WWE Hall of Famer “Stone Cold” Steve Austin was interviewed by Peter Rosenberg from ESPN. Austin was asked if he would’ve stayed with ECW. His working relationship with Vince McMahon, and his picks for the Mount Rushmore of professional wrestling.
Would Austin have stayed with ECW longer?
“Knew it was time to move on, because you know, and of course, I was just talking to Paul down there in Florida the other day and we’re very, very close, but hey man, everybody knew that you’re going down there, they’re the main roster and those guys are gonna stay there for a little bit, but if I guy like me was gonna get a call to go to New York, man, I had a wife and I had a house payment and all that other stuff, bills coming in the mail just like everybody else, so I needed to go to the place where I could make the most money, and that was New York, that’s what we called it, the WWF at the time.
Working one night a week doesn’t really cut it. If I coulda stayed down there for six, eight, nine months, who knows what we coulda done, a year or two, there’s all kinds of stuff we coulda done, but you’re in business to make the money and really, when you’re in the trenches, even when we were in WCW, and we were battling WWF at the time, it wasn’t the Monday Night War, but it was a war, and we kind of felt like we were putting on a better wrestling product, but when you get the call, you knew that the WWE, then F, was the show, it was the big show.”
His working relationship with Vince McMahon.
“Vince can read a crowd. He plays to that crowd, and he just loves to be. As a heel, he would love to be hated so much. I was so over as a babyface, it magnified, what I did. Magnified what he did and what he did magnified what I did, so just great chemistry. Pretty much always on the same page.”
His choice for the Mount Rushmore of professional wrestling.
“The two I will give you, you gotta have Hogan, you gotta have Flair, I’ll stop right there, because those are the two that if you’re building a Mount Rushmore, those are the two you gotta have, and I won’t say anymore than that.”
“Hogan, Flair, or Flair, Hogan. There’s not a 1-2, there’s not a 2-1, that’s just the two guys on it.”
Transcription Credit: 411Mania
