THE STONE COLD TRUTH (24 page)
Read THE STONE COLD TRUTH Online
Authors: Steve Austin,J.R. Ross,Dennis Brent,J.R. Ross
Over the next few days I went and got a bunch of doctors’ reports. Every doctor I went to said to get out of wrestling.
I was out for three or four months after that, and I didn’t really think I was going to get back in because my doctor was saying, “No, no, no.” He wasn’t going to clear me. That was my first experience with an injury of that magnitude. I had all these red flags going, warning me not to get back in the ring.
So I rode my four-wheeler around my ranch all day. I lived out in the country and I had a case of beer in the cooler. I’d drink a case of beer every damn day and ride around on my four-wheeler. I’m not recommending that to anybody, that’s just what I did. Over time, I started feeling a little bit better.
I told the doctor that my ring activity could be a little more of a controlled situation. I could avoid certain things. Of course, I avoided all piledrivers after that because that axial load effect was the one thing that was going to screw me up again.
After several long conversations and tests, my doctor said, “Well, okay, if you think you can do it, you can get back in the ring.” Then I started easing back, doing tag matches. I did lots of tag matches, slowly getting more and more involved in the matches. And then Stone Cold took off again, and there I was, back off to the races.
But it didn’t last, because then I had to have the surgery that would keep me out close to a year. And it all stemmed from that Tombstone Piledriver.
With the injuries and all the physical trauma and the beatings I’d taken in football and wrestling, I had a lot of bone spurs on my spine. If I’d had a normal spinal cord, it wouldn’t have been quite so bad, but my spinal cord wasn’t normal.
Everyone’s spinal cord has a certain amount of room around it. Well, I’ve got less room than most people. I was born that way—with a congenitally narrow spinal cord. Michael Irvin had to quit the Dallas Cowboys because of that.
But even with all that—the narrow spinal cord and the bone spurs—I would have been all right. It was the axial load from that bad piledriver that got the bone spurs going into my spinal cord and touching the nerves there.
The muscles in my hand were starting to atrophy, and my legs were becoming hyper-reflexive and jumpy, and muscles would start pulsing in my back. The medical name for my condition is central cord compression.
But I was told that I could get some relief from surgery. So I set out to find a doctor who could do it.
That’s when I went and saw Dr. Bollman in Ohio, who did Cal Ripken Jr.’s surgery. I was going to let him cut on me. He came very highly recommended. He’s an orthopedic surgeon though I felt I needed a neurosurgeon. Besides, I was in his office in Cleveland with a bunch of interns for forty-five minutes. They herded me in and out of there like an animal. They were very professional, but I wasn’t comfortable with how that whole deal went.
When I got done there, I came back to Texas. It was during deer-hunting season, and this muscle in my hand was still atrophying real bad. That’s when I really noticed it. I told Dr. Jimmy Baros, my friend and personal doctor, “Man, I gotta do something about this. It’s not like I can fly to Cleveland every day. It’s going to be a three-month waiting process before I can even get my surgery.”
Dr. Jimmy said, “I want to send you to see my buddy, Dr. Lloyd Youngblood. He’s a neurosurgeon, the best of the best. I think you’ll really like him. Just go and get a second opinion. He’s right here in San Antonio.”
Great! I went to get a second opinion and for three hours, Dr. Youngblood sat with me in his office. I didn’t have an appointment, but for three hours he sat there and explained to me in language I could understand everything that was wrong with me. He was just a wealth of information about my problem.
Debra, my third wife, was there with me. I was looking at Dr. Youngblood and looking at Debra, and I turned and said to Debra, “This is the sumbitch who’s going to be cutting on my neck.”
A week or two later, I was getting cut on. I got the big operation in 1999, a full two years after the piledriver. It was two years of nagging pain. And it wasn’t like I had another option besides surgery. I was looking forward to getting cut on because I was in danger and I was having a lot of problems. The only thing that operation was going to do was help me. I wanted it.
At that point, I didn’t know if I was going to be able to come back or not. I had no idea if I was ever going to get back in the ring. If I’d had to venture a guess, I would have guessed that my wrestling career was over.
Anyway, I had the surgery and it went fine. I got all fused up. It
took close to a year, but Dr. Youngblood finally gave me clearance to get back in the ring.
Problem was, when I had my surgery done, I was actually a candidate for a three-level fusion. Youngblood’s a very conservative doctor and he told me if I had three levels fused, I would be completely done with wrestling, and there’d be a very long healing process of well over a year.
He said, “Let me just fuse this one, but down the road you’ll probably have to fuse these two also.” So we didn’t fuse those two, but now those are the two that are messing me up. That’s my problem. So every day that goes by, I’m just working my way closer and closer to another double spinal cord fusion.
All because of that Tombstone Piledriver.
J.R.: After Steve had his neck surgery in San Antonio with Dr. Youngblood, I flew down there to see him in the hospital. I think when I got there, Steve had been able to get a night’s sleep and when I walked in he was sitting up in bed eating ice cream. I told him I thought only kids who had their tonsils removed got ice cream in the hospital, but he said he had connections. Boy, did he! You would have thought that it was Elvis or John Wayne himself in the hospital there in Texas, because all the nurses and other personnel were just great and truly felt it was an honor to attend to their homegrown wrestling star. Steve always has been able to connect with his audience and he had already won all the nurses over in the short time he had been hospitalized. There were a bunch of Austin 3:16 fans working in that hospital, let me tell you! He was in amazingly good spirits, because many of the horrible symptoms that he had been experiencing with this neck injury were gone. He had found some significant relief, even though he still had some numbness in his hand and fingers. But Steve knew, and I knew, that he would have to address his wrestling career sooner than later. If Debra had not been there, we probably would have talked about it, but we didn’t. That was probably a smart thing. But I could tell by the look in his eyes that he had unfinished business to attend to. The thing was, neither of us knew when it would happen.
MOM: Right after Steve had his neck surgery, I left to visit him and see the girls. I was going to go up and hang out with them for a few days. When I got there, Steve wasn’t in the house. He left a note saying, “I’ll be out walking up and down the road.” Well, I saw this poor, pitiful thing out there walking. He had both of his knee braces on and he had this awful, big brace on his neck. And he had a cane. It just absolutely broke my heart when I looked at him. He looked like this little old man. It just tore me totally up, the way he looked. When he got himself into the house, he could hardly negotiate to sit down, because of all this stuff he had on his body. He couldn’t put his shoes on, or tie them. But I was there for the weekend. I was cooking and doing all this stuff. “Well,” he said, “Let’s take Mom here,” or “let’s take Mom there.” I said, “Oh Steve, you don’t have to entertain me! I just came to visit and hang out.” He said, “I’m tired of sitting around the house.” He wanted to take me somewhere. That was right after the Christmas when he gave his daddy a new pickup truck, and gave me the new Suburban, so I had my Suburban there. I said, “Steve, you get in the front, push that seat back and let me drive.” It took all of us to get him in the car. There was this place he wanted to take us to eat, and the people on the streets where we were walking would step back and say, “You’re the wrestler who had the surgery, right?” And Steve said, “Yeah.” “Well, we been praying for ya.” People were just wonderful, backing out of the way. Nobody asked anything of him that day. They were all treating him with respect. They really cared about him. People may be real pushy, and we’ve had it happen here. They’ve come to our house and interfered with our family gatherings and stuff. But I was very touched by the feeling that they had for Steve. They really did care about Steve when he was down and out and hurt. The messages, and the things that people said and did, it meant a lot to him. And seeing it firsthand, being with him, I can tell the fans do have a lot of love and respect for Steve.
Owen Hart never called me after he piledrove me and injured me. I heard that his brother Bret kept telling him to call me, but we never connected.
Did I hate Owen? No. That’s just the business and we weren’t really friends to start with. Did I want to work with him after that? No, I didn’t. I didn’t want to do business with him again. Right or wrong, that’s how I felt.
Sometimes I wonder how it could have happened. As good a technical wrestler as Owen was, he should have known he needed to drop to his knees, not his ass, to protect my neck.
I knew Owen as the consummate all-time ribber. He was always joking with people. I’m not saying this deal was a rib. I’m just saying he was always ribbing people and as good-natured as he was, he never maliciously did anything to hurt anyone. Owen was all about fun, so I couldn’t figure out why he did it that way.
When he didn’t call me at my house afterward, that kind of upset me a bit. It was like, “Hey, if I damn near paralyzed someone, I’d be calling them every damn day of the week!”
The WWE Merchandise Department came out with a T-shirt that said
OWEN
3:16, and on the back it said,
I JUST BROKE YOUR NECK.
That was pretty damn cheesy. If I was going to get any royalties off that one, maybe I would have liked it better, but if he’s going to put the money in his pocket for messing my life up, I wasn’t real fond of that.
As I said, I didn’t hold any animosity toward Owen. But it was never the same between us. I didn’t think he was as funny as I used to think he was.
When we’d pass in the hall or in the back, I’d say hi, but we never really spoke much after I came back. I never could figure that out. J.R. thought that maybe Owen was sorry and ashamed that he screwed the piledriver up, but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, admit it. I don’t know.
Anyway, it was just one of those things, and I’m still paying for it now. That’s the way it goes in the wrestling business. It ain’t ballet. Things happen, and that time it happened to me. But I ain’t gonna sit here and cry about it.
I just deal with it—every day. And I will continue to deal with it for the rest of my life.
Unfortunately, Owen had a freak accident on May 23, 1999, when he accidentally fell over forty feet from an overhead catwalk to the ring
and died immediately from the fall. No one deserves to die like that. That was bad and I felt sad for Owen’s family, his wife and his children. I’m really sorry, and was always sorry, that Owen Hart died.
J.R.: Honestly, I was surprised that they were even doing a Tombstone Piledriver, because no one does it better than Undertaker, as it is one of the Deadman’s signature moves. Wrestlers usually don’t, or shouldn’t, use other talents’ finishing moves for their own high spots, but that’s another story for another time. My take on this incident was this; Owen was a good person and a helluva wrestler. He was born into wrestling royalty in my eyes, as the youngest son of the legendary tough guy and long-time promoter Stu Hart. I always felt that Owen may have thought that he had let down his family, specifically his dad and older brother Bret, with a poorly executed maneuver. It would be like the son of Michael Jordan being cut from his basketball team. It just wasn’t supposed to happen. But it did, and I think Owen was so taken aback by what happened, that he never cleared the air with Steve. I will guarantee you one thing—Owen cared and I know he felt bad about what happened, because we used to discuss it often. When Steve was out of commission because of the neck injury, Owen used to ask me about Steve all the time. I would say to him, “Why don’t you call him?” Owen’s response was always along the lines of, “I’m going to,” or, “I will, I just feel so bad about what I did.” Those two never had the conversation they needed to have, the conversation both men felt in their hearts before Owen’s untimely death. That’s one face-to-face meeting I wish I could have orchestrated.
Stone Cold and Debra
