THE STONE COLD TRUTH (37 page)

After the match was over, a lot of people said they liked it. But then, I lost it in grand fashion. The deal with me is that in my matches, you go from Point A to Point B. You can draw a straight line, and that’s a match. Or you can go up and down and around and in curves and that’s a match too. I just wanted to get through the match, from A to B, with a few turns in the road. We didn’t do anything fancy. It was a basic formula and we told a simple story.

All of a sudden, all the pressures were gone, lifted off my shoulders. I had fulfilled my contract and my obligation to Vince McMahon and his family, had closure character-wise and didn’t end up having to be stretchered out of the ring when the match was over.

But it was weird for me. I wished I could still wrestle a regular schedule. But I knew I couldn’t, so I accepted that. I knew there were lots of people way worse off than I was. My time had passed, sure, but I was still one lucky South Texas redneck.

When the show was over, we had to wait for all the fans to clear out before we could return to the hotel. There were so many fans there, it took over an hour for us to go. But you don’t mind waiting when the event was a sellout. So I took it easy after the show, I was in no hurry. I took a shower at the arena and put on an Ozzy Osbourne CD and then put on a Black Label CD and listened to a few songs.

I rode back to the hotel with J.R. I think it was appropriate that the last ride from
WrestleMania
for the wrestler known as the Texas Rattlesnake was with ol’ J.R.

He asked me how I felt. He said I looked “relieved.” I was. I’d been under the knife so many times with my knees, my neck and all this other stuff, it was great to know that I wouldn’t have to go out there and perform at a substandard level.

I felt good that I had not only got through the match with The Rock without getting hurt, but had put on a pretty damned solid match. I had been off for eight months, but thank goodness my timing all just came back to me. I really liked what we did and was happy it was over, especially after so much apprehension about doing such a physical match at an event the caliber of
WrestleMania.

We went back to the hotel and I went upstairs and showered again, changed my clothes and then went down to the company’s big post-
WrestleMania
party. I kind of camped myself in one spot and talked to whoever came by.

It was fun. WWE really knows how to throw a party for all the hard-working people in the company who do such great work at
WrestleMania.

Then I went up to my room. I put on some CDs and was just thinking, wondering what the next step was. What’s gonna happen next?

I remember telling Vince more than five years ago that I only had three years left in the business as a wrestler—and despite that, I was still there in the main event at
WrestleMania.
But now it was over.

Was I sore the next day? Yes. Did I injure anything new or make anything worse? No. Is Stone Cold retired from active wrestling in the ring? Probably. You never say never in this crazy business, but I wouldn’t bet on my wrestling again.

There had to be an ending. But this was closure. This was the finishing touch to Stone Cold’s active wrestling career. It all made sense, story line-wise. My story now had an end as well as a beginning.

Nowadays, I miss going out and wrestling. And my fans miss it too, no doubt. The WWE fan base is extremely loyal, in general, but the Stone Cold fans are more intense and more loyal, than any of them, and I love them to death. So they might be disappointed that I can’t go out there and raise hell, and drink and cuss, and challenge guys to wrestling matches.

I’m challenged now to be useful in another role. But I still want to entertain the fans who have stuck by me so long and through so much.

In my final match, I laid on my back and looked at the lights for three seconds and knew that my wrestling career was over. But what I did was right—for me, for WWE, for The Rock, for the wrestling business. It felt real good. I haven’t always made the right decisions, but I nailed this one square on the head.

And that’s how my in-ring wrestling career ended. But Stone Cold Steve Austin’s story isn’t over, believe me.

38
Stone Cold’s Bottom Line on the Wrestling Business

I
f I ran WWE in a perfect world, I’d take the business back ten or fifteen years. I’m not talking about eliminating the music or the pyrotechnics. I’m talking about the wrestling style, bell to bell. If we change that the way I’m suggesting, guys are going to sell the moves more.

That means slow down, take less chances and tell better stories. The way it was in the eighties, or when I was really hot in 1996, 1997 and 1998.
Raw
on Monday nights
was
raw.
Raw
is so damn slick right now, it ain’t raw at all.

It used to be in WWE that three years out, they knew where everybody was going. They don’t do that anymore. It’s too bad. There was a big picture, a game plan. And you worked such a safer style then, because the guys were actually better workers. They didn’t have to take as many crazy bumps, because they really sold the bumps that were available to them.

Then the high flyers came and everybody stopped selling the moves. The Road Warriors came and they stopped selling pretty much anything. It was good for them, but everybody spun off the good things that people did and turned them into everyday, regular stuff. Some people brought positives in, and other people made negatives out of it.

The first change I would make would be to have unscripted promos. I’d force guys to use their brains. Make it a spontaneous situation where guys are forced to use their hearts, their heads and their guts. When someone asks them a question, they wouldn’t just be regurgitating some BS written on a piece of paper they had to memorize. I’d like to see WWE go back to being more of a wrestling company and less of a television company doing wrestling. And by no means is this a knock on the folks at WWE TV. My friend Kevin Dunn’s crew is A-1.

And the promos—the talent would be given direction, “Make sure you cover these three points, and you’ve got two minutes allotted to your promo.”

If the talent had a question, you’d give them direction on how to get from point number one to point number two. You’d give them the bridge. But what came out of their mouths would be their feelings, not what they committed to memory.

When it comes to cutting promos, I think we put a lot of guys in a position where they can’t win. They’re being asked to do something they weren’t brought into the business to do. Their training is wrestling. We ask them to play a character, which requires acting skills. We don’t have
any acting coaches or acting classes and these guys have no acting background. But we expect them to be actors.

Still, they could pull it off with some help. Hell, I can do it and I never took any acting classes. It’s about having experience and having a gimmick that you can “become.” Look at that damn Kurt Angle! He’s a legitimate 1996 Olympic gold medal winner who never did anything but train, and he has terrific, natural acting skills.

It’s better to let wrestlers be themselves. The cream will rise to the top. So I’d go back to the in-ring product. I’d slow down the process of putting guys in a main-event environment, if I had that luxury.

It would also be nice to have two separate locker rooms, one for heels and one for babyfaces, and have guys learn how to call matches again. Just like back in the old days when the referee came in the locker room and gave you the finish and gave the other guy the finish, and you went out in the ring and worked that style. To me, that’s why there’s no emotion in the matches anymore. They’re so rehearsed and prefab, it looks like a performance.

You’ve made all your decisions before the match on the basis of the matches you’ve been in and also the stuff you’ve seen, so you’re forming a decision without even listening to the crowd’s response. You’re not working them and you’re not performing for them, and that makes a difference.

It’s got to go back to being a work, the way it was when wrestling came out of the carnivals. Guys couldn’t beat each other up all the time to make money, so they started “working” it. When you’re working for a crowd, you listen to that crowd. And then, according to how the crowd reacts, you call a different sequence in the match.

“Hey, it’s time to get some heat now. It’s time for a little comeback. Time to cut the guy off. Time to go home.” It’s all based on how you’re taking people on that ride. It might be a ten-minute ride, it might be a thirty-minute ride. But not all the decisions were made backstage. Guys have to think on their feet again and be able to call matches in the ring. That’s one of the things I miss about the business these days.

I also think we have too many women wrestlers right now who
want to wrestle like the guys do and perform Lou Thesz presses, stuff like that. That’s not sexy and it’s not feminine. My ideal woman wrestler would work like Sherri Martel or Fabulous Moolah. They didn’t wrestle like guys. They had their own style. That’s my two cents on that.

I’ve talked about my frustration with the creative process. But I’ve spoken with several of the writers, and called a few of them aside, and we’re all on the same page there. Yeah, I was critical of the writing. By the same token, people can be critical of me. I’m open to the criticism.

I also understand that most of our writers came from a different system than I came from. I came from the small circuits and the small territories—that’s the way I learned the business. The writers are thrust into the system with a different perspective. They have to construct a show, and have to deal with the fact that we’re so fast-forward these days, producing all the TV programs we produce.