THE STONE COLD TRUTH (3 page)

W
hen I was born, there was no sound of “breaking glass” with the Stone Cold entrance music pumping through the hospital on loudspeakers and doctors tossing beers. That would have been pretty cool, but it didn’t happen.

My story starts in Austin, Texas. That’s where I was brought into the world on December 18, 1964, as Steve Anderson, the second brother in an eventual line of four brothers and one little sister. My mom, Beverly, is a great lady and a wonderful mother who did her best to raise her boys the right way.

My dad, Ken Williams singing lead

Shortly after I was born, she got pregnant again with my brother Kevin. I guess my biological father, James, couldn’t deal with that fact. He took off and left me and my brothers Scott and Kevin with my mom.

My parents got divorced before I ever had a chance to get to know James. I have no memories of the man. Neither does Kevin, who’s ten months younger than I am. James showed up once or twice at live events when I was in World Championship Wrestling, and told me his name and told me who he was. He looked like me and talked like me, but I didn’t know him. I tried to talk to him, but it was like talking to a stranger. The only things I knew about him were what I had heard from my mom. He had abandoned us and I had no feelings for him. By the same token, I had no animosity toward him.

After Mom and my biological father divorced, she moved us from Austin to Victoria, Texas. Mom raised us right, hard as it was on her. She was a single mother with three kids—my older brother, Scott, me and my younger brother Kevin.

Then she met a wonderful man named Ken Williams, and everything
kind of took off from there. It was “a marriage made in heaven,” as they say, as Ken fell in love with my mom and all of us kids too.

Ken Williams was a real Texan, a man who traveled on the road on weekends playing guitar and singing in a country-western band, was a part-time rancher with his family and sold insurance as his regular job. He had played running back at Rice University on a football scholarship. He worked hard all his life, was in his thirties, but was not married.

Ken always said he was at the point in his life where he was ready for a family, so he married my mom, adopted my brothers and me as his own and moved us to Edna, Texas, a much smaller town than Victoria. We were somewhat middle class, but we had to work for whatever money we wanted for spending. A few years later, my brother Jeff and my little sister Jennifer were born and added to the family.

Edna was just a regular little Texas town. I remember the city limit signs and how they would change the population numbers on them. For a long time the number was 5,332, and then it went to 5,650. After I left, I think it went all the way up to 6,000. Now I think its back in the five thousand range.

At the time I was growing up, I think Edna had three or four red lights and a Dairy Queen. About three years ago, they got a few other fast-food places, a Whataburger, a McDonald’s and a Sonic. But I was already long gone by then.

The high school graduating class was a little over a hundred kids. We went from Double-A to Triple-A football, depending on our enrollment that year. I think they had two or three motels in town, and only one theater. It eventually went out of business. Edna had a couple of feed stores a few tire stores, a couple of drive-in grocery stores and a Ford and a Chevy-GMC dealership.

The town finally got a Wal-Mart a couple of years ago, but there wasn’t any such thing there when I was growing up. It was just a little-ass town a hundred miles south of Houston on Highway 59, too small to attract the notice of a big retail chain.

Victoria was another town twenty-five miles farther down south. If you went shopping, you sure didn’t go to Edna! You’d go to the mall in Victoria, which had a population of about fifty thousand. Or if you really
wanted to go big time, you went to Houston, which was a hundred miles away.

Anyway, Edna was where Ken decided to raise us.

I want to say something about Ken Williams. What a hell of a man he is. Ken is the only father I’ve ever known, and I love and respect him as my own. In our family, the word “step,” as in stepdad or stepson, was never used. When someone asks me who Ken is, I always say he’s my dad. He is my real father in every sense of the word.

For anybody to take on the kind of responsibility he did is really something. I don’t know if it’s something I’d be willing to do. I’ve always respected the hell out of my dad for that. He’s a great man that I really respect. He taught me my sense of humor and my values, so he is my dad one hundred percent, in my opinion.

My dad raised us right—firm, but fair. He kicked my butt many times when it was called for. And my brothers and I did a lot of crap to deserve getting our butts whipped too. We were always doing some kind of stupid stuff.

And then there’s my mom. I absolutely love her to death. She has been my inspiration, along with my dad, for everything I have done in my life. I have relied on her for support, love, advice, taking advantage of her wisdom and experience.

I have screwed up plenty of things in my life. That’s all a part of living. Through all of my screwups, my mom has understood and helped me in any way she possibly could. It has been one of my missions in life to make her proud of me and to never embarrass her. I love and respect her more than any other person in this world. I’ll help you read between the lines.
Don’t mess with Stone Cold’s mom!

I have to say I have the best parents in the world.

I gave this photo to a neighbor with the promise, written on the back, that I’d be famous someday.

3
Growing Up in a Small Texas Town

M
y dad’s family had a cattle ranch outside Edna, Texas, and We’d go out there and help with throwing the hay and herding and taking care of the cattle. It was cool, but we managed to always get in some kind of trouble. If I didn’t think of something to do to cause some trouble, my brothers did.

Kevin is just like me, only crazier, or maybe I should say “more imaginative.” (We were almost like twin brothers, being only ten months apart in age.) Were we bad? Well, yeah, sometimes. We weren’t criminal, just ornery. We never got taken to jail, but we did pull some crazy stuff that the whole family laughs about when we all get together on special occasions.

Kevin is serving in the United States Coast Guard and I’m real proud of him. He always said he’d either be a policeman or a soldier. I guess he’s sort of both now. And that’s a good thing too, ’cause that sumbitch is the real “Stone Cold” and will definitely open up a can of whoop-ass on anyone stupid enough to try on the United States Coast Guard for size!

I was always into athletics. I always played football and baseball, and participated in track. I also really liked the discus throw. A friend and I even tried out tennis one year and somehow went to the state finals. Of course, the only reason I took up tennis was to meet a girl, but we’ll get more into that later on.

In high school, I started working out with weights, and my body responded to it. I got thicker and more muscular, “jacked-up,” some would say. This paid off, as I got a football scholarship at Wharton Junior College in Texas, and from there I got a full scholarship to North Texas State University in Denton, Texas.

That was a very lucky thing for me in many ways. For one, if I had gone to school out of state, I would not have seen the ads for Chris Adams’s wrestling school that aired on
World Class Championship Wrestling,
the Von Erichs’ TV wrestling show out of Dallas.

Family has always been real important to me. I’d do anything for my parents, Beverly and Ken, or my brothers Scott, Kevin and Jeff, and my little sister, Jenny—or their families. I’d do pretty much anything for my family, bottom line.

I’ve screwed up here and there, but I learned some great respect for people from my parents. I do tend to use a lot of four-letter words, but if we’re in a restaurant or at a Make-A-Wish appearance, something like that, I’m going to conduct myself accordingly. I pretty much know how to handle myself. But to my friends, the people who know me, yeah, I’m pretty foul-mouthed. Still, I’ve always respected people. Hell, I treat people
how I expect to be treated myself. I learned to always say thank you, please, all the right stuff. That’s the way my mom and dad brought me up. They taught me respect and the difference between right and wrong.

I wouldn’t say I came from a superstrict background, but there were certain things that were going to happen. You were going to do your chores. You were going to take out the trash. We always rotated when it came to doing the dishes, mowing the yard or washing the sides of the house and the windows.