THE STONE COLD TRUTH (23 page)

Also, it seemed like he had a real chip on his shoulder for some reason. I don’t know why that was. Shawn seemed very egotistical, and it was true that he had been a big success, but he seemed arrogant.

I always had great matches with him and I got along with him, but it wasn’t like we hung out together. We weren’t buddies. But I learned a lot from him. He was quite a hand.

My relationship with Shawn is a lot better now than it used to be. It’s not that he’s gone through any real changes, but because it’s a different day and age. We’re a lot closer friends than we were back then.

Shawn had a lot of issues back then, before
WrestleMania XIV.
He had a lot of demons. He was burning the candle on both ends and wasn’t exactly feeling like a million bucks. Man, do I know that feeling.

And then,
wham,
I came along, Stone Cold Steve Austin, getting white-hot and breathing down everybody’s neck. I think that was unsettling to him. I think that adversely affected him. He was asked to drop the title belt to me, and at the time I don’t think he really wanted to do it.

If it had been anybody else other than me, he probably wouldn’t have done it. But he did do it for me. The match wasn’t a classic by any stretch, but I did appreciate Shawn Michaels’s ability and his timing, which were always impeccable.

23
Owen Hart

O
wen Hart was Bret Hart’s brother. I enjoyed Owen’s company. But we weren’t running buddies.

I was hanging with the people who drank a little bit, and Owen hung out with a lot of the fans and saved his money. He would get rides with pretty much everybody and stay with fansinstead of at hotels, and that enabled him to keep his expenses to a minimum.

One wrestler he hung around with a lot was the “British Bulldog,” Davey Boy Smith, they were brothers-in-law and they were both from Calgary. Davey was a drug guy and Owen wasn’t. But Owen wasn’t an alcohol guy either. Absolutely zero on both those counts.

So, basically, I did my thing and Owen did his. We hung out in different crowds. But Owen was a hell of a hand and I had always enjoyed working with him, just as I had always enjoyed working with his brother Bret, whose style was closer to my own.

My match with Owen was set for
SummerSlam 1997,
on August 3, 1997, at the Meadowlands Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey. By then, Stone Cold was really catching fire with the fans.

I was told that I was going to win the Intercontinental belt back from Owen on that night. The stipulation to my challenge was that if I couldn’t beat him and win, I was going to have to kiss his ass. We really built that up on TV as a major deal. It was another simple, easy-to-understand story line.

So the day came and I was talking to Owen in the back, and we were throwing a few things together for the finish of the title match.

I said to him, “Well, what about if we do that thing where I come in for the elbow and you rotate your back around and pick me up upside down and give me the Tombstone Piledriver? Then you cover me and I’ll kick out right before the three-count.” I added, “Now, Owen, I don’t trust just
anybody
to do a piledriver to me, but you can do it, right?”

And he said, “Yeah.”

I said, “You’re going to go to your knees, right?”

And he said, “No, I’m going to drop to my ass.”

Then I said, “Well, you need to go to your knees, right?”

And he said, “No, I drop to my ass.”

That’s two times I said that. And I was thinking, I’m dealing with Owen Hart, brother of Bret Hart and son of Stu Hart. I guess he knows what he’s doing. He’s ribbing me about dropping to his ass instead of his knees.

Owen was a hell of a technician. When he assured me I’d be okay,
I took his word that I’d be okay. I didn’t think twice about it. I had mentioned my concerns to him twice. But in an inverted Tombstone Piledriver, done the way Undertaker does it, it’s always knees, not ass.

So I figured, Owen’s got it, he knows my concern. I had asked him twice about it, and that was the big spot in the match.

When I came out that night, boy, people were ready to see Stone Cold Steve Austin do the Stone Cold Stunner on Owen for that title belt. The match went along and it was a good match, the right style of match for that year. It was a solid wrestling match. We were going through some things near the end that could be finishes, but they weren’t. The crowd was really into all the false finishes. After that we wrestled for another five or six minutes, the idea being to lead into a Stunner.

Eventually, he set up the piledriver spot. I spun Owen around and he landed on his feet. Then he picked me up, upside down, and
WHAM
—he dropped straight to his ass. There was simply no room for me to protect my head.

If you watch the videotape, my head’s about six to eight inches
below
his ass. I weigh 250. He weighed 225 or thereabouts at the time. But with the jump up and the impact down, man, I got spiked headfirst into the mat hard as hell.

That’s one of the things that’s going to turn you into a quadriplegic quicker than anything, like what happened to Christopher Reeves. It’s called axial load. It’s not a whiplash thing, but a major impact blow to the spinal chord—
BOOM.

I remember when it happened, I was going to kick out on two and a half or two and three-quarters. I was going to sell the piledriver, but I was going to kick out of it at the last second. When my head hit the mat, it was as if a big gong went off in my body.

When stuff like that happens, people usually go unconscious or get all groggy. I stayed razor sharp the whole time, and it was like I had super hearing. My legs straightened up, my arms bent up and my hands were frozen.

I remember kind of picking my head up from the mat and telling the referee, Earl Hebner, “Tell him not to fucking touch me, I can’t move.”

Earl got up and told Owen, “Don’t touch him, he can’t move.”

A piledriver gone bad,
Summer Slam 1997.

I said, “Tell him to buy me some time.”

Earl told him that, so Owen started chanting to the crowd, “Now he’s going to have to kiss
my
ass!”

He was buying me the time I needed. A minute or a minute and a
half went by, and I finally started to get a little bit of feeling back in my limbs. My shoulders and my interior delts were on fire. It took everything I had to bend my legs and try to get into a crawl position, but I couldn’t crawl on my hands because I couldn’t use my hands yet.

Still, we had to get to the finish. And I had to win.

So I was crawling around on my elbows and I told the referee, “Rollup for the win.”

He told Owen what I had called, and the next thing that happened was I did the worst-looking rollup in wrestling history, because I couldn’t use my limbs. Somehow I managed to hold Owen on his back and get a three-count out of it.

I meant for that to be the end of it, but Owen kicked right out after three. Why? To make himself look strong, like he was barely beat. That kick-out hurt me like hell too, and could easily have injured my neck further.

I should have lain there and gotten medical attention, but it didn’t happen that way. It was one of those deals where it was a highly anticipated match. There were a lot of 3:16 shirts out there that night, a whole lot of Stone Cold fans.

Owen rolled out of the ring, defeated, and left. But as I rolled over on my back, I knew that I was completely screwed up.

I had wanted to get the match over with the right way, and the
only reason I called for the rollup rather than just laying there and let him beat me, was because of the kiss-my-ass stipulation. By finishing the match the way it was supposed to go, I was doing everything I could to
be
Stone Cold Steve Austin.

All the referees came out to the ring and it took three of them to pull me to my feet. I got my arms around them and they tried to hold me up and hand me the title belt, but my legs were dragging and I could barely walk.

The feeling was starting to come back in my feet, so I knew that I could walk a little bit. I took my arms away from the refs and held the belt up, and acknowledged the crowd. Then I walked out, but my legs were really dragging.

I got to the back and I was visibly shaken. The whole thing just scared the crap out of me. As they got me onto a stretcher, I just wanted to know what the hell had happened.

I had told Owen, “I don’t trust just
anybody
to do a piledriver on me,” but I got planted on my head. It had happened. My shoulders were absolutely on fire. My front delts wouldn’t stop burning. That goes with the kind of injury I had.

They took me to the hospital and did an X-ray—I don’t think they did an MRI that night—but the reports came back negative. Later, when I had further tests done by Dr. Joseph Torg in Philadelphia, it showed that I had a bruised spinal cord. I’m still dealing with the residual damage now, six years later.

Anyway, I left the hospital and bought myself a twelve-pack of beer, and I was kind of starting to feel the effects of getting dropped on my head. I guess it was almost like having a concussion. I was feeling really weird in bed. I probably should have stayed in the hospital, but lying in bed at the hotel drinking beer, I went to sleep.

Despite everything, I got up the next day and drove to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to do
Raw
and cut a promo on Owen, because I’m Stone Cold Steve Austin. My delts were burning like crazy and I couldn’t wrestle, but I went and covered my ass on TV.

Here’s what I said to Owen Hart the next night on
Raw is War;

“Owen Hart! I’m not going to listen to the doctors. I’m not going
to wear this piece of crap [neck brace] they gave me. The fact that you dropped me on my head don’t mean a damn thing to me! The fact of the matter was, you were too stupid to cover me when you had the chance! The bottom line is, you’re a loser, Owen Hart. Not because I say you are, but because it runs through your veins, ’cause your mom and dad gave that to you, and I can’t do nothin’ about that! Tonight I truly will open up a can of whoop-ass and show you exactly what Austin 3:16 means, and that’s the bottom line, ’cause Stone Cold said so!”