THE STONE COLD TRUTH (8 page)
Read THE STONE COLD TRUTH Online
Authors: Steve Austin,J.R. Ross,Dennis Brent,J.R. Ross
In my case, I’ve never regretted not finishing college. I was talking to a young woman on the airplane just the other day, coming home from Cleveland. We had just gotten to San Antonio and while we were waiting for them to open the doors she introduced herself. She was a sophomore in college, she told me. We started talking about it, how she was doing well in school and all.
I told her I was seventeen hours shy of getting my degree. My parents
were disappointed, because I would have been the first kid in my immediate family to get a college degree.
She said to me, “Do you ever regret not going back, or are you going to go back?”
I said, “No on both counts, because I have nothing to prove to myself. With all I’ve done, I don’t need a degree. It’s not going to open up any more doors for me. A piece of paper means nothing to me. But as far as you or anyone else is concerned, I’d recommend it absolutely, because it’s going to open up a lot of doors for you.”
Education is extremely important. I highly recommend it. But for me, at this stage in my life, a piece of paper saying I graduated from college at this point isn’t particularly useful. I’ve been successful without it.
I know my parents were disappointed, and that’s a shame. But not having a diploma hasn’t been a hindrance to me on the path my life has taken.
If I’d gone to Albuquerque to attend New Mexico University, who knows if I’d ever have gotten into wrestling. But the fact that I was near Dallas, and the Sportatorium was sitting there calling to me, made it all happen for me.
My college education ended, but my wrestling education was just getting ready to begin. And what an education it was! It changed my life forever.
J.R.: Bobby Jack Wright is the current football recruiting coordinator for the Oklahoma Sooners and has long been considered one of the top recruiters in college football. Coach Wright has made a few stops along the way in his long coaching career, including serving on the staff of the University of Texas and on the staff at North Texas State, where he recruited Steve Williams to play defensive end for the Mean Green. Because of my relationship with the coaching staff at OU, I have gotten to know Coach Wright. He once told me that he always thought Steve would not last at North Texas, that he would quit. I listened to the coach’s story in amazement. Stone Cold quit? Are we talking about the same guy here? I asked Coach Wright if he thought Steve lacked the heart or the guts to play for North Texas, and the
coach emphatically said, “No!” Steve, like many athletes, had one helluva time getting over being homesick! Steve Williams would never quit on the field, but he sure missed his family. He missed his family so much that Coach Wright wouldn’t have been surprised if someone had come to him on virtually any morning and said, “Williams is gone. He went back to Edna.”Steve and I had the opportunity to visit with Coach Wright (who, ironically, married a woman from Edna, Texas) at the OU team hotel after the 2003 Rose Bowl victory over Washington State, and we all had a laugh about the homesick country boy from Edna with the motor that never stopped on the football field—a boy who would become one of the most famous wrestlers in the world.
DAD: Steve was always very athletic. He was blessed with a lot of ability. And he always had great size, strength, agility and speed. That combination is pretty rare.
I was always amazed at how supportive Steve was of his little sister. He was off at college doing his own thing, playing ball, lifting weights, working, always busy. Jenny, meanwhile, was a pretty big
track star in her freshman year of high school. She was on the varsity, and Steve always came to her track meets in these podunk little towns down here. He came to her district track meet in Yokum, and you would’ve thought she was running in the Olympics. He’d bring down his college friends, and they’d all be up in the stands hootin’ and hollerin’. That was always so special to Jenny.
Dear Worm, (I mean Jenny)
Hey girl, what have you been up to? You are’nt chasing all the guys, are you? What have you been doing this summer? I’m not doing anything but eating, sleeping, and lifting weights.
I sure did like the letter you wrote me the other day. You better write ma some more.
You are kind of a brat every once in awhile, but I miss you. Have you been acting like you’re sick? Just kidding. Are you etting a pretty good tan? I’m not. I’m getting ass white as a fish. I mean sheep! No, I just don’t have time to get in the sun right now. But I do have a pretty good moon tan. Just kidding, I fooled you did’nt I? Well girl, I guess I better go.
Steve
And Now It’s Time to Go to School—Wrestling School
T
he whole time I was driving a forklift for Watkins Motor Line, I would come home and watch the
World Class Championship Wrestling
shows from Dallas on TV. I remember they had a graphic of a satellite dish at the beginning of the show, and the satellite dish was beaming
World Class Championship
Wrestling
all over the world. I thought that was the hottest deal I had ever seen.
My buddies and I were going down to the Sportatorium on Friday nights to watch the big main event matches that weren’t televised, and then we’d go down on Saturday mornings to watch the TV tapings that went out on the satellite. I’d been thinking about getting into wrestling, but I didn’t know what to do or how to get started.
Then they started running TV ads saying that the English-born wrestler, “Gentleman” Chris Adams, was starting a wrestling school, and gave out his contact information. It got my attention. I asked my folks if they would mind if I gave this wrestling a try.
They encouraged me to go try it. They said, “Yeah, give it a shot, as long as it’s not illegal or immoral.” My mom said I had to change my name though. I told her I was going to change it to “Steve, Son of Beverly Williams from Edna, Texas.”
Anyway, I had a fallback position. If wrestling didn’t work out, I was still young enough to go back to school or work in the insurance business, and eventually join my father’s business after I got enough experience.
For a long time, I had been on a path to be an insurance salesman. So naturally, when I first started college, I was a business major. But accounting kicked my ass and college algebra did too. I was a good student, but math was my weak point. I dropped algebra so many times it was unreal.
But I was going to be an insurance man and eventually take over my dad’s business. That’s just what I was going to do. I didn’t have any other goals once I was out of football.
I remember I once took a career aptitude test in high school, where you fill out all these forms and they give you an indication of what you should pursue in life. When I got mine back, it said I should be a park ranger. I had said I like the outdoors and stuff like that. I don’t think I would have looked too good in a Smokey the Bear hat.
I called Chris Adams one day and he said, “Hey, we’re going to do seminars for the school, and it will cost you forty-five bucks to go to the seminar. And if you sign up for the however-many-month
course, it’ll cost an additional sum, like fifteen hundred dollars.”
So I figured, Okay, I’ll go check it out. I had nothing to lose but a little time and forty-five dollars.
The seminar was set for an early Saturday afternoon, after the TV tapings and interviews were over and the fans were leaving the Sportatorium. I had long, blond hair at the time and I was pretty jacked-up. I’d been training hard and working on the freight dock. I showed up, and I’ve never dressed nice my whole life, but I showed up wearing those black Girbaud pants that were in style then with the snap buttons. I had a purple shirt on and a pair of black loafers. So I looked pretty good for me. I wanted to make a good first impression, another of life’s important lessons.
I figured there would be a bunch of big, jacked-up guys there, but I was wrong. In fact, I was the biggest guy who showed up. I looked around and some of these guys and girls I saw around me were definitely not in shape. There were thirty-five or forty of us in line for the seminar. It was just a bunch of local people—normal, regular people like you’d see anywhere. And here I was, about 250 pounds, muscular, a decent-looking kid twenty-three or twenty-four years old with long, blond hair. I was standing in line for the school, and people were coming out because the TV tapings were over, and here come the SWAT Team, Samu and Fatu, and those two guys from South Africa, the Simpson brothers.
I’m thinking, Man, here are all these wrestlers from TV, walking right by me.
And then fans started coming up to me and asking me for my autograph. I was saying, “Hey, I’m not a wrestler. I’m here to go to wrestling school, but I’m not a wrestler.”
They said, “Well, sign this.”
And I said, “But I’m not a wrestler.”
And they said, “Yeah, but we know you’re going to make it. Go ahead and sign.”
What could I have done? I didn’t want to be a jackass, so I was standing there writing “Steve Williams” on these pieces of paper.
Pretty soon, we went into the room where they were holding the
seminar and there was Chris Adams. He looked over at me a couple of times and saw something, because of my size, I guess.
He said, “Hey, how you doing? What’s your name?”
I said, “Steve Williams.”
And he said, “I’m Chris, it’s nice to meet you. What’s your background?” He gave everybody the same basic greeting, but he came over to me and shook my hand in person.
I told him I had just finished up playing football at North Texas State. Then the meeting started and he began describing the wrestling school. Three or four times he said, and I thought he was referencing me in particular, “Just because you’re some big football player doesn’t mean you’re going to make it in this business. There’s a lot more to it than just being a big football player.”
I listened to all this, but after the meeting I went up to him and said in a polite way, “You know, you keep talking about football players. I don’t know what being a football player’s got to do with it, but if you show me how to do this, how to wrestle, I can do it.”
I wasn’t trying to be cocky or anything, I just wanted to let him know I was paying attention to what he was saying. It kind of pissed me off.
He said, “Okay, Steve, I hope to see you again.”
And I said, “Oh, you will,” and I signed up.
DAD: At that time, I remember telling him, “You’re taking a shot at something that’s a high-risk thing. It’s hard to be successful in the entertainment business. But I would encourage you to do it now, while you’re young. Take a shot at it, if that’s what you feel like you want to do.” We were all for it. We try to encourage all of our kids to decide what they want to do, as soon as they can. I didn’t try to steer them any particular way to do any particular thing. I wanted them to try and figure out what they liked to do—and then get an education and learn how to do it better than the average person, because a person spends so much of his life in his workplace. Even if it’s a little less money, if you enjoy what you’re doing, it makes all the difference in the world. All the kids have managed to be pretty successful.