When Stone Cold Steve Austin ‘passed out’ during his match with Bret Hart at WrestleMania 13, it made for one of the most iconic WrestleMania moments of all time. However, Austin wasn’t quite comfortable with the finish to the match, as he explained when appearing on the ‘Talk Is Jericho‘ podcast.
Austin broke down the match to Jericho and explained how they created the match, and sat down and mapped out the finish with Bret Hart and Vince McMahon. Vince was the one that said they could do the match how they wanted, but suggested Austin should pass out in the Sharpshooter to end the match. Austin explained how he had no issue doing business with Bret (and noted that he never beat him in his entire career), but went to Vince to work on the finish of the match.
“I was really worried about that finish, so I went into Vince’s office—and I still don’t know him that well at this time—and I said, “God dang, Vince, are you sure about that finish?” Austin said. “And you know how Vince talks, when he looks at you—Vince goes, ‘oh God damn, Steve, I’m telling you it’ll work.’ That’s exactly what he said and dude, if Vince gives you that kind of reassurance, he’s the f*ckin’ guy, so I said OK, I’m down with it.”
Steve Austin also talked about the decision to make sure he was bleeding as he passed out, a now-iconic image in WWE history. Austin says Bret Hart is the one that suggested he should be bleeding during the spot, and broke down how the moment happened in the match.
“I went back out to the ring [during rehearsals] and he [Bret] goes, ‘Steve if you’re going to pass out in the Sharpshooter, you need to have some color’, I said ‘ya think?’ and he goes ‘yeah!’ Austin continued. “And at the time, there was a no color [blood] policy. I’m the newer guy, I don’t got any tenure, so when Bret offers that up—and I’ve done the business plenty, but in this new place that I’m in, I ain’t got no stroke. And he goes ‘hey man, if you want, I can get it for ya’. That’s an insurance policy and he just put me under his umbrella, right?
“So, there’s a point in there [during the match] I hit my head on the guard rail and I accidentally got busted open, but that was his idea. On that exchange, when we go to the floor I said, “judgement call”, meaning ‘if you want to, get it. If you don’t, we’ve got these people hook, line and sinker. Of course, he’s following through and I’m so glad that he did because had I done the same thing, the way I sold that, it was a master—I can’t sit here and blow smoke up my own ass—I sold it like a motherf*cker. But, had I not had all of that red shit streaming on my face and on my teeth, my goatee, and you see how much blood I actually lost—and it wasn’t a gore fest, because you can go too far and it becomes hard to watch, but it wasn’t hard to watch, it just added to the level of struggle that I was going through. But it was not just a turnoff and it became, as you said, one of the most iconic images, in my opinion, in the history of the wrestling business. I’m not going to say the most, but one of the most.”
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Austin said that this moment being as successful as it was happened to be a fluke, similar to many moments in his career. Austin noted that the infamous “Curtain Call” led to him winning King Of The Ring, and his bald head with the blood led to another one of these moments. He noted that if Bret had never suggested it, he never would have said anything about bleeding during the finish.
Jericho asked what Vince said about the finish after the match, and Austin said that normally Vince lays down the law and that’s gospel, but they knew they had “crushed it” as soon as they were through the curtain.
“I knew we had a motherf*cker on our hands, an instant classic, and I never heard a thing from Vince. He didn’t say nothing, because he knew that we went out there, did a double turn and I was going to be a monster after that. And when you do something and execute something at such a high level, with such a high rate of success, he ain’t going to say nothing because dude, it’s hard to capture lightning in a bottle, and on that night, we did. So he never said sh*t.”
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