Austin: Three, Sixteen

Three
1. I was a fan of “The Gentleman” Chris Adams for how his British accent added class to his act and the way that he walked to the ring with a purpose for his World Class Championship Wrestling matches to the tune of Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” that made his every encounter feel something like an old time Texas shoot out.

I watched him weekdays on ESPN until my mother decided I was watching too much wrestling and my father gave me the choice between these after-school broadcasts and the WWF. (What chance did Adams and company have relative to Hulk Hogan and friends?) In those latter days of watching World Class, Adams introduced his protege, a muscle-bound, blond youngster named Steve Austin. In my three or four years as a wrestling fan, already a student of the game who knew the tale of the “Living Legend” Bruno Sammartino and his mentee Larry Zbyszko, I saw the writing on the wall that Austin would betray Adams, just as surely as I knew Adams would Superkick the younger star back into his place.

The feud did happen, ongoing and more personal than I imagined when Austin stole Adams’s wife. The episodes were sometimes shown out of order, sometimes with gaps in between (and, in retrospect, I suspect sometimes my youth and habit of intermittently playing with my wrestling action figures, back to the TV screen, came at the expense of fully following the narratives). Nonetheless, I don’t remember seeing this rivalry resolve, but rather Adams and Austin locked in eternal war.

2. A nine-year-old, I got my first subscription to WWF Magazine for Christmas. The gateway drug of all gateway drugs: I’d spend much of the next decade pursuing the so-called "Apter mags"--reading Pro Wrestling Illustrated, The Wrestler, and Inside Wrestling in drugstores, pleading for money to buy them, asking for subscriptions as birthday or Christmas gifts.

In 1993, it was this obsession that led me to watching not only the WWF, but WCW. I knew stars like Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes from their WWF tenures, and stars like Sting and Big Van Vader has transcended WCW to be the kinds of performers any wrestling fan knew.

And I knew Steve Austin.

Steve Austin, removed from the Dallas Sportatorium that hosted World Class, operating under WCW’s Ted Turner-backed brighter lights. I had the sensation of watching a star on the rise--a middle-of-the-card guy being groomed to be the next Flair, or something like him, as he clashed with Flair and new Four Horsemen, Austin teamed with Brian Pillman as the brash Hollywood Blonds. Austin turning on Pillman, like he had Chris Adams before, to emerge a bigger villain for it.

3. Steve Austin arrived in the WWF. Billed as “The Ringmaster,” positioned as an interchangeable stooge for manager Ted Dibiase, I saw Austin for what the company presented him as: a talented guy who’d never amount to much of anything, and probably be quietly on his way out of the scene within a few-year span. I’d seen it happen enough, barely a teenager, to recognize how wrestling worked by then.

I didn’t know then, as I’d subsequently learn from articles, tell-all books, documentaries, and podcasts that he’d been fired from WCW Fed-Ex, and while I followed budding Extreme Championship Wrestling indirectly and in untimely fashion via wrestling magazines, I don’t think I was even aware Austin had surfaced briefly there, cutting blistering promos about how asinine Eric Bischoff was.

I didn’t know what was to come.

For the first time in my life that I could remember, I followed the WWF only intermittently. It was a perfect storm of me favoring WCW for a spell, my family changing its cable package so I no longer had regular access to Monday Night Raw, and getting a busier homework load and social life with the onset of high school. Ironically, in what may have objectively been the WWF’s most historically important, creatively ambitious, and most popular periods, I was largely tuned out from watching.

I gleaned bits and pieces about the rise of “Stone Cold” Steve Austin in fragments of VHS tapes borrowed, stories my friends told in school, and the fledgling Internet. A gap from around mid-1997 to spring 1999, when SmackDown debuted and UPN brought the WWF back into my home. I’d only go back to watch what I’d missed years later by virtue of illegally downloaded videos of matches, more in-depth Internet write-ups, then DVDs and finally the WWE Network.

Sixteen
1. Steve Austin was the upset winner of the 1996 King of the Ring tournament. It has since been well-documented that spot was earmarked for rising young star Triple H before he made politically complicated choices that got him punished. Austin got the chance on a lark, and after beating Bible-thumping, born again Jake Roberts for the crown, cited scripture before arriving at the ad-lobbed line: “Well Austin 3:16 says I just whooped your ass.”

Austin was catching fire already. Here, the most iconic t-shirt slogan in wrestling history was born.

2. Austin was a heel, but one of the best-loved ones in history when WWE executed a rare double turn. Perennial hero Bret Hart bear Austin bloody and unconscious to win their match, then kept his Sharpshooter hold clamped onto his defenseless for. Hart won the match. Austin won over the people for never having given up.

3. In a spot gone horribly wrong, Owen Hart hit an accidentally legitimate piledriver in Austin at SummerSlam 1997, temporarily paralyzing him, putting him out of action for weeks, causing injuries that would haunt Austin the rest of his career.

4. The war between Austin and the Harts saw “Stone Cold” emerge as a hero in the States and the Harts villains. Those orientations were reversed in the Hart family’s native Canada.

Never was this dynamic more vibrant, more clearly on display than the Canadian Stampede pay per view. Austin looked genuinely gleeful to play the bad guy again, taking cheap shots and shortcuts before ultimately taking the pin in a classic ten-man tag team match.

5. Austin beat Shawn Michaels in the main event of WrestleMania 14. Bret Hart had already left the company on ugly terms. Little did fans know that Michaels had a back injury that would make this his last match for over four years.

The upshot? By whatever combination of design, happenstance, and force of will a new generation of top stars took hold.

Austin was the man.

6. Austin rose to fame as an anti-authority rebel. Vince McMahon embodied that authority, first as a well-meaning suit who didn’t get “Stone Cold,” then increasingly as a villain.

Austin stunned McMahon, yes. But it wasn’t until much later that he goaded him into a match.

It was, in so many ways, the perfect wrestling storyline for two great characters, one of whom was not a wrestler. The challenge accepted. A background story that pervaded the show of McMahon’s cronies, Gerald Brisco and Pat Patterson, teaching him to wrestle. The steady ramping up of tension as McMahon made Austin tie one hand behind his back to get his match. Mick Foley’s arrival.

Austin wouldn’t get his hands on McMahon that day. Instead, only the promise he one day would, plus the continuation of Austin vs. Foley—the latter gathering heat for denying fans the spectacle they really wanted.

7. Austin defended the world title against fellow face The Undertaker, SummerSlam 1998. WWE themed the match as “The Highway To Hell,” complete with the AC/DC song playing over hype videos.

The match itself offered little to write home about, but it hardly mattered then, relative to that dramatic build. That and the fact that Austin won.

8. The Rock rose up, quickly a number two to Austin’s number one. After a villainous turn, he was McMahon’s ideal proxy in his war with “Stone Cold.”

Before they’d clash in the ring, Austin would drive to the ring in a beer truck, take out a hose and soak McMahon, Rock, and a host of others in a spectacle WWE still replays as one of its top highlights.

9. Real life Austin needed neck surgery. To write off the most important star in the company, the WWF staged an incident the night of Survivor Series 1999 in which a mystery driver mowed him over in the parking garage.

10. Back from surgery, back after missing a WrestleMania and nearly a year of action, Austin returned to peak form, winning the 2001 Royal Rumble.

His resulting WrestleMania re-match with The Rock was great—easily best of the three matches the pair had at different ‘Manias. But the hype video was even better—a Limp Bizkit song never used to better dramatic effect in selling the fight of a lifetime and foreshadowing Austin’s turn to the dark side.

11. WrestleMania 17 ended with Austin teaming up with McMahon after the latter helped the former win his main event world title match over The Rock.

It was questionable creative to say the least—Austin has commented in multiple shoot environments that he knew it was a mistake.

Nonetheless, there was that key visual—McMahon and Austin toasting beers over The Rock’s carcass, celebrating a storyline alliance, yes, but also commemorating a real life victory as the people in the ring had teamed up to turn around the WWF’s fortunes, outlast and buy out their most dangerous rival WCW, and had just closed out arguably the greatest pay per view event the WWF had ever staged.

12. Newly heel, the question arose as to what the WWF could possibly do to get fans to boo Austin, arguably the most popular wrestler who’d ever lived.

A step: he mauled real life and on screen friend, the popular play-by-play man Jim Ross while McMahon jeered for “Stone Cold” to open him up--i.e., to make him bleed.

13. By 2002, Austin had cooled off. A heel run that included good wrestling but lackluster storylines and a crowd that never bought him into him as a bad guy gave way to a face turn without explanation. Austin was popular, but my every metric, his best days were behind him.

As Austin and others have told the tale since, the company called on him to put over new star Brock Lesnar in a previously unadvertised TV match, that would earn Lesnar a spot in the 2002 King of the Ring tournament.

Most pundits agree it was a bad creative call.

Most agree it was an even worse call for Austin not to show up for work and effectively quit the company in response.

14. In a similar time frame to leaving the company, Austin was charged with domestic violence for physically harming his wife, a fellow wrestling personality who performed simply as Debra. He pleaded no contest, but would be accused of domestic violence again two years later by girlfriend Tess Broussard.

15. Clear of personal demons around assault, retired from the ring Austin hasn’t shied away from self-criticism, not least of all that he’ll “never win father of the year.”

Austin’s cagey about discussing particulars. All indications are that his wrestling career kept him out of his daughters’ lives, and that he didn’t necessarily make much of an effort to bridge that divide.

16. I’ve grappled with being a Steve Austin fan. Because being a good father is important to me. Because there’s no rationalizing domestic violence.

And yet, I am a wrestling fan. As such, it’s difficult not to have some degree of a soft spot, some nostalgia, some appreciation, some reverence for not only one of the top five biggest wrestling stars who ever lived, but a great practitioner of very facet of professional wrestling.

Austin lives on in my life, far removed from his career in his ring. His was among the first podcasts I got hooked on, because he’s a charismatic talker and an incisive interviewer. Not only that, but when chatting wrestlers, past and present, there’s next to no one who can rattle Austin’s credibility.

And so, as another WrestleMania is upon us, I reflect on one of the greatest wrestlers who ever plied his trade, albeit not necessarily a great man or role model. I raise a beer not so much to him as to all of the memories.