It's September 22, 1997. The stage is the most hallowed arena in professional wrestling, Madison Square Garden in New York City. Professional wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin is in the ring with the owner of the World Wrestling Federation, Vincent K. McMahon. There are uniformed police present, threatening to arrest Steve Austin for his reckless, unhinged behaviour. McMahon offers an olive branch, appealing to Steve with benevolence. Ask anyone who grew up in the late 90s with even a tangential connection to professional wrestling. They can tell you beat for beat what will happen next.
Just as you know Abbott and Costello will have an argument about a baseball players' strange name, just as surely as Laurel and Hardy must be pelted with the conspicuous tray full of cream pies, just as Romeo must drink the poison upon discovering Juliet. Everyone knows that Stone Cold Steve Austin is going to give Vince McMahon a Stone Cold Stunner in the middle of the ring.
Professional wrestling has always been dismissed as mindless entertainment for the working class. A pastime for hillbillies, rednecks, bogans and assorted social detritus living in the margins of accepted popular culture. Professional wrestling is imbued with an unmistakable lowbrow character stemming from it's birth in the travelling carnivals and vaudeville halls of 20th century North America. It mixes pantomime with incredible athletic feats, simplistic storylines with incredibly damaged and troubled character actors. Early wrestlers like Lou Thesz and Frank Gotch would have to be legitimately tough, walking into bars around the country and routinely being tested physically by anyone who wanted to beat up a famous wrestler.
Trainees were ritualistically hazed and beaten to protect the secrecy of the artificial business. A lowbrow sideshow for lowbrow people. Bruno Sammartino may have sold out Madison Square Garden 188 times, but he of course he was just an Italian immigrant, and all of these people in the crowd were probably immigrants too. A lowbrow sideshow for lowbrow people. But other lowbrow forms of art have overcome the dismissal of the elite. Jazz has culturally been accepted as a refined and sophisticated discipline after years of criticism from cultural theorists such as Theodor W. Adorno, who can now be easily dismissed as being on the wrong side of history.
Something about the subterfuge and the artifice of professional wrestlling prevents it ever being looked at critically as an art form. But even with the disdain of the mass media, professional wrestling manages to attract damaged, talented artists who create characters more compelling, more real than any soap opera or television starlet. And of all the professional wrestlers who have ever lived, perhaps none was more compelling than Stone Cold Steve Austin.
He began life as Steve Williams, taking his stepfather's surname in the little town of Edna, Texas. His life was the same as so many working class Americans. A football scholarship to the University of North Texas. Sneaking out on weekends to watch wrestling at the Dallas Sportatorium, a neon-signed shack that was closer to a barn than an arena. It smelled like cheap beer and sweat, and every Saturday night it was packed with people to see the Fabulous Freebirds take on the legendary Von Erich family in bloodbath after bloodbath. Steve Williams gleefully sat in attendance, his mother sometimes reading a magazine next to him.
Williams was not much of a football player, and broke his parents' hearts by dropping out of college with just a few courses to complete. He started working on a freight dock, and from his telling was a pretty skilled forklift driver. He openly admits he planned to do this job for the rest of his life.
It's August 3rd, 1997 at the Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Williams, now known by his sobriquet 'Stone Cold' Steve Austin, may just be the most popular professional wrestler in the world. In the past ten years he has survived training, ritual hazing, poverty, a torn tricep muscle, tours of Japan and being made redundant via telephone call. He has re-invented himself, with a persona that is just his own personality dialled up past eleven. He is a violent anti-hero that rails against the establishment. He doesn't dance. He doesn't smile. His head is shaved bald and he only wears black. This was not the kind of person audiences were used to seeing. In hyper-capitalist 1980's, the hero had been Hulk Hogan. His the unbridled positivity and pomposity made iconic as he danced alongside Cyndi Lauper and Mr. T with bronzed, steroid-assisted muscles and platinum blonde mullet. The 1990's had ushered in down-to-earth, soft-spoken heroes such as Bret Hart, who grinned sheepishly at the camera while Salt – n – Pepa fawned over his shirtless body. Stone Cold is neither of these men. He drinks beer, he swears, he gives his opponents the finger and fights any celebrity who dares step into his ring, including a famous brawl with Mike Tyson. He is a working class hero, in a working class sports drama. And he has been ‘booked’— meaning scripted — to win the Intercontinental title tonight from Owen Hart.
During the match, Hart gives Austin a sit-out tombstone piledriver. It is a dangerous move, but they are both professional wrestlers with years of experience. The move goes wrong. For the next sixty seconds, Austin is quadraplegic. The rest of the match is difficult to watch, but Austin says he watches it all the time, sometimes 20 or 30 times in a row. Just to put things in perspective. Agonising seconds pass, as the men in the ring try to improvise a way to end the match. Austin tells Hart not to touch him, that he can't move. Referee Earl Hebner kneels by Austin's side to console him. After an excruciating minute, Austin communicates to Hebner, and rolls up Hart in a pinning predicament that is extraordinarily fake looking. Coworkers backstage are furious with Austin for exposing the artifice of the business to the audience. But the audience know not to laugh at the artifice. It is clear something is desperately wrong. But Austin knows he must finish the match. This is what he does.
Austin walks out of the ring as champion, concussed and with the support of two WWF staff. His left leg drags behind him. He says his left side still drags behind in cold weather. He says, like an old war wound, that Owen never called him to apologise after the accident. Backstage, the toughest son of a bitch in the WWF is alone and emotionally broken. Photos of him sitting backstage show tears in his eyes. He is loaded into an ambulance and carted away. When he is released from the hospital later that night, he is alone. None of the WWF staff remember that he might need a ride home. Three women, fans of Austin who followed the ambulance from the arena in their car offer to give him a ride. They ask if he needs anything on the way back to the hotel, and Austin says yes. He'd like it if they could pick up a 12-pack of beer on the way home.
It's September 22, 1997 again. Steve Austin is in the ring with Vince McMahon. He has just attacked Owen Hart from behind in storyline retaliation for a very real injury. Security staff and police members dive on him, but Vince McMahon enters the ring to play peacemaker. McMahon is saying that Austin must control himself. He cannot keep coming into the ring with his injury. He has already been stripped of the Intercontinental title. He is in no shape to be a professional wrestler. There is no pantomime here. Vince McMahon is legitimately Steve Austin's employer both on and off screen. He is a millionaire who inherited his father's wrestling company. He signs Austin's pay cheque, and the injury he is talking about is genuine.
“Your doctors say you aren't ready,” explains McMahon.
“These people,” he says as he points to the rabid New York crowd “don't want to see you in a wheelchair.”
Austin is silent. He fumes, he storms around the ring. He says nothing but his face says everything. He is a working class man, and his boss is telling him that he cannot do something. That because of his history, because of what has happened to him, he cannot participate.
“You gotta work within the system. That's all you gotta do,” assures McMahon.
Austin grabs the microphone, pauses, then speaks.
“You know as well as I do that this is what I do for a living. This is all that I do. And can't nobody tell me that I ain't the best in the damn world. Don't even say nothing. You sit here and tell me to work within the system. You ain't the one sitting on your ass at the house like I am.”
There is no character being played here. Steve Williams the man is saying these words, and while he might paid to play a character, he believes every single word of what he is saying. He is a professional wrestler, that's all he is and all he does. It defines him and bleeds into his personal existence.
The more I speak with unemployed friends, the more common I find this sentiment. We are what we do. We are defined by our pursuits. Friends who struggle with unemployment decide not to even pursue dating. How could anyone find them attractive if they don't even have a job? How can I even try to date someone if I'm between jobs? If I'm a designer but I'm stacking shelves at the local organic store? If I'm a dancer but I actually just work reception 9 – 5 at the moment? What would we even talk about? We are defined by what we do, as much as any family that called themselves Miller or Cooper, Thatcher or Brewer. Steve Austin has his identity stripped away by his boss, by his society and responds in a way that most people will never have the opportunity to, will never get the chance to. He tells Vince McMahon to kiss his ass, he kicks him in the groin and delivers his patented finishing maneuver, the Stone Cold Stunner.
The always spirited New York crowd goes ballistic. Austin is handcuffed and led away by police officers. From this point on, professional wrestling becomes bigger and more popular than any other point in it's history. They repeat this act a hundred times, a thousand times. There are variations, with Austin pretending to 'sell out' to corporate America, with Austin dousing McMahon and his cronies in gallons of beer, with Austin making McMahon soil himself with a fake pistol. They even subvert it, having Austin share a beer with McMahon at the conclusion of Wrestlemania X-7. But the beats were always the same. McMahon would set loose a hundred foes against Austin. Infernal demonic brothers Kane and Undertaker, prima donna corporate champion The Rock, deranged madman Mankind. But corporate American McMahon always gets his comeuppance, working class American Steve Austin always has the last laugh. It is a fantasy, a dream shared by working class people around the world, and you could watch it live every Monday night from the comfort of your own home.
This rivalry, this famous double act straight from vaudeville stages, would make Vince McMahon a billionaire. Professional wrestling would not ever again reach the heights of pop culture relevance it once had in the late 1990s, and Austin was not destined to have a long career after his neck injury. He claimed, “when it takes Steve Austin too long to stand up, too long to fall down, then it's time for Steve Austin to move along and let someone else do this thing.” One night in 2003, it took Austin too long to stand up. The night before Wrestlemania XIX, Austin was rushed to a hospital in Seattle, suffering an anxiety and substance induced panic attack. The following night, Steve Austin wrestled his last match. He did not take leaving the business of professional wrestling easily. Not many 39-year olds forced into retirement at the height of their powers do.
Roland Barthes wrote in a 1972 article tiled ‘The World of Wrestling’: When the hero of the villain of the drama, the man who was seen a few minutes earlier possessed by a moral rage, magnified into a sort of metaphysical sign, leaves the wrestling all, impassive, anonymous, carrying a small suitcase and arm-in-arm with his wife, no one can doubt that wrestling holds that power of transmutation which is common to the Spectacle and to Religious Worship.
Roland Barthes had a fundamental misunderstanding of the type of people who become wrestlers. He compares them to stage players, method actors. But no matter how blustery Daniel Day-Lewis might be as a gang leader or oil tycoon, he eventually goes back to being soft spoken English actor. Wrestlers never go back. When Steve Austin left the wrestling business, he didn’t go back to being impassive, anonymous Steve Williams, 9 to 5 on the freight dock. He couldn’t. What he did for a living, that is to say, being Stone Cold Steve Austin, was so intensely ingrained into his DNA that there was no going back. More than Barthes might ever understand, we are what we do; and transmutation for professional wrestlers is permanent.
Steve Williams would legally changed his name to Steve Austin. Alcoholism, several divorces and legal troubles followed him for years after his retirement before he managed to settle into comfortable retirement on his property in Texas, with occasional pilgrimages to Marina Del Rey in Los Angeles to record one of the best podcasts of all time or launch his own beer brand.
Now, over twenty years later, Austin still makes sporadic appearance on television. But it’s clear he isn’t doing it for the money. He himself has said about being in front of the crowd “you may as well call yourself a junkie, because you’re hooked on it”. Steve Austin is still searching for that magic, that alchemy that entranced all of us every Monday night, week after week. Just one last time.