THE STONE COLD TRUTH (19 page)

Jack was my guy in the locker room when I started with WWE, but so was Jerry Brisco. I was a big Brisco brothers fan and he was from Oklahoma, so I was always ribbing him about Texas—OU stuff.

In May 1996 we were in Kuwait holding a tournament and I was wrestling Marty Jannetty. There was this red carpet that went all the way around the ring and all the way up to the entrance, probably a hundred yards long. When the match was over, Jerry walked out to ringside and I was kind of bent over, catching my breath. He chicken-winged me and over-the-head suplexed me onto the carpet.

There was nothing I could do about it! I was just chicken-wing suplexed in Kuwait!

Then Jerry and the referee ran to the back, leaving me there. There was no explanation why he just suplexed me and I was left lying out there on the floor. I guess with me bending over, he just thought it would be funny.

So I rolled all the way to the back up that long red carpet as a haha for the boys in the back. I rolled like a tumbleweed and the people booed me out of the building. They don’t know what the hell they saw that day, but it was unusual and entertaining.

When I got to the back, I said to Brisco, “Are you all blown up?”—asking if he was winded from suplexing me. The former Oklahoma State University wrestler immediately put an amateur wrestling hold on an unlucky wrestler who happened to be standing nearby, where the guy couldn’t breath.

My stuff was fake, but not Brisco’s. I don’t care how old he was, Gerald Brisco was still double tough. He’ll be the toughest man in the AARP someday.

But Brisco wasn’t the only one with a sense of humor. Jack Lanza had one too. I used to do this bit in the back where when somebody said something stupid I’d take my hat off and throw it against the wall. It was like I was all mad. But I wouldn’t be mad at all. It was a rib, you know? Something funny.

One day we were in the dressing room watching a TV show, and one of those goofy infomercials came on about people who were losing their hair on top. They were selling that black spray paint stuff you could spray the top of your head with. It was a little uncomfortable because Jack, who is follicly challenged, was standing right next to me.

All of a sudden, he reached over, grabbed my hat off my head and threw it against the wall.

We laughed our asses off. I wonder if Jack ever called that phone number on the infomercial …?

After six or eight months, things were going okay. Then we went on a tour of Germany and I was working in the main event with Shawn Michaels every night. They needed someone he could have a good match with, and I can have a good match with anybody. Even though the fans might not have known who I was, they knew I was working the main event.

The Heartbreak Kid, back when he was on fire, was a big name for me to be working with. J.R. was doing the booking. Being a mark for great wrestling, he wanted to see how HBK and I would do together. It worked. Man, I was out there having classic matches with him.

Now, I wasn’t making Shawn Michaels’s kind of money, but I was getting good feedback from the road agents. Time was going by, and I started thinking, This Ringmaster name just ain’t cutting it. It sucks.

I was getting it done in the ring, but my gimmick was lame as hell. The Ringmaster had no upside. I felt it, but more importantly, the fans felt it too. I had to change my in-ring persona or I would eventually be back at the freight dock in Dallas or selling insurance in Edna, and I wasn’t ready for neither.

Something had to give … oh, hell yeah!

17
The Origin of Stone Cold Steve Austin

I
was still living in Atlanta while I was working with WWE, and I was watching HBO one night. This HBO documentary about the
Iceman,
a serial killer-for-hire named Richard Kuklinski, came on. He used to put his victims in freezers to keep the bodies preserved, then he’d finally dump them out a year later. Man, I watched that show and it got my gears spinning, because I was a heel, and here was this cold-blooded guy who didn’t give a damn about anybody.

Not that I approved of what he did. It was just that cold, “I don’t have a conscience” attitude that attracted me. I saw something in this psycho that I could use in my in-ring presentation. I could, as perverse as it sounds, relate to this animal.

I pitched my concept to Debbie Bonnanzio, senior vice president of WWE Creative Services. She was in charge of gimmick characterization, and they started faxing me pages and pages of names. But the names just weren’t working. They were all temperature-based things like “Fang McFrost,” “Ivan the Terrible,” “Ice Dagger,” names like that. The names were horrible. Our creative group did not “feel” my new character idea.

I was thinking, Man, they don’t understand where I’m coming from on this. I could just hear Howard Finkel, the ring announcer, saying,
“Ice Dagger … accompanied by his famous sled dog, Nantucket!”
More non-reality-based horse manure …

I told a few guys about all this and damn, they ribbed me terribly about it. I got frustrated as hell. Then, one day, I was just sitting there in the kitchen, thinking about the name thing.

Jeannie, my wife, who’s English, drank tea all the time. Knowing how frustrated I was, she made me a cup.

“Ah,” she said, putting the tea down in front of me, “don’t worry about it. Just go ahead and drink your tea before it gets stone cold.” Then she paused, with this light in her eyes, and said, “That’s your new name … Stone Cold Steve Austin.”

I raised my eyes up from the cup of tea and said, “Yeah …” After I’d had a chance to think about it, I wondered if it might not be too long. “Stone Cold Steve Austin. That’s four words,” I said.

But I liked it. It had a ring to it, those four words together. Originally I was thinking about using the Iceman name, but Iceman King Parsons had done that in Dallas in World Class Wrestling, so I couldn’t just take his name.

Anyway, I pitched the Stone Cold idea to someone at TV. They told me to call Jerry Brisco and J.R.

I called Jerry, explained the concept and finished up by saying, “I
want to be this guy and I want to call him ‘Stone Cold Steve Austin.’”

Jerry said, “Okay, let me check through the normal channels.”

He called somebody else, and they put it through legal to see if it wasn’t trademarked or something. Eventually, Jerry called me back and said, “You’re cleared. You’re Stone Cold Steve Austin.”

I was thinking, Oh, hell yeah!

And they just started introducing me that way. There was no big buildup or explanation or anything like that. There were no vignettes or interviews, to provide some background on this cold-blooded guy. The name just started catching on, and I was Stone Cold Steve Austin from Victoria, Texas.

But I still wasn’t really going anywhere. I had the name, but no one knew how I had gotten so cold-blooded. I had to get this thing kick-started somehow.

Beating Jake Roberts at the
King of the Ring 1996.
Jake was one of my favorites of all time.

18
The Birth of Austin 3:16

“A
ustin 3:16” all came about at the King of the Ring Pay-Per-View on June 23, 1996, when WWE announcer Dok Hendrix (Michael P.S. Hayes, a former “Fabulous Freebird”) told me in the locker room that Jake “The Snake” Roberts was going to cut a religious promo on me.