What’s the story?
Stone Cold Steve Austin recently spoke out about a stunt involving The Rock that almost ended up being deadly. Austin revealed the story on one of the latest episodes of his highly acclaimed, award-winning ‘Steve Austin Show’ podcast.
In case you didn’t know...
Stone Cold Steve Austin is one of the greatest superstars in the history of professional wrestling, and even that may be an understatement.
After years of only popping up sporadically on WWE television, Austin re-emerged as the host of the Stone Cold podcast on the WWE Network, which has provided fans with some of the most fascinating interviews in recent memory.
The heart of the matter
The following are quotes from Austin regarding the stunt, which was set to include the Texas Rattlesnake destroying The Rock’s brand new Lincoln Town Car with a monster truck.
“Well hell, I didn’t know how to drive a monster truck. So there I was in the parking lot, driving the Austin 3:16 monster truck. So there we are, we go live. I get my cue and off I go running up and down that car, crushing the s*** out of it. Then there’s going to be a deal where I drive the truck into the arena. So I go into the back door of the arena and I’m in a holding room with a couple of curtains in front of me. The monster truck was loud as f*** and that 1800 horsepower motor is churning out exhaust fumes.
Austin then goes to explain what happened as he waited for his cue:
So I’m in this room and they shut the door behind me. It was about a three minutes commercial break, so the whole time the people back home are watching commercials, I’m in a room, inside a truck, breathing methanol/alcohol fumes — I could barely breathe. I was just begging for the show to come back on air so I could charge out in the audience and get a breath of fresh air. I’m breathing all those exhaust fumes, mother***er, I was going to crash that gate doing 98 (157km/h) and go and take my own cue and haul a** into the arena, if they hadn’t of cued me when they did- I was about to die.”
What’s next?
This is one of many fascinating stories to come out of Austin’s podcast, and going forward it seems as if we’ll hear several more – as you’d expect.
Author’s take
It’s not all too surprising to hear that WWE didn’t think a stunt all the way through because we’ve seen it happen on so many different occasions over the years. It detracts slightly from how cool that moment was, but in the grand scheme of things, it shows just how determined Vince was to win the Monday Night Wars.
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