THE STONE COLD TRUTH (32 page)

It’s amazing. I did a fifteen-minute promo in the ring on what I ordered from Whataburger for lunch and the crowd was with me all the way.

“I went to Whataburger for lunch today …”

Crowd goes,
“What?”

“I ordered a Whataburger with cheese …”

Crowd goes,
“What?”

“Small fries …”

Crowd goes,
“What?”

“A large Diet Coke …”

Crowd goes,
“What?”

“Large coffee …”

Crowd goes,
“What?”

Will Sasso, of MadTV, as the fan reaction of “What?s” build to the only conclusion of someone who mocks Stone Cold.

“I had a beer …”

Crowd goes,
“What?”

“Then I had another beer …”

Crowd goes,
“What?”

“I ordered a Whatachicken …”

Crowd goes,
“What?”

“Apple pie …”

Crowd goes,
“What?”

I had a lot of fun with that and so did the fans. It made it hard on the other guys, especially Kurt Angle. After it caught on, when somebody would be in the ring cutting a promo and they paused for a second, the crowd would yell,
“What?”

It threw off their timing. At the peak of its popularity, the fans chanted
“What?”
while Lilian Garcia, our very talented ring announcer, was singing the National Anthem. I’m not proud of that one.

But Kurt learned to work with it. He’s completely endorsed it. At first he said he was mad about it, but you can see right through Kurt and you could tell he was having fun with it. He used it to his advantage. He’s great. He’s smart, he gets it.

And I could use that gimmick to move onto the next thing. I remember when I got thrown out of that last
Royal Rumble 2002
we had in Atlanta. I had already told all the fans on TV that I was going to win. That was when I cut the Whataburger promo. I did Whataburger, Whatafries, Whatacatch and all that other stuff. Now I had lost that match and needed to move on, without losing my momentum.

I came up with the idea for that next promo while I was driving to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to pick up Debra because someone in her family had died. I was sitting there with a lot of idle time on my hands after the Pay-Per-View, and I was thinking, I didn’t win the PPV. I had said I was going to win that match and I didn’t, so I needed to cover my ass. I needed to cut a promo to erase that fact in people’s minds that I had just lost.

After mulling on it for a while, something popped into my head. I said, “I got a concept. I got an idea about the Beverly Hillbillies.”

Then I told somebody about it and they said, “What’s this about a Beverly Hillbillies promo?”

I said, “You know what, it’s either going to work like a charm or the people are going to completely crap all over me.”

I pitched the idea to Vince. It wasn’t like a three-hour process explaining it to him. It was like a two-minute deal. I don’t think he really understood it, but he trusts my judgment on things like this. It was one of those deals where it was either going to be a complete success or a complete flop. But he let me go with it and it turned out to be a complete success. Vince went with my instincts and it paid off.

I went out there and cut that story about the Beverly Hillbillies. I basically sang the whole theme song, pausing at the end of each line for the fans to say
“What?”

I walked to the ring, put the mic to my mouth and said, “I don’t want to keep you guys too long, but I want to tell you a story. This isn’t a story about a man named Jed.”

“What?”

“Poor mountaineer barely kept his family fed.”

“What?”

I went through the whole deal about the Beverly Hillbillies, and then I said, “Well, that’s not the story I’m gonna tell you.” I said, “Right now, I’m officially entering myself in the next
Royal Rumble,”
the one I should have been in 2003 had I not been out from neck surgery.

When I cut that Beverly Hillbillies promo, the audience completely forgot that I just got my ass tossed over the top rope. They didn’t care. Everybody remembers the promo though.

I had them thinking, Damn, it doesn’t matter if Stone Cold won or not, I like the Beverly Hillbillies and Steve Austin’s in
Royal Rumble 2003,
so that’s all I really care about.”

I’m always thinking about stuff like that when I go out there. I’ve always thought you should promote ticket sales, which is why I have a problem with people doing infomercials on themselves today, rather than trying to sell tickets.

But never in a million years did I intend for one word like that to get over like it did. Who the hell would have thought that?

What?

Edmonton, Canada, wrestling hometown boy Chris Benoit. An awesome wrestler

32
Stone Cold and the Canadian Crippler

A
nother guy I really admired and loved to work with was Chris Benoit, aka the Canadian Crippler. His style was straight ahead, take no prisoners, beat me if you can.

Like me, he overcame a neck injury, and his surgery was done by Dr. Youngblood, who did my surgery too. Chris had to take a year off and the whole nine yards, just like I did.

My favorite match with Chris was at
SmackDown!
on May 31, 2001, in Edmonton, Canada. It was a match that I needed as a heel, as I was having a hard time getting people to hate me. Edmonton was Chris Benoit’s hometown and he was over like gangbusters, so it was a great place for me to try to get the fans to hate me. He’s vicious, and he’s very believable, but so am I. I wanted to go out and have a great wrestling match with him because I knew we could do it. Before the match, I said to Chris, “How much time?”

And he said, “I don’t know, sixteen minutes? What do you want to do?”

I remember telling our road agent, Jack Lanza, “We’re just going to wrestle. Here’s the finish. After he gives me ten German suplexes, here comes Vince.”

I think we worked close to twenty-seven minutes, and I think twenty-four made it to TV. I said, “I don’t care how long it is, we’re just going to keep wrestling. We’re just going to have a kick-ass match.”

We had a set of ten German suplexes, a dive off the top into the belt and a reason for me to go up to the top rope and him to start chopping the crap out of me. We had four or five things lined up. We had laid out the simplest skeleton of a match ever. We went out there and just let it happen.

There was true, natural, raw emotion in that match. The bald-headed, foul-mouth American who had aligned himself with “Satan” (Mr. McMahon) and the born-and-bred Canadian. There were all these great, plausibly real elements. Even though we weren’t in the middle of a hot program, all the elements were there. All the emotion was there. It wasn’t written for me. I didn’t recite a line. And man, when we can find those personal issues and put guys in plausible emotional situations, it’s magic.

I could have theoretically done less and gotten a comparable result because of the stage that was set. But I gave it everything, and it wound up being one of my best matches ever.

And I feel like it put Chris Benoit on the map. As amazing a worker
as he is, he needed that type of match on TV, and that’s what I gave him. And he gave it to me also.

The deal with Chris, and I love him to death, is that he’s an eight-cylinder motor running on seven cylinders. He doesn’t have the promo or the persona part of it down just yet, but he’s one of the best wrestlers in the world. He just needs that other cylinder, which is a little bigger personality, to be a top, top guy, because he can flat out work his ass off.

It would also be to Chris’s advantage to slow down. Sometimes he goes through those kicks and chops so fast and it’s like … what the hell just happened? Which move do you sell, the second one or the sixth?

But Benoit’s an awesome talent. He’s one of those guys who if you ever get in a fight, you want Chris to be with you. If you want to hang out, you want Chris with you. If you’re going to be in this business, you want Chris with you.

He’s the type of guy where if you say, “I’ve gotta go work and I’ve got last week’s payoff in my wallet. Would you mind holding my wallet for me while I go to the ring?” you know that when you get your wallet back, you don’t need to count your money. He’s an honorable man and he knows everything that’s going on. He watches. He doesn’t say a lot, but he watches.

When he gets the persona part of his game going, watch out. I think Chris can make himself a true superstar in our business. He’s a wrestler’s wrestler and he should be a champion many times over in the course of his WWE career.

Vince McMahon loves to see guys kick and scratch and fight to get to the top, because that’s what this damn business is all about, and Chris Benoit is capable of doing that.

33
Have I Had Lots of Fun with Other Gimmicks?
Hell Yeah!

T
he ridiculousness of Stone Cold Steve Austin singing on
Raw
was one of those things I came up with while I was injured. I had those broken vertebrae in my back and Kurt Angle was beat up too, so neither one of us could wrestle—but we could still go on television and entertain the fans.