THE STONE COLD TRUTH (26 page)

25
Does Stone Cold Love to Entertain People?
Hell Yeah!

I
appeared in ten episodes of the CBS show
Nash Bridges,
as a character named Jake Cage, in 1999 and 2000. Originally I was supposed to just do a bit part on one episode, but they kept bringing me back in a recurring role.

Don Johnson was really cool to me. You really knew who was in control of the set when he walked on. That was his set. He was the top babyface and the booker. He laid down the law with a lot of people, but he treated me like gold. If somebody spoke to me in a negative way, he’d get on their ass because you weren’t going to talk down to Steve Austin. They were going to be very nice to me, so he took really good care of me and I appreciated that.

The way I got on that show was through Don’s bodyguard, who was also his friend and was a big wrestling fan. Sometimes for the show they’d get a football player or a baseball player to do a bit role, so his bodyguard told him, “Hey, man, why don’t you get Steve Austin on the show?”

Don said, “Who’s that?”

And the bodyguard said, “You know, Stone Cold Steve Austin from WWE! The badass bald guy who gives everyone the finger.”

Don said, “Okay, let’s get him on.”

And hell, I came on the show. I only had a couple of lines at first, and of course I was going crazy running white-hot with WWE. So I was doing this project on my days off. When I went out there, I did it to have some fun, so I’d memorize my lines real fast, and I’d have a couple drinks the night before.

It wasn’t like I was really trying to make a name for myself, but I did well at it. So, because I had done well with the limited scenes I had, they started writing more lines for me every day. They kept writing more and more lines for me, and my character kept on coming back.

And, of course, anybody from Texas is a Cheech and Chong fan, so Cheech Marin was real cool to me now. He had a son about fourteen years old who was a big wrestling fan, so I got along great with him. Yasmine Bleeth was also extremely nice to me when she was on the show. I got along fine with her. CBS offered me a series the next year based on the Jake Cage character. But, of course, it wasn’t something I could do—I was still hotter than a firecracker with WWE. There wasn’t time to get out of this game yet. Plus, what I would make on a TV show wasn’t even close to what I was going to make at WWE. Sports entertainment definitely paid me more money than I was going to make playing Jake Cage. But I’ll tell you, I enjoyed doing
Nash Bridges.

I really didn’t see too many stars when I was out there, because we
filmed
Nash Bridges
in San Francisco, and not too many people film there. I only went out socially with Don Johnson maybe a couple of times, and he would always have a part of the restaurant sectioned off. It might even have been his restaurant—I don’t know.

The other times, I’d just go to the local seafood and fish houses, and drink beer and eat oysters. I was doing the low-key thing anyway. I never did ask Don Johnson if I could drive that Hemi Cuda they used on the show. I got to ride in the car a couple of times, but I never got to drive it. They had three of them on the set and they were on a guarded lot. They gave me a motorcycle and I’d ride that all over the place.

Don bought, or got, those cars, after the show was ended. He auctioned one of them off on a big nationally televised auto auction earlier this year and it went for over $100,000. There is a good chance that it really doesn’t have a real 426 Hemi motor in it, and that it was a prop 383 or something, but that didn’t seem to matter to the bidders.

As far as other forms of entertainment, I’ve had fans and people in the business ask me, “Why doesn’t Stone Cold do movies?” When I was running at my hottest, I probably could have been considered for movies and other TV projects. But I was the horse pulling the WWE wagon, being the main guy, and I wasn’t going to go nowhere to do a movie. Maybe down the road though. That door is always open.

Am I interested in being a gigantic movie star? Not really. A bit part here and there to pay the bills and keep up my exposure would be cool though. Even those corny little Lorenzo Lamas-type movies might be cool. I used to hate that guy, but now I sit there and watch his movies, and they’re so goofy—if I’m not careful I might actually start to like the guy

I’m kidding. I enjoy Lorenzo Lamas’s movies. Like Mick Foley says, movies on TV are movies for guys who like movies.

I don’t have to star in a blockbuster. Just something to entertain my damn brain. And something that doesn’t last too long, so I can go onto the next thing or go hunt or something like that. Something to throw some money in the bank. As ol’ J.R. says, it sure beats picking up rocks.

I just want to keep my name out there. I’m not interested in going haywire like I went haywire in the wrestling business. I don’t entertain thoughts about being Sir Laurence Olivier or Robert DeNiro, or anything like that. All you gotta do is find your niche.

Look at Don Johnson.
Miami Vice, Nash Bridges
—same thing, different clothes. Look at every Joe Pesci deal—wise guy, smart mouth,
My Cousin Vinny, GoodFellas,
whatever. Same deal. Will that thing ever come along for Steve Austin? Who knows?

I kind of did that in
Nash Bridges
—I had a different name, but the guy I played was like Stone Cold. On one of the episodes, when I was walking down the street, you could even hear my entrance music in the background coming out of someone’s car.

Regardless of what name I use, I can always be me. I really can’t be anything else. It’s not like I’m a trained actor. I’m from South Texas and I am who I am. But I’m thirty-eight years old now. That’s not prime time to start a movie career. If I were going to do anything, I’d do a hunting show. Stone Cold hunting, fishing, whatever. That would be a lot of fun.

Even though I can’t physically get through the rigors of working in the ring very much longer, I can see myself entertaining people in other
ways. I’ve been told I could do a forty-five-minute stand-up comedy routine at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas:
“What?
—An Evening with Stone Cold Steve Austin.”

I’ll have to maybe think about that one … plenty of F-bombs!

Yeah, I like to think there is a spot for me somewhere in show business. It would be nice. Maybe I should do one of those theater deals in Branson, Missouri. Build my own theater, the Stone Cold Theater. I’d do two or three shows a night, come out, sing some songs, cut some promos and do my deal. I think that would work! Well, that might be a stretch, but you get the picture.

If I worked in a movie, I’d love to play a heel. That’s what I wanted to be my whole career in wrestling—it just didn’t turn out as well as I wanted. Jenny, my little sister, knew I always wanted to be the bad guy. To me, it’s always the best role. When you’re a heel, you can do absolutely anything. As a babyface, there are a lot of parameters and boundaries you can’t cross.

As a heel, you’ve got to be aggressive. You gotta be one tough SOB and a little bit of a coward. And you can cheat. To me, that’s the easiest way to express myself. That live camera allows me to turn that switch on, and being a heel is so natural to me—being aggressive, outspoken, loud and decisive.

Sounds like Vince McMahon, doesn’t it?

26
Stone Cold and Vince McMahon

T
he
absolute highlight of my wrestling career was an extended three-and-a-half-year feud with my boss, the owner of WWE, Vince McMahon. It is said by many that we had the most-talked-about rivalry in the history of sports entertainment. Based on today’s mass media, cable and satellite penetration, that’s probably true. We went at each other in so many bizarre scenarios that newer fans might wonder, How in the world did all that start?

It was a simple formula that started the “era of attitude” at WWE, and shot the ratings sky high. We caught lightning in the bottle on that one, for sure. When Vince threw himself in there as the corporate heel owner, he saw money, even though I might not have seen it. That was Vince’s great line drive out of the park, and it generated millions of dollars of revenue for WWE. It was all new to us, but we did have some damn great television! We worked so well off each other, I really enjoyed going at it with Vince week after week.