THE STONE COLD TRUTH (27 page)

I was doing things that blue-collar and even white-collar people could identify with. It was stuff they would have liked to do themselves. I was standing up to my boss and doing crap to him and I was getting away with it, which is why I think it was so universally accepted. Our fans could suspend their general disbelief of the product and relate to what we were doing. The best wrestling story lines are the ones that are easy to understand and relate to.

My feud with Vince began on January 18, 1998, when I faced and beat The Rock in the final match of the
Royal Rumble.
That victory guaranteed me a WWE Championship title shot at
WrestleMania XFV.

So far, so good. As we were building toward
WrestleMania,
Vince did everything he could to screw with me and the fans backed me up all the way. Vince would tell me in the ring, “Austin, I’m the boss and we can do things the easy way or the hard way. Tell me how you want it.”

I’d ask the fans, “Do you want to see Stone Cold Steve Austin do things the hard way, give me a Hell Yeah!” Capacity crowds would yell, “Hell Yeah!” so I’d give Vince the Stone Cold Stunner and climb the ropes to celebrate with the fans. They took a lot of pleasure in my physicality toward my boss.

Then the WWE promotional machine really started grinding. Vince always comes up with something way over the top for
WrestleMania,
and he didn’t disappoint the fans on this occasion. To make sure the match would be “fair and square,” Vince brought in the notorious boxer “Iron” Mike Tyson, who would be the special “enforcer” referee. Can you imagine that? We got worldwide press coverage. That tie-in with Mike Tyson was a hell of a deal. Yeah, that was a home run, a real grand slam for the company. It was a helluva good idea by the big Irishman.

It was all good working with Mike Tyson. The first time I met Mike, he called me “Cold Stone.” He kept calling me that, even though we did several shows together. So I used to make him mad. I’d say to him, “Why you gotta call me ‘Cold Stone’? It’s damn easy! STONE COLD!”

I’d do it in character, barking at him. He’d say, “Okay, Steve,” but sure enough, he’d call me “Cold Stone” the next time. Mike was a big fan and wanted to meet all the wrestlers. He and Shane McMahon seemed to hit it off pretty well.

Mike liked to talk about all sorts of things. I had the usual conversations with him, nothing like solving the world’s problems or anything like that. The guy I met was intelligent. I think it’s a case of him sometimes being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But you got to give the guy credit. He hasn’t made the greatest decisions in his life, but hey, he’s owned up to all of them too. I enjoyed the guy. I’m not going to hold him under a microscope. Everyone’s made mistakes and he’s made his share. Big deal, so have I.

And he did well for our company. That whole issue with Stone Cold, or “Cold Stone,” as he’d say, was good stuff. The Austin-Tyson story line was super for our business, and Tyson came out of there a huge babyface at the end of the day.

At the press conference before WrestleMania, being able to sit there with Mike Tyson was really fun, and he brought in a lot of outside people. Everybody knows who Mike Tyson is. There was a tremendous crossover appeal when he came to WWE. I’m a big boxing fan and he’s a big wrestling fan, so it was cool.

At one point in the press conference, he shoved me.
Hard.
I shoved him back, and everybody just started shoving everybody else. There were hundred-dollar bills shooting out of Mike’s pockets. There was just money everywhere. He had a lot of money on him that night, thousands of dollars in cash. It was just a great piece of business. I never got one of those loose hundred-dollar bills though.

Wrestlemania XIV
finally arrived. It was an absolutely
huge
event that sold out Boston’s Fleet Center. Despite Triple H’s and Chyna’s best attempts to help Shawn Michaels win, I beat the current WWE champion, with some help from Tyson. He ended up turning on HBK, which allowed me to win the WWE title for the first time.

In the context of the story line, Vince McMahon was not pleased at all with me as the new WWE Champion. He did not like the way I made the company look with my beer drinking and colorful language and finger motions, so he did everything possible over the next year to cause me problems and to try to pry the title away from me.

Stone Cold wasn’t a “corporate” enough image, is how it all began. Vince told the fans that if I won the WWE Championship, it would be a corporate nightmare. That angle had more people watching wrestling than had ever watched before. We did some great television and some things that were very cutting edge. Everybody wanted to know what Stone Cold was going to do to that bastard Mr. McMahon the next Monday night on
Raw.

I represented the classic “working man” and Vince played the evil owner of the company, who was trying to manipulate his employees like a puppet master. It was a universal story that everyone could identify with.

I was getting back at my boss.

“Hell yeah!”
the crowd roared, and Vince is stunned once again, to the delight of everybody.

Every week Vince would try to screw me, and I’d come right back with something really wild that would shock the fans and keep them coming back for more. It was super-ego versus super-ego. Vince tried to screw Stone Cold at every turn, but I got my revenge in some very creative ways. Nobody tells Stone Cold what to do, and that’s the bottom line.

I filled up Vince’s classic Corvette convertible with tons of concrete from a cement mixer I drove into the Nassau Coliseum. I crushed his limo with the 3:16 Monster Truck. I drove a beer truck into the arena, and hosed him and his stooges down with thousands of gallons of beer. I attacked him while he was in the hospital and zapped him with those heart paddles. I brained him with a bedpan and jammed an enema gimmick up his backside.

The next week, I filled up his corporate office at WWE headquarters with cow manure. I also hit him with steel chairs and kicked him in the testicles many, many times. I’m not doing that on purpose, by the way. What I’m trying to do is kick him in his gut to set him up for the Stunner. The idea is to kick him in the gut, but sometimes my shorts or jeans were too tight, depending on my weight situation, and I couldn’t lift my leg high enough. Anytime I kicked him below the belt, it was not intentional. It’s just the way it happened. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

But Vince has never bitched about it, not even once. For a rich guy
who takes a limo to get a haircut in New York City twice a month, don’t kid yourself. Vince is a tough SOB.

He’s also whacked me with steel chairs and made me bleed a few times himself. I have a scar on the back of my head that’s a permanent souvenir from one of Vince’s chair shots. But I loved working with the man.

A big part of my WWE career was working with Vince. For a guy who’s north of fifty, the chairman of WWE is a physical freak. Vince has his share of critics and I’ve personally butted heads with him, as has been documented. But bottom line, there is nothing Vince won’t do for our business.

Ever since day one, I’ve listened to everything that comes out of his mouth because I know how smart he is. Anything he says I can learn from. There’s a lot of things I’ve learned in the course of my life and my career I’ve forgotten about, but I can recall every conversation I’ve ever had with Vince McMahon—what I said and what he said in return.

I think the guy is a genius and a shark. He’s gutsy and he goes by his instincts. He’s made his mistakes, yeah, but he’s a winner.

And so is his family. The thing I always appreciated about the McMahon family was they didn’t tell you to work hard. You worked hard by following their example. They all work their butts off. That impresses me. I like those people. Sometimes that can be a double-edged sword, but I’ve enjoyed working for them.

I mean, Vince is the boss, but I also consider him a friend. He’s someone who I think I could pretty much ask anything from, and get it. And he could ask anything from me. Anything I could do for him and his family, I would do. I think that much of that whole family.

It’s been a real education. I’ve learned more from Vince than I think I could have learned at any college. Not about all kinds of subjects, but about life in general, how to entertain people and how to handle yourself. Working here is like a college education in life, business and success.