Steve Austin recently appeared on Sam Roberts’ Wrestling Podcast (via wrestlinginc.com) to talk about various topics. Here are the highlights:
Walking out of the WWE in 2002:
“When I look back, I was running so hard and the level of intensity was so hot and I was just white-hot in the business and I made a knee-jerk reaction to, they wanted me to do a job in Atlanta [Georgia] in a really non-publicized match with Brock and I thought that was real piss-poor business and it was,” Austin said. “I’ve always been willing to do business, when it was time to do business, but that wasn’t business. When you have a guy, and I never blow smoke up my own ass, but when you have a guy like me that draws big money, you don’t just job him out on a bulls–t Monday night TV, so I got to jazz up the language because that was something I was very passionate about and it really comes from my heart and my guts. That being said, I shouldn’t’ve got on an airplane and taken my ball and went home as they said. But hindsight being 20/20, yeah, I should’ve [gone] to the arena. I should’ve talked to Vince and said, ‘I’m not doing it,’ but just stayed with the company. I would have handled the situation much differently today and it would’ve been great had I handled it differently back then. I lost a lot of money. They lost a lot of momentum. We all lost a lot of money and the crowd lost a part of the product that they loved to watch.”
His legacy:
“I had blinders on back in the day. I was all about selling tickets. It took being away from the business. It took me a long time just to be able to see what I did. And now I get asked the legacy question or what I thought I meant to the business or where am I, and I like to keep it… my new answer, the way I really feel about it, long story short, bottom line is I brought grey to a black and white world. And the last bottom line is ‘Stone Cold’ sold tickets. That’s it. I sold tickets.” Austin continued, “and I was never a great wrestler, but I’m one of the greatest wrestlers to ever step foot in the squared circle. So bottom line is if people want to ask me where I fit. I just say, ‘I sold tickets, a s–t pile of them.’”
