Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable.

Dismiss

[MUST READ ARTICLE] Stone Cold Steve Austin, Rolling Stone Mag, Dec 24th 1998

1,238 views

Skip to first unread message

James Alexander Starritt

unread,

Dec 23, 1998, 3:00:00 AM12/23/98

I thought this was a superb read guys, so here it is! ........ Enjoy. For
those of you who think this is off topic for the WCW groups, well I
apoligize. Every now and again something comes along that is worth all fans
reading and this is one occasion, besides he used to be in WCW ;-)

James Alexander Starritt (star...@geocities.com)
The Pro Wrestler Archive (http://pro-wrestling.iscool.net)

STONE COLD STEVE AUSTIN

(Rolling Stone, December 24, 1998)

By Chris Heath

One a day like today, he'll throw two of his twenty guns into the back of
his maroon pickup truck, toss his chewing tobacco onto the dashboard, blast
out some heavy metal that rocks the old-fashioned way, stop off for a cold
case of beer, put it on the floor within reach of his right hand, and drive.
As each Coors Light is drained, he crushes the can with one hand, then
reaches out the window and lobs it confidently into the flatbed behind,
where it joins the other empties. There's time today for real hunting --
staking out those white-tailed deer -- so he heads for a makeshift country
shooting range where Texas folk go to drink, talk scopes and ammo, let off a
few rounds. A guy in an IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED, BUY HER ANOTHER BEER
T-shirt asks for an
autograph. He takes out a blue Sharpie pen, signs "Stone Cold Steve Austin
#1" -- because he is Stone Cold Steve Austin, and he is Number One -- and
gets another beer.

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 hsaved, 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, anti-authoritarian
Everyman, but bigger. "A bad motherfucker" 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 in to 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.

Professional wrestling first got really big in the Eighties. In an era of
bluster, excess and exaggeration, it fit perfectly. Stars like Hulk Hogan
and Andre the Giant were household names; in 1987, Wrestlemania III --
wrestling's Super Bowl -- set an attendance record for an indoor event, at
Michigan's Pontiac Silverdome (93,173), that still stands today.

When the mainstream media looked into what was causing all this fuss, they
were sniffy and suspicious. Feigning horror, they tried to "expose"
wrestling as fake -- the matches were rigged, they trumpeted, and the combat
staged. This was nothing that any half-conscious fan over the age of
fourteen who enjoyed the spectacle not as actual battle but as a kind of
vicious cooperation with hyped-up story lines, didn't intuitively know.
Vince McMahon, who ran what was at the time the only national wrestling
organization, the World Wrestling Federation, began to refer to the activity
not as sport but as "sports entertainment." Some wrestlers resented the
change in emphasis, because they felt it demeaned their athleticism, but a
new breed, like Hulk
Hogan, who understood that their primary job was to entertain, prospered.

In the early Nineties, wrestling lost its way. Maybe the times changed and
wrestling failed to change with them, though there were other, more specific
reasons. In the ring, the WWF's story lines and presentations grew stale.
Out of the ring, McMahon was hit with a protracted series of federal
investigations, which narrowed into a set of accusations concerning the
distribution of steroids. Though none of the charges stuck, the
investigation
sapped the federation of time, money and energy.

And now it had competition. Ted Turner had bought a local wrestling outfit
in Charlotte, North Carolina, renamed it World Championship Wrestling and
created a second national wrestling organization. Both the WCW and WWF
admit -- sometimes grudgingly -- that the ensuing Monday-night cable battle
between the
WWF's Raw Is War and the WCW's Nitro (launched in 1995), has been partly
responsible for drawing the fans back. These days there are twelve hours of
wrestling on American television each week. The WCW estimates that its core
business has grown from $24 million to $200 million in the last four years.
The WWF claims that this year its merchandising and licensing operations
will gross $500 million.

For a long while this Monday-night ratings battle was one that Nitro always
won. Not anymore. In the second week of April 1998, after losing for
eighty-three weeks in a row, the WWF beat the WCW, and it has won more than
it has lost ever since. Many weeks, more young men tune in to the WWF on
Monday nights than to any other show on television. And the person they most
want to see is Stone Cold Steve Austin.

The man who would become Stone Cold 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 new 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 his 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 in our share of trouble.
Typical South Texas stuff." In the fifth grade, he started watching local
Houston
wrestling matches on TV. The rest of the family would ask 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 other 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 the 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 a
regional manager: He could see one version of his future tapering away into
the distance. But another idea had been swelling inside him. He'd been going
to the Dallas Sportatorium 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 you 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 beaten up."

After a couple of months, the USWA moved him to Tennessee. Noone 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 he 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 to drive from Nashville to Memphis, fight, then drive back -- a
420-mile round trip. 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 meals a day.

Things got better when he got badder. Over their careers, wrestlers often
switch roles. Austin, who in those days had long blond locks, no facial hair
and long spandex tights, started 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 jackass 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 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 wrestlers on contract between them. For Austin, it
was a long shot.

After a year and a half, he got the call. It was from the 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 turnks, 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 not going to sugarcoat anything,
Steve -- 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 our 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 sidestep away from the big time, but it 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 in 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 its
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 started looking for a new character.
One evening he watched an HBO film about the serial killer Richard
Kuklinkski, who was nicknamed the 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, ofcusing 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 wrestlers 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 famous famous finishing move
in the business -- the Stone Cold Stunner.

In this era of less-certain heroes, where good guys and bad guys are harder
to tell apart, it was the audience that changed Austin's role from that of a
heel to that of a babyface. Even though he was "losing" most of the time,
his straightforward, black-shorts-and-black-boots, take-no-shit character
was the one the audience identified with. There was, according to the WWF,
serious internal debate when Austin first raised his middle finger on TV
about whether to let the gesture air. They decided to go with it. For the
traditionalists and wrestling's more sensitive viewers, it marked another
sad step into the gutter. For the fans and the money men, it was the moment
when pro wrestling found its spirit and belatedly muscled its way into the
it's-all-good, trash-
talking Nineties.

The WCW argues that the WWF started taking things too far, damaging the
industry. "They could no longer compete on a creative basis, so they decided
to move toward shock television," says Eric Bischoff. Though the WCW's
broadcasts are hardly over-shy or wholesome, as part of Time Warner, they
don't have the same freedom to break taste barriers. The WWF's McMahon
relishes that freedom and any criticism it brings. "I believe we're somewhat
insulated," he crows, "because we want to be known as the bad boys of TV."

At home or on the road, Austin tries to go to the gym every day. The
upper-body days are more strenuous, but today is a lower body day, and he
can't do too much because of his legs. The anterior and posterior cruciate
ligaments have gone in the left knee; the anterior cruciate ligament has
also gone in the right. Some wrestlers have a lower-impact style, but that
is not Austin's character. He has worn-out shoulders and bone chips in his
elbows, and he has had nearly 200 stitches in his face. He recently spent
three days on an IV in the hospital after a staph infection took hold in his
arm.

Today he grabs a Razor Ripped thermogenic drink and spends a little time
pushing weights with his legs. After his workout, he utters a sentence
rarely spoken by people leaving gyms in the Nineties. "Do you like Mexican
food?" he wonders.

As we drive around, I enjoy hearing him talk in wrestling language. His
critique of "From Dusk Till Dawn," with Quentin Tarantino, for example:
"They committed these brutal murders, and then at the end they were supposed
to be the babyfaces against the vampires -- it was the shits . . . " My
favorite of his expresions is the one for getting angry. A large part of
building up anticipation for televised wrestling matches -- and for building
a wrestler's character -- is making good promos, in which the wrestler talks
to an interviewer or the camera, setting the scene, feigning aggression of
one sort or another. Consequently, when Austin talks about anger, in all
contexts (including those away from the ring), he will say something like,
"I really cut a promo with him. . ."

Later we meet up with his wife, Jeannie, who has a broad English accent and
who looks as though she could have done well on "The Benny Hill Show." She
insists that Austin play Will Smith's "Gettin' Jiggy Wit It" on the pickup
truck's CD player, even though for the most part he is a heavy metal and
country fan. He has released a rock-compilation CD called "Steve Austin's
Stone Cold Metal," and he assumes that in this area he and the man from
Rolling Stone will find common ground. We'll be sitting in a restaurant,
lost in our thoughts, when he'll say, "Dokken didn't make it as big as they
should. The name didn't have a ring to it. What's a dokken?"

He and Jeannie met in Dallas years ago. For a while in the WCW, she was his
"valet," the woman some wrestlers enlist to usher them into the ring, though
I have to find this out for myself before he will confirm it. The two of
them are sweet together. They reminisce about the lean days. She reminds him
how they used to sit in motel rooms, passing time by seeing who could throw
the most Coors Light cans in the trash can. She says she beat him once.

He nods: "As soon as I taught her that flip-wrist action, she got good."

One Christmas, they tell me, she bought him a computer. He is not the kind
of person to use a computer much, though she is. The next year he bought her
a nice new deer rifle he'd been wanting.

"I think we bought our own Christmas presents this year," she says.These
days, Jeannie mostly stays home with the children: Austin is the father of
two and the stepfather of one. She won't watch his wrestling matches live --
"I'm not really a fan," she says -- though she will watch them on video once
she knows that nothing bad has happened. She has been like that since the
accident.

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 imression of viciously
slamming the top of his opponent's 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 220 -- 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 managed 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 be able 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 ever 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 derailed 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 savings could last and whether 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 months after the
accident, he was scored. 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,
wrestlers 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."

Did Hart acknowledge his mistake?

"I guess," Austin says. "But I don't think he really did. Finally he called
meat the house once or twice. But I'll tell you what -- if I'd damn near
paralyzed someone, I'd have called them every damn day and said, 'Hell, I'm
sorry . . .'"

In an age where almost all forms of celebrity are endlessly picked over and
studied, professional wrestling exists in its own peculiar shadowland --
avidly and obsessively consumed by the millions who love it but largely
ignored by the rest of society. Half the people Steve Austin meets don't
know who he is. The other half can't believe it's really him. In the San
Antonio airport, on the first day of a three-day road trip, he is approached
by a man and two young boys in braces, both clearly terrified.

"He don't bite," their father tells his kids, chuckling.

"Sometimes I do," says Austin, not cracking a smile as he signs the
autographs. "Just not today."

He buys a copy of "Guns and Ammo" to read on the plane, but later he will
complain that there is not enough about scopes in it. And, anyway, he rarely
reads very far through such things these days. Same reason that when he goes
to the driving range, he gets bored halfway through the bucket of balls: no
attention span.

When Austin arrives in a new city, there is no limousine waiting. He catches
a shuttle bus, waits in line for a Hertz car and asks himself for the
hundredth time why he has never signed up for its "preferred" service. He'll
ask for something big -- like a Lincoln Continental -- and if he has
accidentally been given a smoking car, he'll curse before he drives away, a
wad of chewing tobacco in his cheek (he tried to give up for a while, but
those sunflower seeds just don't do it for him).

At the New Orleans Lakefront Arena, Austin appears in a "Fatal Four-Way
Title Match" for the World Wrestling Federation Championship with three of
the WWF's other biggest stars: the Undertaker, Kane and Mankind. Before it
starts, Austin paces backstage. Might have a couple of protein shakes and a
hot dog. Some coffee. A couple of Cokes. That's when the wrestlers talk: a
big bullshit session about what they've been doing, where they've been, what
they've bought. They don't need to discuss what they're going to do in the
ring. "Once you've been in the system for a while," Austin says, "you're
good enough mentally and physically to go out there and just ad-lib it and
wing it and kind of mix things upu." If the show is on TV, he might arrange
a few things, though he says he doesn't like it too carved in stone. But at
a "house show" -- one where there's no TV and the only audience members are
those in the seats -- two experienced wrestlers can work out most of the
acton as they go.

Beyond the actual athletic combat, there are routines that are followed in
most wrestling matches. The action generally begins with a surprise attack
by one wrestler on the other, after which the timekeeper will belatedly ring
the bell, in grudging acknowledgment of what is already happening. At some
point the fight will usually spill out of the ring, onto the mats that
surround it (as though the sporting violence has now turned into something
more real). Accomplices will often interfere in the matches, either hitting
or tripping one of the wrestlers or distracting the referee while their
wrestler unfairly attacks the other. Metal chairs -- which have carelessly
been left at ringside -- will often be used, folded up, as weapons. Loose
cables or ropes lying on the auditorium floor also often come in handy to
choke opponents. Whoever wins rarely does so without being -- only moments
before -- on the verge of losing.

There are two moments when Austin feels best in the ring. The first is when
his introductory music hits and the crowd explodes. Then, for maybe fifteen
minutes, he does what he does and what he is good at. Most nights it works,
though sometimes the bottom can drop out of a wrestling match -- he'll hear
the crowd losing touch -- and he'll be there in the ring, thinking, "This is
the shits." The second moment comes at the end, when he hits his Stone Cold
Stunner. The place goes crazy. In wrestling, a moment like that, when the
roof blows off the place, is called a pop. When he gets a pop and gets that
adrenaline rush . . . it feels as cool as hell.

The way the fans juggle truth and fiction, reality and illusion, is as
complicated as the way the wrestlers do. Within minutes the same people will
slip between deriding the spectacle with full knowledge of what the
spectacle is ("That's so fake! You're such a bad actor!") and being fully
caught up in the fiction ("Come on, Shamrock! [with increasing desperation]
Get up!"). This bemuses me until I remember that we all do this frequently
enough at the movies -- pick apart an actor's talent and haircut and failure
to convince us in a part while still being fully engaged in the story.

"Fucking blast, man," Austin says backstage after tonight's triumph. "Good
building." He is still shirtless when he gets into the car. He fiddles with
the radio until he finds a song he likes -- "Layla," old version -- though
he
changes stations again when it goes into the soppy, piano-led second half.
(Austin does this constantly. He has no patience with the wrong song.) A few
blocks on, he pulls into an Exxon station -- "We got a sell-out house to
celebrate!" -- and buys a twelve-pack of Coors Light for the ride back. The
rain is almost torrential, but he merrily squeals from lane to lane down the
freeway -- "Hang on! I'm an excellent driver!" -- a beer in one hand, tuning
and retuning the radio, then reaching into the back seat for his T-shirt and
putting it over his head as he moves forward into the left lane. This seems
like a bad time to remember the story he told me about the scar underneath
his lip: a car wreck, senior year in high school; his buddy at the wheel;
missing a curve; jumping a ditch; too busy fiddling with the car radio. But,
that aside, it's fun, as though he's sharing just a little echo of that last
pop.

Suddenly -- speeding along the inside lane -- Austin demands a piece of
paper. Holding it against the wheel, still holding a beer in the same hand
as the pen, he scribbles. Merchandising inspiration has struck. We have
passed a car with one of those yellow plastic BABY ON BOARD signs in its
window, and a Stone Cold version will soon be on the way. "That'd be a sure
hit," he declares. "Put a skull on it."

Austin thinks about merchandising constantly. His cut of the various Stone
Cold products accounts for about half his income. He'll sit at home, put on
some metal nice and loud, and strain his head for T-shirt ideas. Just this
year he has introduced maybe fifteen new ones. You see the favorites at
every show: the skeleton holding a rattlesnake with one hand ("the
Rattlesnake" is one of his nicknames), flipping the bird with the other. The
100% HELL RAISER one. The 100% WHOOP-ASS one. And then, of course, AUSTIN
3:16, perhaps the
defining phase of his career.

He'd been fighting a wrestler known as Jake "the Snake" Roberts, whose
shtick involved revivalist religious imagery 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 your Bible and you say your
prayers," he said, "and it didn't 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 to just put AUSTIN 3:16 on the front. "That shirt," he
says, "probably outsold any shirt in the history of wrestling."

The Daiquiri House is the kind of place where icy, colored drinks swirl in
barrels behind the bar. Austin chooses his seat with care. He always likes
to be facing the door. Other wrestlers know this about him, he says, and if
they eat together, they defer to him on it. "I guess it's bullshit," he
says. "It's something to do." Another, less peculiar affectation: Austin
does not like people putting their hands on him from behind, which is why
his face is stern when a drunken local leans over his shoulder and says, "I
don't want to disturb you . . . "

"You already did," Austin growls, "putting your hand on my back."

The guy compensates by buying us huge shots of tequila to go withour
daiquiris. Austin holds his up in the light, says, "Hey! I'm the designated
driver!" and sculls it. More locals gather around, and Austin asks them
about
Louisiana hunting. They say they mostly hunt ducks. Austin screws up his
nose -- call that hunting? "You know the best way to cook a duck?" he asks.
"Stuff it full of shit, cook it for three hours at 350 degrees" -- he has
their full attention; they are almost taking notes -- "throw the duck away
and eat the shit." They sort of laugh.

Despite the offers of the increasingly worried WWF publicist who has been
shadowing us at a distance, when we leave, Austin takes the wheel. He wants
food. After a few hundred yards, when we see a cop car ahead do a U-turn and
circle back, even he gets spooked. He pulls into the side streets, zigzags a
couple of lefts and rights, and offers the publicist control of the car.

We end up in the place where lonely, late-night people go in America when
their options have run out. At two in the morning in Denny's, you get a lot
ofpeople who know who Stone Cold Steve Austin is, so he successfully charms
the waitresses into letting us sit in the closed section. "I'm trying to
record a hit single," he explains improbably, "and I need a little silence."
Another customer approaches: "I don't want an autograph. I just want to say
I think you're the best athlete in the world" -- an opinion Austin considers
before replying, "I agree with you wholeheartedly." He's pretty drunk now.
"You got any forks?" he asks the waitress. "While ago, I was driving, saw a
fork in the road." Soon after that, his head starts falling toward his food,
and he begins eating his fries by putting large handfuls in his mouth; they
totter on his lips, and half of them fall back onto his plate.

We get into the hotel at around four. We must be back in the lobby at 5:30
a.m., and Austin appears only five minutes late, fully compos mentis. In the
Hertz shuttle bus, he chats with a man in the lumber business. "Got good
hunting down in Oregon," he says. "Good elk, right?" When we arrived in
Oklahoma City, the shellshocked WWF publicist clumsily and unsuccessfully
tries to engineer a way for Austin and myself to end up in different cities
tonight. When that fails, he proposes to Austin that he "tone it down a bit"
this evening. Elementary psychology would suggest that these words are
unlikely to go down well, and they don't. Everything else aside, millions of
wrestling fans know Stone Cold Steve Austin as someone who doesn't
appreciate
being told what to do, and Austin has never pretended that he finds this
aspect of his character a stretch. He is furious. At lunchtime, Steve Austin
calls Vince McMahon (with whom, naturally, in the real world he is on the
best of terms) from the phone booth outside Waffle House for a discussion.
That night, Austin and I will be feeding the profits of a Tulsa, Oklahoma,
hotel bar, and the WWF publicist will be nowhere in sight.

"'Tone it down a bit!'" Austin fumes to me. "That son of a bitch. I'm on the
road 250 days a year. That's how I keep my sanity."

There is a small body of academic literature on wrestling. As I travel, I
grapple with "Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle," by Sharon Mazer,
the head of the department of theater and film studies at the University of
Canterbury, in New Zealand. It seems worth reading a few sentences of this
to Steve Austin, if only to see the appalled expression on his face:

"Professional wrestling appears to violate various principles of masculine
performance in a number of ways. First, it relies on the display of male
bodies that are presented, alternately, in extravagant costumes and almost
naked. Second, these male bodies in performance are seen to touch and
embrace, to make a show but not a reality of hurting another man, to
dominate and submit to one another in ways that resemble nothing so much as
cliches of sexual engagement."

"That's the biggest bunch of garbage I've ever heard," Austin says, shaking
his head in amazement. "I don't know what to say about something like that.
To me that's bullshit coming from someone who is really trying to stir up
something, some kind of argument. I would term that as bullshit. Someone
really went out of their way to come up with that one . . . I think she's
overthinking things . . . two guys going out there wrestling."

I mention to Austin that there is a long history of people noting the
homoeroticism of two near-naked men rolling around in the ring. More
befuddlement. "I'm not knocking homosexuals or whatever," he says, "but as
far as my impression of it, that possibility wouldn't even enter my mind."
It clearly genuinely mystifies him that on the same planet where he drinks
and hunts and chews tobacco and plays his music loud, there are people
thinking stuff like this. "Why do people with such levels of intelligence,"
he demands, "come up with such absurd theories?"

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 get their feelings 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 comes 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 . . .'"

As I write this article, the WWF's story lines get stranger and stranger.
Austin is unseated as World Wrestling Federation champion thanks to some
Machiavellian scheming by Vince Mc ahon. Then, after a series of bizarre
scenarios -- Austin attacking McMahon in the hospital; Austin filling
McMahon's convertible with wet cement -- Austin is "fired." The following
week, Austin returns, armed with various weapons, and holds McMahon hostage,
tying him up with tape and threatening him until McMahon is seen to
literally wet his pants. Watching, you get the feeling that you are
observing something truly pioneering and groundbreaking, albeit in a
marvelously ghastly way -- something recklessly out of control.

When you spend time in the world of professional wrestling, it is easy to
lose your grip on the truth. There are the lies that are its essential
nature, those told in action and gesture in the ring. There are stories
about the
backstage world, and, though some of these are true, some of these are lies,
too, peddled to give the wrestling fan a more intimate, albeit fake, insight
into the "sport." (Even the fans can get confused. After Austin is fired on
TV, hundreds of fans phone up wanting refunds for house shows, assuming he
won't be there. He had to do local interviews guaranteeing his presence.)

Sometimes it's hard to know where wrestling's truth ever really begins. It
makes you paranoid. You start questioning everything. You starting taunting
yourself. Maybe the WWF and WCW are secretly in cahoots, acting out the
biggest wrestling confrontation ever, and Vince McMahon and Ted Turner get
together for cocktails in Montana and laugh about it all. (But I don't think
so. And if they are, these people are terrific, cruel actors. When I discuss
McMahon's legal victories with Bischoff, this is his response: "Well, O.J.
Simpson is playing golf right now.")

It worries me. I begin to lose confidence. Maybe Steve Austin wasn't ever
hurt -- maybe it's just one more whopper of a story line. (But I think he
was. His wife, who appeared upset talking about it and who mentioned that
the WWF considers her a "loose cannon," doesn't seem like the mischievous,
double-bluffing kind.)

The word of wrestling doesn't make it easy to pick all this apart, because
it is a universe in which real life is sometimes heartlessly cannibalized
for the sake of in-the-ring drama in a way that makes all sense of truth
shift and shiver. In October, I watch the following story line unfold on TV:
Owen Hart, the man who gave Steve Austin the pile driver that nearly ended
his career, gives a wrestler called Dan "The Beast" Severn a pile driver;
Severn ends up in the hospital as a result. Hart subsequently appears in the
ring in his everyday clothes, refusing to fight, holding back tears, saying
that after thirteen years he feels too bad about what he's now done to carry
on.

Steve Austin watches this from backstage. He has not been told beforehand
that his experience was to be used in this way. It doesn't thrill him. In a
way, it's a slap in the face, he says. Every now and then, you figure
nothing is sacred. He's not going to dwell on it. He's a grown-up. He's a wr
estler. "On one hand, you would think maybe they would think a little bit
more about how you feel about it before they do it," he says. "but on the
other hands, it's a business where they try to take advantage of a lot of
things you wouldn't expect them to take advantage of, and this just happened
to be one of those instances."

For Vince McMahon, it's simple enough. "If something like that is an
opportunity for us to capitalize on it, we will unabashedly capitalize on
it," he says. "I don't believe any subject matter is sacred. It is the
American
way."