Television • Stone Cold Steve Austin
Wrestling is for idiots? You tell him.
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At that time the Connecticut-based WWF was wrestling’s grand old man, but it was playing catch-up in the ratings with the upstart WCW. When current WWF president Vince McMahon bought the federation in 1982 from his father, who had inherited it from his father, it was a regional circuit playing ratty arenas in the northeast. McMahon had bigger plans. He started buying up other circuits around the country, enlarging his stable and eliminating competition. He recognized the exploding audience for specialty programming as a result of the cable TV boom and signed a deal with the new USA Network. Quickly wrestling went from somewhat ironic filler to national prime-time event. McMahon’s most significant change was his first: He dropped the “real sport” charade and rechristened the WWF “sports entertainment.” The move freed his federation from licensing fees and his wrestlers from the pesky drug policies of state athletic commissions.
The WWF flew high into the nineties. Its biggest star, Hulk Hogan, was a genuine celebrity, appearing regularly on late-night talk shows and in movies. Ratings soared. But a series of scandals threatened to kill the WWF. A ringboy claimed that his continued employment had been conditioned on sex with a high-ranking male WWF executive. Rumors of widespread steroid use by WWF wrestlers culminated in McMahon’s federal indictment for distributing the drug and conspiring to defraud the Food and Drug Administration. (He was convicted only of the conspiracy charge and acquitted on the rest; he calls it “total lies, salacious crap.”) In the middle of it all Turner Network Television—or, as a bitter McMahon sees it, “that billionaire son-of-a-bitch [Ted] Turner”—formed World Championship Wrestling and scheduled its weekly show directly opposite the WWF on Monday nights. Suddenly the WWF, which had started the ball rolling, was a fading number two.
So it was a wrestling federation with a very real black eye that invited Austin on board in 1995. Keying on his technical skill, they dubbed him “The Ringmaster”—another poor fit. He had gotten used to the freestyle rantings that carried him through the heightened raunch of the ECW and wanted a persona that allowed him to spew more naturally. One night he watched a documentary about a wildly anti-social serial killer and seized on a new character. A new name came when his English wife exhorted him to “drink your tea before it gets stone cold.” McMahon gave him the green light to see what Stone Cold Steve Austin could do, and he shaved his head, grew a goatee, and got mean. He started to cuss and drink beer in the ring. Almost overnight, he turned wrestling “from a G-rated family show to the edge of what’s acceptable,” says Mark Nulty, a lifelong wrestling fan who writes about the sport and sells videos of old-school matches on his Web site, www.wrestlingclassics.com. “He was the first guy to come on TV and be uncontrollable, to use the word ‘ass,’ to flip the bird.”
According to McMahon, Austin’s behavior did not initially meet with his approval. “That was me, playing my way in their playground,” Austin says. A typical (and defining) bit of playfulness came at 1997’s King of the Ring. After defeating Jake “the Snake” Roberts, a Christian soldier of the strychnine and snakehandling variety, Austin took to the mike. “Jake, you can thump your Bible and say your prayers, and you see where it got you. You can have your psalms and your John 3:16. Austin 3:16 says that I just whipped your ass!”
“He knew we could stop it,” says McMahon, a fairly hollow statement now that “Austin 3: 16” adorns everything from T-shirts to shot glasses to those giant foam rubber hands. After early anxious moments, the WWF’s ratings started climbing, Stone Cold merchandise started moving, and the WWF went with the flow. Stone Cold Steve Austin was no longer just acting like “the toughest son of a bitch in the WWF”—he was being billed that way. In what proved to be the shrewdest move of all, the WWF incorporated whatever unease it felt into the act. For the past year the primary storyline on Monday Night Raw has been Austin’s violent feud with McMahon, the boss’ scheming to keep the title from Austin until he will behave in a more corporate manner, and Austin’s profane refusal to be anything but himself.
Week after week the fans eat it up in a way no one expected. “Originally I was a heel,” says Austin, using the wrestling term for a bad guy, “but things started changing. It was 1997; things were not so black and white. I was getting cheered as much as I was getting booed. Everybody started telling me, ‘You’re a baby face’”—a good guy—“and I said, ‘No, I’m a heel.’ I had taken a lot of pride in being a heel. But suddenly I realized I am a baby face. What’s up with that?”
Austin answers his own question with a reference to his “psychology,” a word he uses loosely but cagily to characterize the things he learns from the audience’s response to his carrying on. “It should be a psychology lesson every time you are in the ring,” he says, “because a lot of psychology goes into reaching the biggest demographic.” Simply put, heels try to be universally hated and baby faces try to be universally liked. Before Austin, though, it never worked that way. “While a good-looking guy might be liked by the girls, their boyfriends are going to hate him,” he says. Austin fixed that problem: His target is his boss, McMahon. Everybody wants to flip the bird at the boss.
But his success is just as much a sign of the times. If the seventies were the Me Decade, the nineties are the Look at Me Decade, and nothing matters as much as getting on television. For those poor unfortunate souls who fail to make it, the only hope of validation is to search the tube until they find someone who reminds them a little of themselves (think Jerry Springer). To the extent that a wrestler can provide this, Stone Cold does. His gimmick is that he has no gimmick. While the other WWF wrestlers play the roles of pimps, perverts, and the undead, Stone Cold walks out and acts the way a lot of people feel. He wears no wild costume, keeps a leg brace on his busted knee, gets ticked off about the things that tick off regular folks, and acts the way regular folks do, or would like to, when he gets ticked off. And when it’s all over, he drinks a lot of beer.
“Look at a pie,” says Austin. “Everybody wants a piece, but I’m lucky. I get the whole pie.”
And it’s a big damn pie. While the WWF will not release hard figures, reports place his income at between $5 million and $10 million, much of it from merchandise, which he designs in large part himself. On most of his T-shirts, which sell at a clip of a million a month, he chooses the artwork and invents the slogans. “Of course, I came up with ‘Austin 3: 16.’ I came up with ‘100% Pure Whoop Ass,’ ‘100% Pure Rattlesnake,’ and ‘100% Pure Hell Raiser.’ You can put ‘100% Pure’ in front of just about anything.” At an average of $20 a pop, his T-shirts accounted for nearly half of the WWF’s $500 million in merchandise sold in 1998.
Still, 1999 has not been a perfect year for Austin or the WWF. In May he and his wife divorced. A month later, fellow WWF wrestler Owen Hart fell from the arena rafters to his death in a botched stunt at a pay-per-view event in Kansas City, Missouri. Rumors of bad blood between the two had circulated since a sloppy pile driver from Hart temporarily paralyzed Austin in 1996. “I’ve got nothing bad to say about Owen Hart,” says Austin. “Mistakes will be made in any business, and accidents will happen. We had our accident, and he had his.” Then, in June, a seven-year-old boy in Dallas allegedly killed his three-year-old-brother with a move he said he saw watching pro wrestling. Neither the WWF nor Austin are talking publicly about the tragedy, but a few weeks before, talking less guardedly, he addressed critics who perceive a real threat in his sport’s cartoon violence and vulgarity. “I don’t expect the TV or anybody else to raise my kids,” he said.
IT CAN BE DIFFICULT TO DISTINGUISH Steve Austin from Stone Cold, but watching him in Boerne, you notice that his star turn takes a laid-back twist. Here he is accorded the special, small-town type of fame typically enjoyed by high school quarterbacks on Saturday mornings; he flirts with all the girls and signs autographs for all the kids. At the Longbranch Saloon, a local beer joint, his is a familiar face at a bar lined with hard-ridden regulars. But everybody who comes in wears either a Stone Cold smoking skull T-shirt or a camouflage baseball cap with “Stone Cold” on the crown. These are Austin’s hunting buddies, and they laugh at all his jokes as the talk veers from his favorite country songs to a fence he ran over recently in his truck. One man is his taxidermist, another his hunting guide. One couple, Rickey and Sandra Fischer, helped watch his two little girls during the divorce. He met the Fischers after he got out of his truck at a red light to push Sandra’s car, on foot, through a rainstorm to a service station.
In Boerne his time is taken up with raising his two girls, seven-year-old Stephanie and two-year-old Cassidy. He shares custody of them with his ex-wife, and he talks about them constantly. Driving through town one morning in his day-old Ford truck, going from the weight room to the tanning salon to a Mexican food place in the center of town, Austin pulls pictures of the girls from his fanny pack more than once. Stephanie smiles sweetly, and Cassidy is pictured walking on a dirt road with Rickey, stomping on bugs with an exaggerated step. It is what Stone Cold Steve Austin would call her “B.M.F. walk.” (You ask him what that means.)
But the ring is never far away. On the back of the picture of Cassidy, Austin has penciled out ideas for his next video: “Cold Beer” and “Hell Yeah!” The legend will only grow.
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