, sat down one day and read about this rookie from down in World Class who was doing pretty well and then went to USWA.

It was me, of course, that he was reading about. Word got to Dusty Rhodes, who had been a popular wrestler in his day and was booking talent for WCW, and Dusty Rhodes called Tom Prichard about me.

One day when we were riding down the road, Tom said, “Hey, Steve, I think WCW is interested in you. Let me give Dusty Rhodes a call for you.”

This was in 1991. I had been in the business for two years—and I was thinking, Wow!

I knew that WCW would give me the chance to earn more than a few hundred dollars a month. A
lot
more.

WCW was owned by Ted Turner, who was a big wrestling fan, and the shows were televised all over the world on SuperStation TBS. (That was before WCW was sold to WWE in 2001.)

At that point, I was fixing to leave USWA anyway. Portland Wrestling had given me a call. Sandy Barr, the promoter in Portland, had asked me to join his promotion as a heel. “Scotty the Body” Levy, who later became Raven, was about to move on and he had been one of their top heels. They needed someone to replace him.

They said, “We’ve seen you and you’re a good-bumpin’ heel,” which meant that I could fly around the ring for the hero.

If you’re going to be a heel, it helps to be a good bump taker. You’ll be taking a lot of them. As a matter of fact, I don’t think a wrestler can be a great money-drawing heel if he can’t take plenty of bumps.

So I was pretty much on my way to Portland when I got a call from
Magnum T.A., Dusty Rhodes’s assistant and a former wrestler. Magnum called me at home and spoke with Jeannie, saying he was calling for Dusty Rhodes and WCW. When Jeannie answered, he liked her voice a lot, so at his request, she sent in some pictures too.

As soon as I got home, I called back, saying, “Hey Magnum, this is Steve Austin. I was told to call you.”

He talked to me for a little bit and he said, “Well, are you a heel or a face?”

I said, “I’ve been a heel for a bit.”

He said, “All right, why don’t you come down?”

I didn’t know this at the time, but Jim Ross had mentioned my name to Dusty several times also, having seen my work in Dallas. I was flown to CNN Center in Atlanta, and they stuck a contract under my face. I signed it. All that mattered to me was I was making $75,000 a year, $1,442 a week!

Wow, that was great! That was way up from what I had been making. And I ended up more than doubling my contract the next year, from $75,000 to $156,000.

But even at seventy-five, I thought,
Okay, I’m making some money now.
My parents were happy for me, even though I was still doing that crazy “wrestling thing.” I was on my way up.

Right on the heels of me going to Atlanta, Jeannie ended up there too. So I moved to Atlanta and she followed me there a little while later.

In WCW, they started me with a valet, Vivacious Veronica, who was wrestler Rex King’s old girlfriend. Then they put me with Jeannie, who was working as Lady Blossom, just a few weeks later—without any story line reason. They just swapped them out. Dusty Rhodes selected that professional name for Jeannie because her chest was “blossoming out of her top,” or so the story goes.

I remember the first night I was there, they told me they were going to put the TV title on me. The reigning TV champion was “Beautiful” Bobby Eaton, another one of my favorite hands—just an awesome damn wrestler, especially when it came to tag-team matches.