Stone Cold Steve Austin
Stone Cold Steve Austin's Profile
Name : Stone Cold Steve Austin aka The Rattlesnake
Real Name : Steve Williams
Birthday : 18th December 1965
Height : 6 feet 2 inches (1.88m)
Weight : 253 pounds (115 kg)
Hometown : Victoria, Texas
Birth Place : Austin, Texas
Finishing Move : Stone Cold Stunner
Stone Cold's finishing move......The stunner!
Career Highlights :
World Wrestling Federation Heavyweight Champion (3 times)
World Wrestling Federation Intercontinental Champion (2 times)
World Wrestling Federation Tag Team Champions (once with Mankind in 1998)
World Wrestling Federation Tag Team Champions (once with The Undertaker in 1998)
World Wrestling Federation Tag Team Champions (once with Shawn Michaels in 1997)
1996 King Of The Ring Winner
1998 Royal Rumble Winner
Favourite Quotes :
Give me a HELL YEAH!
Austin 3:16 says "I just whipped your @$$!"
And that's the bottomline......Because Stone Cold....said so!
Formely Known As :
WCCW : Steve Williams
USWA / WCCW / WCW : Stunning Steve Austin
ECW : Superstar Steve Austin
WWF : The Ringmaster
Brief Introduction
Stone Cold Steve Austin is the most popular wrestler in America and has become so by turning his
back on some of wrestling’s old conventions. No spandex, no glitter and no nonsense. His head is
shaved, his face is stern, his basic uniform is black trunks and black boots. In a world where
wrestlers are supposed to be either babyfaces (good guys) or heels (bad guys), Austin is notionally
a babyface, by virtue of his popularity, but he often acts like a heel. He is the straight-talking,
antiauthoritarian Every man, but bigger. "A bad motherf*cker" is how Austin describes his ring
persona. "This South Texas guy, baldheaded redneck. Doesn't like to be told what to do or how to
do it. I wouldn't say completely uncontrollable, but damn near." This year he'll make millions of
dollars and more young men will choose to watch him fight on Monday nights than will tune into pro
football. His favorite word is ass, his favorite expression is "Hell, Yeah!" his favorite gesture is an
upturned middle finger, and he is the new American hero.
Steve Austin was born in 1965, the
second of three children in Austin, Texas. (That his birthplace and stage name are the same is only a
coincidence.) He was born Steve Anderson, but his biological father disappeared before Austin was
old enough to know him, and he was raised in South Texas by his mother, who sometimes worked
as a telephone operator, and her husband, who sold insurance. It is his stepfather whom he always
refers to as his father and whose surname -Williams- Austin uses when he writes out a check. Now
he mostly uses the name Steve Austin in everyday life. This is how he separates it: Steve Austin earns
the money and lives the life; Steve Williams pays the bills.
"We were pretty damn ordinary kids," he says. "We just ran around on the street, went to school,
did normal stuff. Got our share of trouble. Typical South Texas stuff." In fifth grade, he started
watching local Houston wrestling matches on TV. The rest of the family told him to turn that
nonsense off, but he loved it: the dim lighting over the ring; the strange atmosphere; the good guy
who would play fair and the bad guy who would break every rule. Back then he never imagined it
was anything over than what it pretended to be: a sporting competition between two athletes.
School went fine. At Edna High he was voted class favorite three years out of four, and in his senior
year he was Mr. Cowboy of 1983, which was the Edna equivalent of homecoming king. "A
popularity-type gig, I guess," he says. He played football and threw the discus, and it was the
football playing that got him to college. "He was a clean-cut kid, great manners," says Buzzy Whitley,
one of his high school football coaches. "I guess if I were to sum it up: totally opposite then of what
he is now (on TV)." Coach Whitley has a hard time with the way Austin comes off in the WWF-"a
totally negative role model, which is nothing like the real Steve that I know; that's acting" -and
mentions that when Edna High kids, who adore Austin, wear the more offensive of his T-shirts to
school, they have to be sent home.
Austin never graduated from college, and he wasn't quite good enough at football to make it as a
professional. By the time his scholarship had run out, he was working forty hours a week loading and
unloading trucks at a freight dock. His supervisors loved him and wanted to train him to be regional
manager. He could see one version of his future tapering a way into the distance. But another idea
had been swelling inside him. He'd been going to the Dallas Sportantorium to watch the Von Erichs,
a famous wrestling family, run through their routines. By then he was well aware what wrestling was.
And he began to imagine how it might be for him, too, inside that ring.
At a wrestling school in Dallas that fed the local professional organization, he learned the basics: how
to fall and stuff like that. "It's kind of like a karate fall," he says. "You slap the mat when you go
down so that you don't kill yourself every time your land. You try to take a flat-back landing." It
might save your body, but school is not much of a preparation for the ring. It doesn't teach you how
to structure a match or milk the audience, let alone how to build a character. The only real training is
on the job. So Austin began wrestling for the local promoters, the United States Wrestling
Association, learning the hard way. "Basically," he says, "I was just getting beat up."
After a couple of months, the USWA moved him to Tennessee. No one even bothered to tell the
promoter there to expect him, but he was put in the ring the day after he arrived. Thus far he had
been wrestling as Steve Williams, but the Tennessee promoter wasn't having that. A more famous
wrestler, "Dr. Death" Steve Williams, had already appeared in those parts. He told his new recruit
he'd be called Steve Austin. "I said I didn't want to be Steve Austin," Austin recalls, “because of the
Six Million Dollar Man." The promoter gave him five minutes to think of something else. He couldn't.
That night, Austin wrestled some guy in a mask. The match lasted about eight minutes, and Austin
thought he had done fine.
Afterward the promoter called him over. "What in the hell was that shit?" he demanded.
"It was a match," Austin said.
The promoter shook his head. "Brother," he said, "that was the drizzling shits."
He told Austin to take a chair and watch the night's other matches - to watch and learn. That was the
only way the would get better. And as Austin studied and scrutinized more matches, he realized that
the promoter was right: He was the drizzling shits. But he would get better. He would learn how to
really work a match with other wrestlers - not just athletically but in drawing a crowd into a scenario,
grabbing people's emotions.
At that level the money was terrible. For regular matches - there would be five or six a week - he
would get paid twenty dollars. For that he might have driven from Nashville to Memphis, fight, then
drive back - a 420-mile round trip. For the first time he was on TV, his fee was forty dollars. One
time in Tennessee, staying in a dive of a hotel in a bad part of town, Austin spent his last money on
disposable razors, eight cans of tuna and a fifteen pound bag of potatoes. For the final three and a
half days, after the tuna had run out, he ate raw potatoes three meal a day.
Things got better when he got badder. Over their careers, wrestlers often switch roles. Austin, who
in those days had long blonde locks, no facial hair, an long spandex tights, stared as a babyface, but
after a few months he was told that he was now a heel. His new name was "Stunning" Steve Austin.
"It was natural to me," he recalls. "Being a jack-ass or an asshole - that was easy for me." But he
was still in the small-time, underpaid world of local wrestling, where most guys languish until they are
discouraged enough to give up. The only way out - the way up - was (and still is) to make it into one
of the two big organizations: the WWF and the WCW. Even now, in 1998, they have just over 200
wrestler on contract between them. For Austin, it was a long shot.
After a year and a half, he got the call. It was WCW, which signed up "Stunning" Steve Austin for
$75,000 a year. Things went well, and the next year his salary was raised to $156,000. Austin found
himself moving up the card. Of course, there were some frustrations. The WCW told him that his
no-frills image - black trunks, black boots - wasn’t' marketable. But it mostly went fine until the third
year, when his knee started acting up. He took a little time off, then was sent to Japan for three
weeks. On his third night there, Austin jumped off the top turnbuckle in the corner of the ring, and his
Japanese opponent moved away unexpectedly. As Austin landed, he felt something tear in his right
arm. He wrestled through the pain until the end of the tour; back in America they told him that his
triceps had become detached and that he would need an operation. While he was recovering, the
head of the WCW, Eric Bischoff, called. "He said, 'I'm going to tell you like it is,'" Austin recalls.
"'Based on the money we're paying you and the amount of days you've been incapacitated, we're
going to exercise out right to terminate the agreement.'" His formal notice arrived in the mail two days
later.
There are no pensions for wrestlers, no lifetime health plans. Steve Austin was thirty. All he had was
a name that wasn't his, a messed-up, worn-out body and no career.
While he was still injured, Austin was called by the ECW, the renegade Philadelphia-based Extreme
Championship Wrestling, which has gained an audience by having wrestlers do things - jump off
buildings, wrestle in rings with barbed-wire ropes - not countenanced in the WWF and WCW. The
ECW knew that Austin wasn't ready to wrestle but also knew there was a value in him doing live
interviews, ranting with attitude about the way he had been treated. For Austin, it was a side step
away from the big time, but tit was something. The only real way back up the ladder was to join the
WWF, but he was too proud to pick up the phone.
Eventually the WWF called him. The idea was that he should be called the Ringmaster, the "million
dollar champion" (a role not echoed by his starting salary) with a dollar-sign belt and emerald trunks.
They wanted him in a singlet but he drew the line at that. Around that time, after seeing Bruce Willis
in Pulp Fiction, Austin got a buzz cut. His hair was leaving of it's own accord anyway, and cutting it
short meant he'd no longer have to have it pulled in the ring. A few months later, one night in
Pittsburgh, he shaved it all off
But long haired, short haired, or bald, the Ringmaster wasn't working: No one cared. "It sucked,"
Austin says. So he stared looking for a new character. One evening he watched an HBO film about
a serial killer Richard Kuklinski, who was nicknamed Ice Man. Austin was no big fan of serial killers,
but the documentary triggered the idea of "this cold-blooded bastard guy, kinda ruthless, who didn't
give a damn." He discussed it with the people in the WWF office, and, focusing on the Ice Man idea,
they faxed him back three pages of temperature based names, all of which missed the point: It wasn't
about temperature, it was about attitude. (Now, when his fellow wrestler want to tease him, they'll
bring up some of the lamer options: "Coming to the stage!...Led by his faithful sled dog!...Ice
Dagger!")
It was Austin's wife who finally came up with the magic words. They were living in Georgia, and as
he was fretting for the millionth time about how his big break never seemed to come, she made him
some hot tea. "Don't worry about it," she advised, "just drink your tea before it gets stone cold." She
paused. "That's it," she said. "Stone Cold Steve Austin."
For his trademark finishing move at the end of a fight (most wrestlers have one), Austin had been
using an old move called the Cobra Clutch. One day an ex-wrestler working as an announcer
showed him a new move that involved standing in front of an opponent, reaching an arm around his
neck and dropping to the floor, taking the other guy with you. Austin tried it out and the crowds
loved it. That move is now the most famous finishing move in the business - the Stone Cold Stunner.
On August 3rd, 1997, Stone Cold Steve Austin was in the ring with a short, muscled Canadian
wrestler called Owen Hart. Hart gave him a pile driver, a maneuver in which the aggressor traps the
other wrestler's head between his thighs and then drops to the floor, giving the impression of
viciously slamming the top of his opponents head into the canvas. Hart got it wrong. "My head was
sticking out about six inches below his ass," Austin says. "So when he landed - I weigh 250, he
probably weighed about 200 - there was close to 500 pounds coming down on the top of my head."
Lying there - live on pay-per-view - Austin tried to move, and he couldn't. This was it, he thought:
Christopher Reeve. "I was a quadriplegic," he recalls, "in front of 20,000 live and maybe 200,000 on
pay-per-view." Because he could do nothing else, he waited.
After about a minute he manage to move some of his fingers. He could remember a John Wayne
movie where Wayne's recovery had been heralded by the wiggling of his toes, so he figured that was
a good sign. Then he got enough movement in his arms to roll onto his stomach. From there he
crawled, though it was hard, as his hands had crumbled in on themselves.
In the days that followed, he went to doctor after doctor. They would shove him in tubes and give
him MRIs, which played hell with his claustrophobia. He had severe trauma in his spinal cord. The
front of his shoulders burned like fire for two weeks, and he didn't know whether that would ever
stop. He wasn't sure whether he would eve wrestle again. A top expert on these injuries sent him a
video showing what happens in the severest of cases like this, and after he watched it, it would play
over and over in his head - everything running together like a de-railed freight train.
He was depressed. He stopped working out. Week after week he rode around in his four-wheeler
and drank a whole case of beer every day. People at the WWF were supportive, in a way, but they
were hardly begging him to come back. He began to think about how long his saving could last and
whether or not he could make it as an actor.
Eventually his doctor gave him a provisional go-ahead, and he slowly eased himself back into the
ring. The first time, just over three moths after the accident, he was scared. They kept replaying the
accident on the video screens before his match. (It's all showbiz.) But he got through it.
Now he will no longer have the pile driver performed on him. Quietly, wrestler know each other's
physical weaknesses and which moves must be avoided. And though Austin has been back in the
ring once or twice with Owen Hart, he didn't enjoy it and has clearly not forgiven Hart for what
happened. "Any time you do something, you don't put another guy in jeopardy," he says. "When you
do something as potentially dangerous as the pile driver, you gotta be careful." He’d been fighting a wrestler know as Jake “the Snake” Roberts, whose shtick involved revivalist
religious imager and whose motto was “Jake 3:16.” Fresh out of the ring, Austin stepped up for an
interview in front of the crowd. “You sit there and you thump you Bible and you say your prayers,”
he said, “an it did not get you anywhere. You talk about your psalms, you talk about John 3:16 -
Austin 3:16 says ‘I just whipped your ass.’” by the next night AUSTIN 3:16 placards were showing
up in the crowd. When the WWF first raised the idea of doing a Stone Cold Steve Austin T-shirt, he
said just put AUSTIN 3:16 on the front. “That shirt,” he says, “probably outsold any shirt in the
history of wrestling.” Sometimes Austin talks about the future. One day someone else will be more famous. That is the
moment, McMahon concedes, when wrestlers are most likely to dispute the story lines they are
involved in. (Nonetheless, says McMahon, he has a fairly clear idea of how he wants the Stone Cold
Steve Austin story line to go for the next five years.) When his star falls, Austin swears, he’ll be
ready: “That’s just the nature of the business. The machine’s going to keep moving...Everyone
always gets their feeling hurt when their value starts to go down and they’re not the Number One guy
anymore. Hey - I’m not going to get my feelings hurt. I realize I gotta get it while I can.” And,
anyway, when the shine come off, he doesn’t plan to hang around. “I am not going to fade, he says.
“I am not looking to be the guy who slides down and you tap your buddy and say ‘Man, remember
when that guy used to...’”
Courtesy of Rolling Stones
In order to listen to the music files, you must right-click and choose "Save Target As" for IE users. For Netscape users, right-click and then choose "Save Link As"
Click here to listen to Stone Cold's glass shattering entrance theme!
Click on the smoking skull to view Stone Cold's pictures!
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