Hulk Hogan | The Steve Austin Show

steve office show is brought to you free today by our friends at bet online get in the mix of bedonline.ag and use the promo code podcast one for your 50 welcome bonus bet online your online sports book experts an exclusive partner of podcast one sportsnet podcast one presents the steve austin show classics man i'm sitting here in tampa florida talking to the one and only hulk hogan i'll call him terry throughout the interview terry thanks for having me over in your crib man it's good to finally talk to you because i've been wanting to talk to you for a long time but it's hard to get to tampa from los angeles how are you well i'm doing great brother it's uh good to see you here on the beach and coming on down to the calm side of the world here my son and my son lived in los angeles for the last 10 years and i spent 23 years being out there so i know how crazy it gets so it's good to see you here in the calm beach area today man i started rolling uh i started flying in uh yesterday we got close to land and i was like looking at the coastline you know back in the day you know obviously there was a territory here in florida we're gonna get to that but you know a lot of guys are based out here because of that and it's a good place to live and part of wwf part of wcw we used to run here all the time but it's been a long time since i've been here and then uh to let people know what's been going on i've been over here hanging with terry for about two hours now we've been talking about everything under the sun that's you know stuff that you don't really record so i don't know where to where to stop or where to start but let's just jump into somewhere sure let's jump at it uh from this standpoint i got all coffeed up and now i'm drinking a uh a truly passion fruit five percent alcohol uh this is kind of settling me down a little bit i kind of needed this but as i walked in i was getting out of your car and i kind of jumped around trying to pick up my recording bag uh and i was stumbling a little bit and he looked at me and said are you all right i said yeah i'm alright just takes me a while to get going sometimes how are you feeling after everything that you've been through because i have been watching probably six hours of your matches read everything about you and watched all the beatings that you took all the legs that you dropped uh got to hang around with you filming a cafe project which we can't talk about yet but it's soon to be uh released and i got a chance to hang out with you about a month ago so after everything that you've been through just from a physicality standpoint where are you well i got to kind of i got to kind of set it up first with the woe is me story you know because you know everybody talks about the fake wrestling you know and all that crazy word that they always say but you do get hurt we all know that so the woe is me story goes i started having my knees scoped many years ago right knee four times with the scope left knee four times with a scope and then i finally had them both replaced then i had both hips replaced then i went in for one back surgery and it turned into having nine back surgeries and i actually wrestled the rock with a knee replacement hip replacement and then when i had the other knee and hip done i kept going so you know i was still wrestling but as soon as they cut on my back it was game over you know i was hoping that if they cut on my back one time i'd have the fusion like shawn michaels and i could keep going but the doctors that wanted me to have the fusion said try everything else first so i went to a place called laser spine they caught me six times and they basically took me out of the game they cut so much bone away and things went awry after the first six surgeries and then the last three surgeries um well after they told my new wife jennifer i'd never walk again after the sick surgery it took me three more 12-hour surgeries to get up on my feet and rolling again and i was down about a year and a half but all that being said i'm pretty darn cool i can't wrestle again but i'm really cool other than this darn arthritis is kicking in and i'm going to be 66 years old in a week i still work out with weights use light weight but my parents before they passed away when they were my age their hands were crippled up like a sideshow freak you know their hands were crippled and swollen and everything like that so you know with the vitamins and then taking care of myself with organic food i'm not there but the main thing is the arthritis i had no idea what that word really meant to you feel what it means and boy the arthritis is definitely something that changes the game but i'm doing good man when i wake up in the morning like when i told you i was going to meet you at 10 30 i backtrack about three hours because it takes me about an hour and a half in the morning before i can stand up straight completely straight that's how long to get the blood flowing everything so once i get standing up straight and i get a little momentum i'm okay but uh you know things are good if if i could get rid of this darn arthritis i think i'd be pretty well set but all things considered at my age 66 years old after what we've all been through i think i'm doing pretty good what does the arthritis feel like because that's a word that i hear about all the time and many people suffer from so what are the actual symptoms because i'm looking down the road and maybe facing the same thing but i don't feel it now so what does that feel like because i can imagine the hip replacement i've had my knee issues i've had both shoulders completely rebuilt cervical fusion three broke bones in my lower back i mean you know we've got a lot of similar uh injuries but what does the arthritis feel like it's um it's a constant you know it's a constant overriding pain that makes it so you don't want to smile or is it your fingers your hands now it's everywhere like with my with my right hand if i go to try to get the car key out of my right pocket and try to go in there with my thumb it'll shoot a pain up the back of my head so it's just this these sharp pains that whatever this arthritis or the inflammation is you know it hits you pretty hard so it's uh you have good days and bad days and it depends on it depends on if it rains or if it's cold or if you drink alcohol because that will dehydrate your joints joints and everything so it's just a series of trying to do the best you can and taking the fish oil and everything else you take glucosamine everything else you can take just to kind of like take the edge off but nothing makes it go away pain pills nothing will make it go away do you have to take pain pills i was for a long time it was for a long time and right now i'm doing the cbd stuff the glucosamine uh i'm having stem cells injected into my wrist my shoulder my back where you going for that you going here in the states you're going overseas for that i was going down to uh guatemala but i had a joan rivers moment down there where they almost lost me on the table did you kidding me yeah yeah i start well right now i'm going to tamper rejuvenation center here in tampa but when i first started going down to uh mexico they took the bone marrow out of my hips spun the blood and hit me with the stem cells the first time and i was fine then they took my stem cells to la and they colonized them they grew the stem cells and when i went back to guadalajara there was a 24-hour window when the doctor left l.a i had to meet him there and have him injected within 24 hours and as soon as they put the needle in my arm my eyes rolled back it felt like i had 25 elephants sitting on me and thank god my wife was there because nobody spoke english but she read my eyes i was like desperate and uh they got the paddles out all the numbers went crazy they were getting ready to hit me with the paddles and i was going under and when they shut it off we found out later that they had soaked the stem cells in dmso so they wouldn't crystallize when they froze them and i'm allergic to dmso ah so i had a joan rivers moment if my wife hadn't been there you know it would have been a different story but since i went to guadalajara i went down there a couple of times after that and had a couple close calls with i got conjunctivitis one time and i went down there because of bacteria in the water they put my arm so i quit going to mexico but now i'm going to a really good place in tampa and they're trying to get me up and running again are you seeing any improvements from the stem cell stuff done here in tampa it's the weirdest thing i was on the phone with the doctor yesterday and i said when you first hit me with the stem cells i really notice it in my back because when i put my left foot down when i walk there's a crazy pain that goes up my hip my back into the back of my ear once i got the stem cells and i walked out of the office i put my left foot down i put weight on it there was no pain shooting up through my head and that lasted about four days and then i was back to square one you know if that could last forever i'd be good so i told the doctor you know i said this stuff doesn't last very long you know it's very very expensive it's like eight grand to have a have my my wrist and my shoulder and my back shot up and they said well we're gonna give you all these peptides which is the healing stuff of the future and let's just keep going with the protocol and let's see if we can get some improvement but i notice it right out of the box and then it wears off pretty quickly hey man how did you find out that you were allergic to dmso because way back in the day and you can attest to this because you're you're a generation ahead of me and i'm right behind you on your heels but you know back in the day when you first get into business you're getting the trash beat out of you and all of a sudden you're subjected to a lot of things that you've never felt before and then all of a sudden a lot of substances maybe you've not seen in vast quantities and you have access to but one of the things that we would do back in the day to combat an injury was to grind up a couple of aspirin and then put your hand in a uh like a sandwich bag a ziploc bag and put the dmso so it didn't go through your your fingers and then you'd rub that on the injury so the the the thinking was because the dmso penetrates the skin and takes whatever you put in there right into the injury that's what we were doing back in the days guys crunching up aspirin putting the ms on and rubbing into the injury were you doing that because i mean that would that would to me that would have been the first time maybe you've been exposed to dmso how did you find out you were allergic to it i never used it but you know the treatment i'm talking about yeah because uh butch one of the bushwhackers just his breath smelled like dmso yeah his whole body young he smelled like dmso i never tried it because back in the day then whatever that was 25 30 years ago i was eating the pain pills back then and it wasn't i wasn't to the point where i'm at now but i never tried it and and you know they could say it was the leg drop or they could say maybe it was the steroids or the combination of both but the truth was when i finally saw my x-rays i had scoliosis which i never knew like a crazy s snake in my back and if you ever look at me doing a double bicep shot i don't stand straight i always [ __ ] my hips to the right if you ever really look at a good shot of me doing a double bicep it's almost like i'm cocky copping my hips trying to look sexy or something but that's not the case my back wasn't straight and i never realized that until i had my first back surgery to go jesus man you've got this crazy scoliosis and i had no idea but that's kind of like where it all started but i never used the dmso until the stem cell thing happened when you uh first got into business you're a big guy always been a big guy uh but you weren't really an athlete played a little baseball but you had injury and you're a musician and you're a very good student so all of a sudden you start hitting weights you start getting into business and did you ever have one of the veterans and you're you've always been a big guy and so a guy like my size man we're taking a lot of bumps because you we're going to bump more because i'm a smaller guy than you but did some of the veterans come up to you and say hey kid take it easy you only got so many bumps left on your bump ticket my question is long story short was the payoff worth it what was all the fame fortune and all the good times worth how you feel now well answer that question first yes i agree i wouldn't change a thing i mean i had i mean it was a great life it was fun i mean it was i had a man i loved the business i i mean you know anybody that really knows me can tell you how much i love wrestling love this i'm a fan i'm a mark i'm the biggest mark you've ever seen i'm a huge fan of yours i'm a mark when when you were coming over today my wife because i haven't seen you this excited since we were married i mean i'm a huge fan so i just love the business but when i first started they said real wrestlers don't wear knee pads that was the wrap i got from hiromat suda when he broke me in the business he goes if you're a real wrestler you don't wear knee pads so about a year into the business you know trying to do 20 minute broadways with brian blair and you know gordon nelson and all these crazy guys that were just bending my head around and sticking it up my ass you know i couldn't wrestle and they they could wrestle you know after about two years i had to start wearing knee pads because my knees were already blown out you know so uh all those injuries that they said kid if you keep doing that you know 25 30 years from now you'll be sorry it all came back to haunt me everything they said was true all the stupid crap you know and and the dumb bumps on the concrete in japan and all the stuff with hans and all those idiots i feel every bit of it today man when i watched uh some of your uh old tapes back dude you were pretty damn quick on your feet and a lot of people don't remember that maybe from some from some of your later matches but dude you were pretty damn quick on your feet and also had some sugar hold some shoe holes and had some muslin background but is that because of the time that you spent in japan or from your time with gordon nelson or some of those shooters because you you worked a big man pro style but when it come down to it you could also wrestle but that wasn't your style to technically wrestle but you could yeah well that was the whole thing was when i first got in the business i lasted about seven or eight months and it's just such a it's here we go with the woe is me backstory i went to school with mike graham eddie graham was a promoter i was like a year behind mike graham and steve kern steve liked me but mike and i really didn't get along until later in the years we became good friends was that the heat because you didn't i was football yeah yeah high school crap i didn't play football i was long-haired playing music so when when matsuda broke me in after he broke my leg he bailed out yeah he broke my leg and i went home for four months i was supposed to be going to college finance and management was my major i had a minor in music and i was going to be an accountant you know and and play music you know on the back side to make some extra money but i was a huge wrestling fan so when i had enough courage to go down there they didn't want some long-haired hippie because i had long blond hair full head of hair playing in a band plus the biggest mistake i made was i ran my mouth around this small town i'm going to be a wrestler i'm going to be a wrestler you know big mistake so when i went down there matt suter broke my leg the first day sat between my legs put his elbow on my shin and grabbed my toe posted my leg and snapped my leg and told me not to come back i went back four years you know four months later i had my hair cut real short and my brother was the tough guy i wasn't you know and so i was always in the shadow of my older brother who was this biker who ran around with a tough crowd and when i got my leg broke my dad was pissed he goes how dare you let anybody hurt you what's wrong with you you're not like your brother and kind of like it lit me up you know and so i went back cut my hair short and i said no one's ever going to hurt me again that was my attitude and they weren't trying to hurt me now when i came back they couldn't believe i came back but they were exercising me getting me in really really really good shape i went down to about 245 50 pounds which is i'm 290 all like right now i'm 295 at 66 years old and so i went back and they taught me how to wrestle and gordon nelson would come work out with me jack and jerry would come down to work at me pat patterson came down to help me do some stuff and so they kind of like taught me to wrestle florida style like you were doing in texas and all over and actually have you know wrestling matches and uh that's how i was broke in but when i went to japan that's the only time i could really wrestle because as soon as i got a chance to go to the the fuller territory p cola mobile doth in alabama birmingham as soon as i got there they wanted me not to go down on a dropkick big man you know the one arm thing push everybody off test the strength they didn't want me selling you know they wanted me to work like andre kind of because i was you know 300 pounds the biggest guy in territory yeah thank you so it was tough because i wanted to actually wrestle and take a backdrop for somebody or a hip toss or an arm drag but they said you can't do that so even when i went to minnesota fast forward years later vernon ghani goes we don't want you going down dude that got all kind of heat from like ken patera 450 pound jerry blackwell and all these guys that i was friends with i said guys i'll have a match with you but vern doesn't want me going off my feet so going to japan and getting to russell was actually fun for me because in japan they don't talk a lot of english and they don't go over matches for hours and hours you just go out there and you work and so for me to go to japan i was in my haiti i was having a blast there but we did do a lot of technical wrestling in in japan which they wouldn't let me do here i don't know that that would have drawn the money that you ended up drawing and to me when i go back and i'm watching all these matches one of the the best things that you did because you always think okay if you're going to build the the perfect wrestler that's going to draw money or let's say you get that size got it some wrap ability to work charisma dude you had all that but you're one of the biggest guys in the territory but to me your biggest assets or one of your hallmarks was your ability and willingness to sell i mean you were like hamlet and a shakespearean play out there you sold your ass off one of the biggest other than andre biggest guys in the territory who who ingrained that into you to the level that you took it to because there's there's few people that i've seen uh have the ability to read and understand a crowd like you could okay so let's go back to it where did you pick up the salesmanship because you were basically a gigantic white meat baby face you know what the you know i am a real american all that stuff with wrestlemania one going forward tell me about the salesmanship because you don't see a whole lot of big guys like you sell to the degree that you did and i think that's why people were able to get so much heat on you and then we'll get into the fire and come back in a minute well subconsciously i really didn't know what i was watching but i grew up watching dusty rhodes down here and the great malenko and eddie graham jack and jerry briscoe and all the big wrestlers that came in when the promoters were friendly in exchanging talent then senior would send down like ivan putski the mighty igor superstar billy graham ivan koloff so i get to see everybody here but the one thing i remember was no matter how great the matches were as soon as dusty rose came out for the main event and somebody would chop him in the throat he'd go right down like a tub of [ __ ] and start selling his ass off and the place would start rumbling so subconsciously i was such a huge dusty fan watching him and then when i saw billy graham come in i said well i want to sell like dusty which i didn't even know what selling was but i want to look like him yeah and so i kind of like had that subconsciously and i stumbled around my first territory um with the fullers and then i quit and went back to work on the docks loading ships because i wasn't making enough money and then i went up and worked for waller and those guys and uh they had it to where they didn't want me selling they wanted me to stay strong you know up there so i had a pretty good little run in memphis but then i quit again and went back to the docks but when i went back up to uh new york in 78 it's for the old man yeah i was just you know i could sell because i was working with andre but i was a heel so i really didn't have it figured out completely but then uh when i got fired there by vince senior for doing the rocky movie and why did he why didn't he want you to do the rocky movie well because the the mindset back there wasn't like it is now back okay that we want stone cold to do his tv show he wants stone cold to do expendables and we want the rock to do this back then 78.79 if you were a wrestler you didn't do tv you didn't go do a movie if you're a wrestler you're a wrestler and i told vince senior hey i got this call from stallone and what you thought was a rib yeah it ended up being a real deal this was a launching dude i remember seeing rocky 3 when i saw you in that because i've been following your career forever because i've been watching since i was seven and you were on top of the world and when i saw you come out as thunder lips i was like holy [ __ ] it was like that that that part was taylor made for you anyway back to your story about the salesmanship you got fired from vince senior right then senior fired me for doing the movie because you weren't supposed to do movies or tv shows or anything like that back then the thinking was pretty barbaric but then i went to japan and i hung out there for a long time because i had a girlfriend in japan and i had a blast over there sorry i don't mean to laugh it was fun and uh but the good thing was i sent all my pictures to vern ghania because i heard that minneapolis was the territory brother you work four days a week they fly you around on a plane i've been driving everywhere i don't with four simones in the car i don't you know i i'm not used to flying on a plane so you know a plane four days a week and this and that the other and when i went into minnesota i sent all my promos in where i wouldn't show them my face i said if you want in my arms were big back then i was like 330 pounds and i was all yacked up and training every day and i and i went in there and i all my promos were with my back to the camera say if you want to see this face you go to buy a ticket you know i was thinking that i was going to be this big hill going in there but everybody was cheering me because they wanted me to beat jesse's ass and when i went up there vern ganya got in my head and greg gone you got to give him his dude they said bro you need to go down and stay down and start selling so those three years i had in minnesota that's where i wanted to just crawl around and beg for help and sell with my head up and and don't keep my head down and show the story you know show them the movie with the expressions in your face and crawl and stay alive and fight back and you know there's an arch of the selling everybody has a different character but there's a way to get that compassion and people on your side when you're down and create emotions so three years uh in minnesota with vern in my ear you know and greg in my ear that's why i learned how to sell there so when i went back to wrestle the chic january 23rd 1984 i was ready you know i knew what needed to be done you had the tools of the trade it took me that long to figure it out okay but then if you started in in florida right you're working for eddie graham right okay i always heard he was a genius and they passed before my time and i didn't get a chance to get down there but how much of a genius was eddie graham well now that i look back on it i mean you know as far as finishes and stuff you know i mean i have my own agenda when when you're wrestling me i've got plan a plan b plan c you know the three standard finishes you know and then there's sometimes d and e if we need to go there but usually plan a b and c we can draw two three times with those finishes but i watched eddie graham for years even though i really didn't know what i was watching i saw the angles i saw all this stuff i saw all this these crazy finishes that eddie graham had you know plus he was a tough son of a [ __ ] you know he he was like the stone cold steve austin with platinum blonde hair eddie graham was the tough guy i don't know if you ever saw him wrestle but that was his whole thing and uh the whole time matsuda was breaking me in you got to realize they never smartened me up i'm real slow about [ __ ] you know i love this business i i back then you could say whatever you want about wrestling meaning fake but i thought the [ __ ] was real and i believed it because we had bob roop and and the big o uh uh randy's grandfather you know bob orton's dad i had all these guys there bob roop i had uh all these guys that were just worked really really snug and steve kern was very convincing you know when he first started and he was having all these programs with rupe and orton so i watched all these guys so when i was breaking in with matsuda and i was getting stretched every day and then twice a week we'd take marks down and beat them up and i was in charge of getting them to where they were exhausted and ready to pass out then i'd feed them to gordon nelson or matsuda and i was in charge of putting the wood on the door so they couldn't run you know the sport for him on the back side of the doors and uh it was just it was just one of those things that you know it was just ingrained in me from day one you know being around those guys but eddie graham and his finishes watching him he was just like a genius you know and after i worked out in that suit and they stretched me and beat me up all of a sudden i got a call one day that eddie graham wants to work out you shoot i started crying so my god i can't take anymore i don't know what i'm in for now i can't i'm not going to be able you know andy graham was different than matsuda matsuda was killing me but eddie graham was like the legend i i was going to quit i was so afraid of him but i went down to the sports room i got the ring he taught me how to lock up taught me how to grab a headlock taught me how to take a backdrop and i started crying because i thought it was a huge shoot when they told me that this is what we do we're work i still didn't get it i went and had my first match with don serrano several matches with brian blair and i never heard the word kayfabe i didn't know what k fade meant and i was in the ring the first match and all the heels and all the babyfaces would come out and watch my matches and i couldn't figure out why they're a human and haunting and laughing because i was trying to beat brian blair and i was trying to beat gordon nelson i couldn't beat either one of them because i didn't know how to wrestle as good as them you know so it took me a while to catch on but eddie graham and his finishes and stuff he was the genius man from day one okay so you got some of your finish that you do which i believe that you would kind of incorporate towards some of the classic matches that you had in the wwf days in those first wrestlemania years i want to get to those in a minute so all of a sudden you go to minnesota and it's vern and greg say hey dude go down stay down sell your ass off one time i was in uh i was never your size i was about 255 when i broke into business and i'm in tennessee and i'm starving and toyo yamamoto a little short japanese guy you know told you it was about five six if if that and you know he's trying to tell me because i'm this young football player and you know when you come in you think you're tough or whatever and hey man this this this can't hurt me because i'm bigger than you well the art of the cell is to be able to if nothing hurts you nothing nobody cares so anyway uh tojo says here grab grab my ear and of course i grabbed his earlobe and he just cringed and i thought i heard him i said oh man he goes that cell and it was like a light bulb when i went off in my head and i understood it we were talking about mentors because they put a guy with you he was a tag tony altimore just bring me up to speed on how you were hoisted away from the ghanias did you want to leave did junior come down there could you you'd spend some time in in wwf prior well i was i was really god this is a horrible thing to say but i gotta say it i was doing really great in minnesota it's probably the funnest time of my life i love the twin cities it was just great being up there i was single and i lived in the versailles apartments behind the old met center where all the stewardesses used to stay and i was there so i had the time of my life and you know i actually slid in to uh minnesota when i left japan i said run all my pictures but when i slid in there as we were talking before i thought i was going to be healed but the crusher had just left he was like the dusty rhodes or you know or john cena or stone cold not he wasn't healed half the time but the crusher was always a baby face and i didn't realize it but i stumbled into his spot so i was there three years doing great making all kind of money and i remember we were in uh the rosemont horizon and it was hulk hogan and greg ghanian jim brunson a six-man tag of course place is sold out i had to say that again come on brother i gotta say it was true yeah and what a great building yeah against uh chicago casey ken patera and chic jerry blackwell right they're all under the garb and all of a sudden when i get ready to go the ring steve taylor i don't know if you know steve he used to be the young house photographer he goes hey terry how are you doing steve what are you doing here because i was good friends with steve you know it's me him and vince in the very beginning before patterson showed up was me steve taylor and vince in that office every day and so all of a sudden he goes take this card and it says call vince i said i'm not calling vince he told me i never worked there again well let me take a picture and he took a picture with the little white headband i had on and it was like this picture with the white headband it was the first cover of the wwf magazine they came out with and i said i'm not i took the picture i said steve i'm not calling vince cause no vince jr wants you to call him so i said okay so one thing led to another i got home i called dents jr and he said i'm getting ready to take over from my dad and uh i want to want you to fly into new york here i want to talk to you about uh you know building my whole promotion and stuff around you and your character and i said no i'm not flying to new york i go you know if you want to talk to me fly to minnesota so i was with my ex-wife linda at the time which we were engaged i didn't want to be seen at the airport with him you know dude i mean because you know everybody hears about this yeah so anyway linda goes and linda goes the airport and she goes how am i going to recognize that he's going to be some guy coming out he's going to have a suit on with these big puffed up shoulder pads it'll probably be a pink or a checkered suit or something but the suit's going to be off the wall and sure enough she grabbed him off the plane we went to my house we had a few drinks you know what i'm saying and about four or five o'clock in the morning we shook hands and for me to come back and what he said he wanted to do was go into all these territories that the boundary lines had never been crossed and pipe our signal in there and then go in and try to draw some money and just kind of like slowly take over the whole united states and then internationally so i said you're going to sit up in the eiffel tower and i'm going to go into harley race's backyard and i'm going to go into bill watson's backyard i said sure let's do it you know they could they keep the kid they can not get to kill me you know so and i knew you know what i was kind of in for so when then said that you know i was all up for it and i just bought a house from kathy ghana in minnesota in the back story on that where uh larry zabisco ended up married her but i was supposed to be the first victim and i dodged that bullet vern was pushing that thing real hard she was gorgeous looking girl beautiful body on her book she looked just like greg in the face i couldn't deal with it and she's a sweetheart she's a good girl i'm gonna get heat for that but anyway um i went ahead and i s and before before vince came in to minnesota i had just sat around the pool with vernon nick bachmann and they had booked me in all the cage matches with nick bachman all the way around the territory for the next couple months in all the main events and i went home and then you know wrestled chicago got the thing from steve taylor called vince and so when vince came in we made the deal next thing i know we're packing up shop from this brand new house i bought and i of course i had to say dr d's got to come with me david's got to come with me so me and david and his wife and linda all moved up to new haven and rented a house and that was a circus in itself but uh i went to madison square garden and i was supposed to win the belt that night but before that happened i made some tvs and i went out there with back one and we had a tag match against the wild samoans and then after that bachmann went to vince senior because i don't want to team up with hulk anymore and he drew a line in the sand he didn't want to be my partner didn't want to be around me and it was you know vince junior goes don't worry about it don't worry about it but you know bob's just in shock because he doesn't have the belt he thinks it's a shoot you know and so the night at madison square garden you know i'm in the garden standing in the hallway and vince has those kind of glasses down on his nose he's clicking the quarters together looking at me vince is here vince senior's here i'm here and bob batman's standing here and he's covered with hives he's covered in head to toe with highs because he thought he was going to win the belt back from the sheik but plans had changed after i made the deal events so all of a sudden we're talking and then vince senior is is looking at me and you know uh bob batman speaks up and he says i don't think anybody should win the title that's not a real athlete oh it's about i've been training with him in japan on tours with him i'm the only one that'll run the steps with him i'm the only one that'll do that crazy workout he was doing and he shot that angle on the spot that he didn't think i should win the belt because i'm not a real real athlete you know and uh vincent was well you know terry uh you know we really should really think this thing through and i think maybe about six months from now you know it might be a good time to put the belt on some vince senior in all due respect that's not the deal i made with your son but i just burnt down a huge bridge in minnesota so i'm gonna go out i'm gonna put the sheik over tonight but then i'm going right back and rebuild that bridge that i just burnt down i'm out of here and vince junior goes oh let's talk let's talk so he vince took me in the back room he was let me i'll be back in a few minutes so i guess he went to his dad and he fixed it so the finish was on where i was still gonna go over we had a there was a moment there you know in the garden and i was cool i was gonna do the job but i was gone and uh senior came i mean junior came back and said hey yeah things are on as planned and this and that the other and i went out and did the iron sheep did the job for me little did i know vernon contacted the sheik and said i'll give you a hundred grand if you break hogan's leg you know shoot shoot yeah and so after that cars goes i can't believe but uh i did the best thing you know i did the businessman you know vernon wanted me to break your leg his cars broke in with vern right and he broke in with her and said they were tight so i got through it all on a women a wish you know go back a little bit and uh talk about your relationship with dr d david schultz yeah because man all of a sudden you guys are gangbusters and then conflicting stories at the end and over several years of what happened here there whatever but you know when i watched uh and and i didn't get a chance to see a whole lot of dr d because yeah when the style stuff went down in the garden and he was gone you know all these years later after or maybe in the latter part of my years of stuff gold i saw a lot of his promos yeah and our chem our characters were very similar but i can't say that he was an influence because i didn't see him do that stuff you and him were so close you have no idea i know and i think you know he was 20 years too soon had he come he would have been you know he really really was the first stone cold i think actually superstar billy graham could have been the first on call but when vince senior was booking him because he was hot as a heel yeah then people started liking him and then backland beat him and then he left because it screwed his head up so much but he was that guy that really as a hill started entertaining people so much i don't think uh the senior saw the the foresight or the vision to do what junior did with me right back then by the way so the the the friendship with you and dr d developed because what like-minded people like to run around no have fun or what it was a situation is is when i quit i broke in lasted a few months in florida didn't get booked and quit went over to cocoa beach and i opened the gym because when i played music there was this 40 year old guy with blond hair that worked out on the top of the club and he was single and had all these girls so i called him and i said hey whitey i just quit wrestling i have a job he's all come on over and help me run the bar so i went over to help him run the anchor club plus we opened the gym over there and then after a year first off i was an idiot i wouldn't allow any girls in the gym old school bodybuilder no girls bad move i know but i understand old school no girls out allowed but we were making so much money with the rock and roll club we didn't give a crap we had a blast then president carter shut the space shuttle down and overnight it turned to a ghost town nobody everybody left you know all the families left and so i got on the phone and i called superstar billy graham up and i said i've been training for a year twice a day i take i drink uh two gallons of milk a day i eat 30 old school daily yogurts a day i sort of just tape my arms billy my arms are 24 inches and i'm bigger than you are because i'm [ __ ] i said i am so i sent him a picture he couldn't believe it and i was huge back then all i did was eat and take the gimmick and you know all the other stuff to get big and so um he booked me he said well i got a guy named louie tillett i'm friends with drive to pensacola and meet louie and they were in panama city that night at a building next to a bowling alley and i drove up i walked in the back door and i walked in the back door i stepped in the heel dressing room and there was dr david schultz uh wayne ferris the honky tonk man terry latham ricky fields i don't know if you know one of these old guys back in the day from the fuller territory ron and robert fuller and they said hey kid you're in the wrong dressing room so i had to walk around the building and go in the baby face dress room which i had no idea you know where what i was supposed to be so i went out and i had a match i hadn't had a match in about a year and then i started working every night and i got over instantly because of the way i looked i was so tan i had a full head of hair i was couldn't do anything except do the austin idol strongman stuff but what happened was i found out that all the wrestlers lived in pensacola and they lived in a hotel that was right next to machine and kelly's a bar so i started parking my van in the parking lot where the boys stayed at the their apartments and i slept in my van for about three months out in the parking lot shoot yeah i slept in my van and then i'd run down to the the beach and me and alph and sika we'd get showers in the public restroom there and hang out and raise hell all day and smoke weed and drink beer and then we'd go to the towns later that night but um david schultz found out i was sleeping in my car so he came up back hey what's in there bye what are you gay in there what are you doing david's banging on my truck and he goes what are you doing out here so bob's trying to sleep man he goes well come on in and so him and the honky tonk man were roommates and they let me sleep on the floor in the living room so that's where we became friends okay yeah he was a he's a real interesting guy yeah what was the business pitch from junior just as far as we'll never talk numbers but just how did he convince you to leave vern and say hey man this is the promised land or or was it the fact that hey man based on your character and you'd be in the centerpiece of our promotion and we're going to take over the united states together was that enough well you got to realize even though i was in the wrestling business i'm still a big mark still into this day and not to rain on anybody's prey but i've heard a lot of guys bragging about if it wasn't for us there'd be no guaranteed contracts and all that stuff well in 1983 i had a guaranteed contract when when i decided to leave vern to go to venice i had a 10-year deal with a minimum guarantee so i had the first guaranteed contract you know not to rain on anybody's parade but what lured me back was the fact that i was a mark and i love madison square garden all of a sudden vince said he's going to put the wwf or the wwe world title whatever you call it on me you know and gonna give me a chance and now i'd figured out this babyface thing in minnesota for three years i knew what it was like just to look at the crowd and have them stand up and go crazy i knew what it was like to slam somebody and look at the crowd get ten times the reaction from the look than the move and i was ready you know and so i kind of like knew that if i didn't trip falling through the ropes or i didn't [ __ ] the bed during the match and you know things went well that was with with the right ambiance and the right momentum that and that i could get over with this thing so what brought me back there was the opportunity to be the champion and have that one run through new york and i told my my girl i was engaged to linda at the time i said look i just want to go back to new york for one year one year and then we're done easier said than done yeah and i was looking for one year and uh the thing just took off it just took off like crazy and when i went back nobody played music in wwe correct e and and i came back and played out of the tiger the first night which got some people upset when i was told i couldn't do it and i did it anyway yeah but when you're in the arena and all of a sudden that's blasting over the speakers and here comes you walking out it was like the von eriks when they came out with stranglehold or whatever modern-day warrior carries music i mean and i think michael psas might take credit for playing being one of the first people down in the south to come out to music but it wasn't being done back then so continue yeah and also i had just had a huge blowout with vernon over merchandise because i was making these shirts at the the york yorktown mall there on france avenue in minnesota and selling more shirts and making a lot of money selling t-shirts which nobody else did and so when i went to japan i came back i came to tv one day in vern city there there's a stack of my shirts there and you know i said vern what's going on here goes oh we've been selling your search since we've sent since you've been gone and i said well how many did you sell and we haven't made a deal what's my deal cause oh you're not getting anything for this so we had a little physical encounter there which thank god i came up on top during that thing with david schultz egging it on when i went to work for vince nobody played music and nobody sold t-shirts so first thing i did was run events man we need to start making hulkamania shirts and doing this and then the other all this and they hadn't even gone in that direction yet so what up no no merchandise bro they weren't they weren't doing any of that no music no merchandise okay let me let me cut in here man because one of the things i've always uh respected about you or heard about and because you you were the guy you were always i'm looking down you were a business major in college you dropped out your music minor or you were going to be accountant but you had it you had a business brain but you get into business you start learning you know hey man you know here's what i need to be getting paid but your business acumen you it seems to me like you've been a tremendous businessman and you're one of the first guys that ever use lawyers in this business am i right on that no that's it's true but i mean so i i just think it's keen because i always talk to today i always talk to today's generation and say hey man you need to learn the business aspects to learn what you you got coming to you you were always ahead of that curve would you disagree with that i kind of was you push the envelope dude yeah i kind of was because there was so much stuff that came my way that all of a sudden it was out of the box of just wrestling and getting a payday and a six pack of beer and going down to the next town things were coming at me so fast um you know with all of a sudden the movie stuff started coming and just a ton of these low budget little kids movies i did donald 14 or 50 of them i don't know how many there were but stuff was coming so fast i needed legal stuff and legal help and then you know the contracts and the merchandising and stuff i couldn't do it on my own you know so i needed some type of you know security to make sure that everything you know ran as it should and i had to bring the lawyers in but i think i was probably the first one to bring a lawyer in to negotiate stuff no but that's an interesting point because you know back in the day you know even when i i negotiated a couple of contracts and i was in a small dressing room man a little bitty room with vince jim ross and bruce pritchard and we're in there right before our show's fixing start and they're pitching a deal to me and you know that that's how it was but i guess would you say then due to all the you know the fact that you were thunder lips and rocky iii and all of a sudden you know you can come from a wrestling background and all of a sudden when you step into that world you are introduced to the lawyers because of all the way the royalties are in the pay and everything like that so all of a sudden you get a hello mcfly knock on the head it's like yes wwe's got dozens and dozens or every wrestling company has lawyers and so the fact that you know most of the boys would negotiate contracts without any help of a lawyer hey it's great to ride down the road and get a paycheck and have fun like you said go get a six pack of beer by the end of the day man we and we'd all say hey man god dang i'm having so much fun i do this for free but that ain't the point the point is to get paid right right and uh you know i knew when i hit that ring in in in january of 84 against the iron sheik it was kind of like the perfect storm for me and i i knew you know after doing so well in minnesota with the t-shirts and stuff that if i got over back in new york things were really going to blow and it was like the perfect storm because they were holding like 444 hostages in iran at the time and america was a turmoil with iran and caused the iron sheik was actually the real bodyguard of the shaw back in the day so i said if we can hit a home run on this thing we need shirts made man we need headbands and shirts made that's what i was thinking about i wasn't thinking about pinball machines and video games or anything that kind of crap i was thinking man how many shirts we could sell you know so it kind of like got vents you know lit up pretty quick with a merchandising idea you're listening to another classic episode of the steve austin show only on podcast one the wait is finally over football is back you might not be at a game this year but you can still be in an action to bet online bet online is going the extra mile to make sure you can get in on everything imaginable this season from game spreads and totals to team player and coaching props bet online gives you more options to wager than any place online you can get in on their season opening bonuses today and start off wagering on wind division and championship futures today head to bed online online today and take advantage of all the great sign up bonuses bet online your online sportsbook [Music] experts is the steve austin show going up there to uh new york for the second time and all of a sudden uh vince comes up with this idea for wrestlemania yeah and so what were your thoughts on that no one ever done it before well you know at the time it was you got to realize it wasn't this big corporate thing it was a it was almost like a real personal thing like if you and i and one of your friends would talk about strategy and how we're going to start our new company or our roofing company or our car dealership when i first went up there um i was in that office every day was just me and vince and then maybe one other guy patterson came in about a year and a half later but when he started talking about the wrestlemania thing i'd only been up there about a year and he was talking about leveraging stuff and selling the farm putting his house up i mean he pretty much rolled the dice on this wrestlemania thing everything that he owned and he had um he put the money online for that in the match which was really crazy with uh me and mr t against piper and uh orndoff that was dr d's idea it was gonna be hulk hogan against mr t against roddy piper and dr d that it was david's idea and so all of a sudden we hadn't started promoting it and vince was thinking it through and david decided to shoot an angle his own angle at the la forum where out of nowhere i had t sitting in ringside because he's a friend of mine and i didn't know what was going on david rolled out of the ring and [ __ ] slapped the hell out of him just out of nowhere a shoot slap so when t came over the rail we had to separate him but chief strongbow sent the cops down and they they shackled david behind his back and carried him out you know and after that he was pretty much done vince was so pissed at him that pretty much was the bullet that did him in but the original idea for wrestlemania was supposed to be piper and dr d because david came up with the damn idea for the match and it turned out to be what it was but vince leveraged everything he had and if we would have you know [ __ ] the bed that night the party would have been over well if you're hanging out with vince that much almost from the get-go and you're gonna be his number one guy man how did you guys you know just develop your relationship because i always tell everybody hey man you got to have a relationship with vince because he's a boss but the more you're with him at the higher level you're working with him and the closer you become because his stakes are so much greater so you're hanging out with a guy all the time uh how how long did it take for you guys to become close or were you close or what was the relationship or the dynamic of a relationship because you know i've seen highs and lows between you two yeah it's always been weird it's always been like a love-hate relationship that really didn't start until uh you know i got too full of myself or he got too full of himself one or the other but that would have been like after like a wrestlemania eight because you were headlining seven of the eight first wrestlemanias right and and for me i i had known vince uh whatever it was 78 or 77 78 79 when i first went up there and he was the commentator he would come in once every three weeks to allentown town and reading just to do the commentating so i kind of knew him then and he partied a lot with morocco and the grand wizard and all these guys every once in a while so he was kind of like around the boys a little bit but he was mostly with his dad you know and i kind of knew him then but then when i uh moved up there the end of 83-84 you know it was business that we needed to be together and when we were bonding business we became close friends you know we were riding harleys around all the time and working out all the time and you know it's basically vince and i in the office going over all the events all the finishes talking things through i became real close with him in a short amount of time but what i realized was he's he loves his business more than anybody i mean i thought i love this business he loves this business more than anybody he lives at 24 7. and out of that i i just a huge respect grew because i'd never been around anybody that loved wrestling more than i did so it's really cool to be around him all the time i'd leave my wife at home we were she was down the road linda was down the road at some big house i'd bought 12 hours a day i wouldn't even go home i'd wake up at nine o'clock i'm gonna go work out events i'll be home a little while i'll get in the office i wouldn't even come home i just love being around all this stuff and me too uh but and obviously you're you're right there with him but when did you guys when did it really start to turn the promotion on fire or the territory on fire as y'all began as a global expansion and you started with wrestlemania one uh when you signed on from awa how long did it take for the place to catch fire because when i watched back on those old videotapes or on the wwe network i mean you guys were playing big arena stadiums way back in the day and of course go to the silverdome night in wrestlemania 3 93 000. how long was it before it just turned into utter chaos because it was that was when you go back and you do the years to draw those kind of houses back and back and and that day they're just now doing it now i mean i played astrodome we did drew 67 000. we were ford field we had 90 000. y'all were doing this stuff way back in the day so how was that for you to go from humble beginnings good money would burn but now all of a sudden you're the man and things start taking off how long did it take to get there sorry for the long-winded question how many shits at this no it was it was instantly okay i mean it was not it's almost like everything had built up you know almost like something exploding like a like a volcano or something but for whatever reason the back story with the rocky and i'd been there before we sold out shea stadium with me and andre and zabisco and bruno and you know we had some whenever i wrestled andre you know we had huge crowds because andre was over like crazy and all of a sudden it's kind of like when i came back it was almost like they were ready for something new they had about five years of backline you know doing his thing and i think they were ready for a character so as soon as we hit madison square garden my memory is not that great but what i remember is that was a rocket ship ride from that day forward and i hate to sound like this but it was sold out everywhere we went and everything we did strombo used to put his hands behind his back and called me the golden goose and just teasing me you know and i was and i was really you know i wasn't trying to take advantage of the situation but i wasn't real great at being on time because i used to like to work out you know i used to like to party a little bit during the day you know and so i would kind of like show up at the buildings instead of like at six o'clock or 6 30 when i should be there i'd sometimes show up at 7 or i'd show up during the intermission and i would tell everybody if you don't hear from me if i do not call you everything's fine i'll be here if you get a phone call from me then we got a problem and i always know i only missed one show the whole time i was there all those years and that's when i got fogged in and i couldn't land in st louis but i always made the towns but it was a rocket ship from the moment the iron chic thing went down it just took off what was the difference when you go back to thinking about some of your messages with under the giant uh the match in shay stadium when he would have been a little bit more in his prime versus three when he wasn't feeling real good and you slammed him what was the difference between working andre kind of you know prime and then kind of post prime and just the magic or the the jesus what's the word i'm searching for the mystique of working with andre and the reality of it there were two two things that were different between shea stadium and then later on when andre like wrestlemania 3 when andre had some health problems the main difference was we were friends at wrestlemania 3. shea stadium he didn't like me and i was like you know i had a hard time with it because i was booked with him everywhere and i was just this i don't know what it was i was such a fan and such a mark in my mind when i went to andre i thought that i could be as big as him or i could be the giant i know i couldn't be but in my mind i was just an idiot you know that's the competitive side of all of us yeah i mean i just thought i could go after this guy who would fight him tooth and nail and go calm down you know he would yell at me in the ring because i was be first off i was green you know i was probably dangerous but with him i was just trying to show that i was a worthy opponent and he just beat on me like a dog for about seven or eight years i just remember driving up the philadelphia spectrum or the capital center because we drove everywhere when i see the building i'd realize andre was in there and i pulled my car and i puked that's how scared i was and nervous and then once i got in there and we made contact i was okay but by wrestlemania three we spent so much time in japan together and he saw me fight for my life over there because japan back in the 70s was a lot different than it is nowadays and he saw me fighting for my life over there when enoki would call me up going oh we're shooting tomorrow and all this gotcha's boy fujinami said oh we're gonna have to shoot and all the stupid crap they were doing you know that andre kind of like watched me he goes okay this guy's okay you know he's he's cool he loves the business then we became really good friends we were inseparable so by the time we got to wrestlemania 3 we sat in a locker room all day he drank a couple bottles of crown royal i was sitting there and i kept dumping mine because i couldn't keep up with him you know when he wasn't looking and thank god he'd catch me or i'd have been dead but we were good friends you know and so when we went out to wrestlemania three um you know i was really upset and worried about what we were doing and the finish and andre just kept telling me don't worry you know i asked him about the slam don't worry am i going over you going over don't worry so i actually went out there not knowing what we were doing or what the finish was nothing i've heard you say this a hundred times yeah shoot shoot shoot but what the weird thing was this vince put me in a really bad spot because the night before the match he came to my room and he said andre is in a really bad spot with his back and stuff what would you do you know to to get through the match with andre so i took a yellowly legal pad out and i started writing the match down you know i've never done the diamond dallas page thing before but i started writing the match down i said walk to the center of the ring start jibber jabbing at each other have andre throw the punch block it one two three go for the slam fall backwards i wrote it all down step on me once step run me twice slammy one slam me the second time head butt off his thigh i wrote all the stuff down the whole time keeping andre next to the ropes even when i fell backwards with a slam on him close enough to the rope so he could pull himself up everything i wrote down the match from a to z with a question mark on the finish and i had a slam in the match with a question mark the whole legal pad i wrote everything down i gave it to vince i said if you let andre know i did this if you tell him i wrote this down i don't know how you're gonna presented this but i will be a [ __ ] dead man and i'm serious because he does not like anything like this he likes to call it in the ring he doesn't want to talk and if you show him i did this i'm dead vince must have went and talked to him because everything i wrote down was exactly the way the match went it's exactly what i wrote down is what we did and the question mark for the slam andre yelled in the middle of the ring slam you know about towards the end and then he said drop the leg i've dropped leg i didn't know if he's going to kick out or not and he didn't kick out man to me i rewatched that match last night and of course i've said it a million times and i saw it went on down but that was a genius match because for you to fire up after blocking this shot a couple of a couple of punches go for the slam and of course when the way you fall down and you have to twist your leg out for money from getting it crushed and then they start selling that back you're immediately you know you don't need to be shined up i mean in theory you're the babyface but but you don't need to be shined up you're fighting from underneath the entire match it was brother it was made so much sense it was there from the moment we walked in the ring such as it would have been there if you would have ever wrestled me that's what would have happened it would have been we could have looked at each other and the roof would have blown off the place you were so over at the time and they hated me so much from trying to put wwe out of business for 10 years they would have been great but anyway i'll get off that now we'll get going that's in my craw brother and i never got to work with you i did i was in such a different uh headspace back when that window of opportunity presented itself and sometimes i kick myself in the ass over it and i think man i don't know i just kind of i was so frazzled towards the end i was just in a bad space and i i don't know i just it never happened and it should have happened but you know what what i think if we could have just got in a room you and i and just and just just talked because you know what and you probably never told you probably never knew this but i was down and we're gonna jump back to a little bit of uh you know stuff back in the early days of wwf but you remember when you had you know those uh headline those eight seven eight seven out of eight wrestlemania's down in uh down there in wwf uh you left me what 93 92 but you ended up in wwe you ended up in wcw in 94. yeah 94. okay i remember all of a sudden the word on the street i'm stunning steve man i'm i'm upcoming i'm going to be the next ric flair well we always know that there's never going to be another ric flair there's never going to be another hulk hogan there's only going to be the next whoever you are but all of a sudden here comes the biggest attraction in the history of the business to wcw and i'm thinking great and i i you know i'm sitting right across from you wearing your house uh and i say this with respect because i've respected your career but i'm thinking okay here comes the top attraction in the world he's coming to wcw i was fine when you were in wwf and all of a sudden you come down there and now i'm another nice father down the ladder and i always had this grudge against you because and now you know i you were the guy yeah now how am i going to overtake this when i can't even get past you know three quarter mid card status so there was always that grudge and it was competitive i was like man why is this guy here now well i know why you're here now you know in retrospect when i look when i look back but when you're in the trenches and you're in the ring every night there's that competitive part you watch nba players or major league baseball players nfl players talk about another player they'll put them over to a degree but it's never very much because it's so competitive the same with our business yeah it's back when i was i would say talk about sean michaels these days i call him the greatest in-ring performer of all time as far as execution and being able to do everything back in the day as a high spot artist you know that was my perception back in because i couldn't put him over then yeah and so anyway it was always this thing in an office and i turned into stone cold and you come back from wcw where i got squashed down another notch but i i think if we had ever gotten to a room and had a just just a chill conversation we probably could have done business together and that'd probably be one of the i guess it is one of the biggest progress of my career other than not you know jobbing for brock well i never done a job but i wish i would have showed up but i would have loved to have worked a program with you uh especially when now in my pr in my post-prime looking back at all all the stuff that she did and i was a fan from day one anyway but you know what i mean when you get caught up in inner workers i guess i was in my head and i guess i worked myself into a shoot and it was just it was just a dumb thing for me to do well a lot of people don't realize that certain you got to treat people on a case-by-case basis and certain people have a grudge or a hard-on or they don't misunderstand or they're out of their mind or they're consumed with something because it could be business or personal or your lady could drive you crazy or you just don't know what's going on and when i went down to wcw i had some personal stuff at home that i would walk down the hallway and there would be 20 people in the hallway and i didn't see anybody i was out of my mind i was so worried about my home life and the problems i was having at home that you know stuff happened and i don't mean to call anybody out but stuff happened for instance where i wa and maybe this was in the wwf or whatever it was when i went back for the raw's 15th anniversary but i walked in the dress room there and there was a guy there named cm punk i didn't know who he was and i heard i had heat because when i came back i didn't say hello to him when i walked through the hall but i remember that night flying in with rvd from california and i was going through so much crap on the phone i landed and my whole life was falling apart at home that when i walked through that dress room brother all i could think about was i just need to get home and fix my life falling apart and i don't remember seeing meeting talking or disrespecting anybody that day but i had to live with that because i was in that space at the time you know so when i went to the wwe and i knew i was working with the rock i'm all about making the money brother and as a heel i could put anybody over and go back in next week and say stone cold never beat me that i mean i'm gonna lie my ass off so and so when i got the reaction i had with the rock my sights were set on you because i thought it was going to be you first but vince asked me to work with the rock and i said sure but i was trying to get to you and i understand you had a bunch of physical stuff maybe mentally so i get it bro i totally get it and we would all like to wind the clock back but i've been there and i've done stuff not knowing i did it that got heat on me i've made decisions because of i was screwed up in the head personally or because of some business crap if i was arguing events and i made decisions which i wish i could have changed people don't understand what's really going on all the time but i get that brother but the one thing i wanted to tell you if i could have ever got to you was i'm like this in the ring bro i mean i'm like i got the ray stevens thing going on you know what i'm saying and so if your legs were hurt or something i'd have never touched you that's what i wanted to tell you that we can do this yeah it wasn't the physicality thing because i could have i could have still gone it was just if we could have just gotten her it wasn't about the physicality it was just because i was so on a different page and i you know you know i guess i was i guess i was pissed off i was then run to death too but dude i was running hard i want to fast forward a little bit and we can't cover your whole career and nor was i trying to but when ultimate warrior came in all of a sudden he starts coming in and getting hot i used to go down to the uh sportatorium in dallas texas i was playing football at north texas state university he was coming into dingo warrior and you know had been the blade run was staying down in tennessee and said hey man this guy's probably going somewhere you know mechanically in the ring you know and zack wilde from black label society that's his favorite wrestler yeah you know against guys you know as far as reading crowds or workers i think probably you would agree with me uh on this or i've heard you say it you can disagree to me the greatest professional wrestler that ever lived was nature boric flair for me yeah i call him my champion and when i caught when i talked to him on the phone a couple times a week i said how's the greatest wrestler ever lived doing today that's how i feel about the same page right yes sir brother okay sir so and you're probably the biggest draw i've always had the gimmick and he worked the stone cold the hulk hogan give me kev the rick flair give me but he [ __ ] wrestled like jack briscoe on harley race and he was believable and he could he could put everybody over and he didn't need to win because he would roll out of the ring bleeding with the belt you know and he'd just stumble off into oblivion he knew how to do it all he could do it all absolutely but back to back to the warrior so you know i knew he's going to be a star he comes into wwf of course vince's body guy and you know he for obvious reasons and wary looked great on tv very charismatic and you know he had his thing and it caught on so you guys go to work there's wrestlemania six okay uh y'all but then that match comes together a couple times he gets a little lost during the match and man i'm watching you man and you are just such a ring general in that match you're grabbing him up he kicks out you you're you're on him like glue you want me to go home though yeah yeah put that [ __ ] knock off yep and you were gonna put the time in oh yeah because i'm watching all your matches from those first seven and until you arrest your career you always put the time in to build and tell a story the one with you and much from the mega powers you put the time in there's elizabeth neutral corner all of a sudden she gets taken to the back you know from helping him helping you but you always incorporate all these different things here's warrior you're talking him through this match how was that i mean because you kept him and he's no longer with us and i got i called jim on a personal basis every now and then and that i'd call him warrior because that's what his name was so i'm not going to speak out of turn of him because i was a big fan and i remember one time at my first wrestlemania there at wrestlemania 12 i was wrestling savio vega but warrior was always cool to me and treated me with respect when i was just a nobody so and i've always been a fan of this so you're working with the man how was it or how chaotic or frenetic was it because he was he was all about the hype and you know the the high energy stuff you're a thinking guy and you know the adrenaline and you're working the crowd better than anybody in the history of the business how was it being in there with the man and keeping him on an even kill to get through that match and then i want to talk about the finish because in a real genius kick out at three and a quarter talk about the man first well first off you know i gotta back up just a little bit you know i had the red and yellow i had the big tan you know i had the the whatever the hollywood not holly with the california whatever it was whatever the venice beach thing was i'm not from venice beach i'm from clearwater but anyway the california land of opportunity the tan the blonde hair or whatever i had left of it and i had my gimmick going so visually i had a little bit different gimmick than anybody else because i was always tan and stuff because i'm dark anyway without being in the sun but um all sudden the ultimate warrior shows up he's got the red and yellow and the blue and the purple on but he's got neon colors on and i've got a big set of arms and i got one big ab and he's got a 12-pack and all of a sudden i'm sitting in the room and i'm watching vince look at him and look at me actually really not look at me anymore but looking at him and vince is calculating the dollar signs so to go back there i could see visually he was to vince looks like a better package to draw money than me because i've been around for a while but also maybe a fresh horse yes you had been around yes a fresh horse but when we're gonna do the wrestlemania thing we did the build up pretty darn good and then vince uh told me to finish and my question is always whether i'm going over or not why are we doing this and what's next and so when vince told me he wanted me to put the warrior over i said okay well why are we doing this and then where we go from here he goes well you know i kind of think that the red and yellow run is pretty much over you know and i think you know we've kind of got everything we can out of the red and yellow thing and you know let's just kind of take a little break from this but i want you to put jim over and i went damn vince what about after the finish and i point to god and i give him the belts and everything i go halfway down that island i do that stop and i do that slow three stooges turn slowly i turn and i go back and when he's up there celebrating i gaff his ass and i crucify him and i call myself triple h hollywood hulk hogan oh that'll never work you can't be even a baby johnson vince i was healed when i first came in here i can be healed but now i know more i could be a great deal then says no no you can't be a heel so vince kind of squashed the hollywood hulk hogan deal and um we had a couple years there they were kind of turbulent where they put the belt on the warrior and they had to take the belt right off him because he wasn't drawn you know but when i was in the ring with him i told him in the back room which i never did i kind of like laid the match out for him not everything but i laid out this this and i went i probably had a b c d e and what we did in the middle wouldn't matter but we're going to hit these a b c d e spots and so we got going in the match and uh i could tell right away we did the push off stuff and the strong man stuff and all this stuff and we i started chopping meat a little bit on him and i could tell he was blown sky high so i put a rear chimney on him as i held him down i said brother just breathe and calm down he's going no man let's go home now let's go home i'm going brother we only got about five or six minutes and we're not going home and i told him because i don't know let's go home now the cr because the crowd was rumbling he goes let's go home i said no brother you're gonna have to press me over your head in the girl press and i'm gonna kick out of your finish before we go home i told him that my ring so i got him to calm down and we got through it you know he would hit the ropes in the wrong direction and run the wrong way i was used to that yeah and uh the match was the match was okay you know but the fact that he blew up so fast was hard because he really couldn't press me over his head and and you know it it turned out good but i didn't have a problem putting him over but when i asked why are we doing this or where are we going next i didn't get the answer i wanted so i kind of had a heart on from that point on you know one of the things i've always really appreciated about you was and and it comes with anybody that's lasted a long time but you were on top for a super long time and drawing huge money taking care of yourself because you got to take care of yourself yeah yeah but what what a lot of people don't understand is you have to take care of the other guy more than yourself and and what a lot of people don't realize about this business and there's just two two quick points i'm gonna say is first off this business was a little tough for me when i went to new york when i beat the chic because to me it was a shoot and this business was not a work anytime a man makes like if i wrestle you and you make more money than me that's a shoot i want your spot and when i went back to work in 84 vince senior always paid the champion more money and that was a shoot to me you know if we're all doing jobs and it doesn't matter if you win or lose we make the same amount of money it's a work but when somebody's making more money to me that's a shoot so when i went back and then took over i tried to hold him to that as long as i could that the champion always makes more money so that was one of the things you know that i fought for the other thing that i fought for on top of that which i lost that battle eventually then i i hung on for a long time the other thing i fought for was making sure whoever i worked with whether they beat me or whether it was a dq or they did a job they were worth more money going out than they were going in and one of the things to keep myself alive and that warrior like i had to go to people like the one man gang and and what people don't realize is when i was working with vince if i went to the philadelphia spectrum and i said hey roddy vince wants to beat you with a leg dropper hey orange off vince wants me to do the leg drop they said i'm not doing a [ __ ] job today well there was no control like it is now i'd call vince back say hey vince i know you want me to be piper but he doesn't want to do a job today well god damn it yeah work it out i said okay so it was a wild wild west back then so i had to sit down with these guys in on on a camaraderie level and get along with them and if they didn't want to put me over i said well what else can we do to make this work and the last thing i want is someone else coming in here and taking your place and making this main event money because we're going to come back for two and three so since you don't want to do that finished what can we do to make this work and thought back at them so that you don't want to put me over you don't want to dequeue sometimes the hulk hogan thing i hate to say this but the whole thing was over so strong i could beat you and as i was posing if you'd come back and ground me i'd get some color we'd sell out again just for you jumping me after the fact so i would always throw it back at these guys with the finishes that didn't want to do jobs for me piper never did a job for me and years later we became good friends and i stuck it up his ass going can you imagine how much money you'd have made piper if i could have trusted you to flip the belt like nacho and he go my piper didn't even know how he'd get it but i would always tease piper later on in life because he would never put me over so if you put me over can you imagine i could have kept putting the belt on you four or five times flipping it back and forth and i was doing movies you're doing movies but you never get the belt because you wouldn't do a job so i always would take care of the guys so when i was doing the warrior thing and he wanted to go home early i had to take care of myself because i'm putting him over and one of the things i really needed was to kick out his finish to show that i'm still hulk hogan and then when you beat me you're really beating a bigger monster because i've kicked out your finish you know and then you come back and beat me it just it's going to be good for you but it helps me too so my whole mindset the whole time i worked with plan a plan b or plan c like i talked about the hulk hogan finishes were to protect my opponents so i could come back and draw money with them i'd go like to the garden with randy savage three four times in a row and saw the place out three four times a row just with randy because he would do the right finishes with me you know so it worked you're listening to another classic episode of the steve austin show only on podcast one did you know that right now geico is offering an extra 15 credit on car motorcycle and rv policies that's 15 on top of the money geico can already save you so what are you waiting for your dog to make you breakfast in bed with belts and waffles and a fresh food compo as nice as that sounds that's probably never going to happen but at least there's never been a better time to switch to geico save an extra 15 when you switch by october 7th visit geico.com to learn more [Music] but tell me about getting that news uh going back 10 15 minutes you talk about this junior saying hey man i'm not seeing the red and yellow man maybe maybe you know it's time to shift gears and of course that's that was pre warrior match when you dropped the title to him he was ic champ you were the world champ so he's in there celebrating with this belt i agree you want to take care of the other guy it mean it's great that for him to come out better than he was before the match you know before he entered the match but you you have to take care of yourself first and you you have come on man i know that but the thing was and i hate this sounds like a total ego trip but bro that whole community thing got over so strong i didn't have to worry about that i just needed somebody to dance with oh i know but but had you just gone out and laid down for everybody it wouldn't work no it would have been good yeah but yeah but anyway my point is all of a sudden you guys have this match you reel him back in it is it is what it is yeah there's a couple things in there he roughed up but but you maintain your composure bam come through with a stellar match the crowd's going crazy i mean i think they would pop louder had you won but they popped for him you know it was it was it was nice the thing that stuck out to me was you kicked out at about three and an eighth three and a quarter yeah i loved that because you were there for the three camp but as soon as that referees hand him for that that i guess it was dave yeah you kicked out yeah and to me that's that to me that goes back to old japan fighting spirit and boy he beat him but he barely beat him yeah and there's a difference between kicking out at three-quarter and laying there like a dead sack of [ __ ] and just saying flat back one two three and just remain motionless it kept you alive and then all of a sudden you're just overcome with disappointment you look up yeah and dude you saved yourself you put the man over to the highest level you dropped the belt to him and made in wrestlemania but you kept yourself over then you walked out you did the turn around and instead of gaffing him and turning hill yeah you handed him the world championship you hug him and you put him over but to me that solidified you is still being the man well that was all and this is i guess this is the evil hulk coming out which i try not to be but that was all calculated because hebner was supposed to hand me the belt and i knew if i slid out there and grabbed that belt and i walked up walked up in the apron on the outside and looked at that belt and looked up the big man went yeah okay then i walked in the ring and when i handed the warrior the belt he's the one that charged me for the hug and said i love you and so i went with it perfect now when i leave and i when i say this is the guy when i leave i was betting on the people following me going down that aisle that's what i was gonna give vince the hard time about because you watch that back when he goes up to celebrate and i step out of the ring and walk down every person in that building is looking down the aisle and watching me they're not watching him celebrating the ring that's when i wanted to turn around you know i did it for the money i wanted to gather him i was dying to turn heal i knew i'd have been white hot but vince had a different opinion but i just i just loved it to me when when you walked off well and to almost the point of you still being a man you headlined the next year's wrestlemania yeah against sergeant slaughter and he was before that it didn't last we had a b and c towns vince was running three towns a night and god this is i don't know how to say that every time i say this it sounds terrible but you can ask the boys that look at their book and see whose town they're on hogans or warriors and dude it is what it is so much heat on myself and i talk about this [ __ ] so here we go again so if most of the guys look to see if they're on my [ __ ] towns because they're on my towns and made more money that's just the way it was and i didn't need the belt the gimmick was over just like you didn't need the belt the gimmick was over they sent him off in the direction with the belt with randy and they were coming back to me saying you know you got to take the belt back and i i didn't want to say i told you so but if you let me turn heel i could have really got this guy over but i needed a couple months to get him over but they wouldn't let me do that because i'm all about getting you or the word up so i can make that that paper bro that's my deal i'm only in this business for one reason i love it and i love making the money okay i hate the traveling i hate all the [ __ ] but i just love being in the ring i love the money you know and i just love the business and so that's what i was trying to do but you know it just it just didn't pan out that way hey man let me just start shooting from the hip here because i just want to sit there and hang out and uh drink a few beverages with you and get off uh microphone how was it working with randy savage if i've ever been in love with another guy it would have been randy that son of a [ __ ] was my best friend i mean brutus was like hanging out but brutus and i bruce was kind of like a lost puppy i was friends with his sister in high school bruce was a few years behind so when we go to the beach in the morning we tell brutus we're leaving at 10 you know we'd leave at 8 o'clock and we were just leaving behind he was too young to hang out with us he got in the wrestling business and it was just kind of like a thing where he was a lost puppy and a friend he kind of hung around and it was just surface level stuff but randy and i became really good friends and he was just intense he was kind of like david schultz man he was just like so intense he called me up a three and a half logan man i don't like to finish you know i thought about pulling elizabeth now i think you're right you know maybe i'm right i just don't know but let's talk you call me three in the morning only people that call me three in the morning about wrestling would be vince and i love that [ __ ] right yeah because that was my whole life so randy and i randy lived right down the beach we were together every day we worked out on my house every day we'd charter planes and fly out or go commercial but we traveled together everywhere and in the ring he was so intense and i like working kind of loose you know and and and and making things real easy and when i grab a headlock on my ground i'm standing up we're both breathing and talking and taking it nice and easy and but randy was so intense man when he pulled my bald head he ripped my hair out and when he'd punched me i showed goddamn randy any more of those and then i'm you're gonna get one but i love working with him because he loved the business so much and he was so passionate about it i've never been any around anybody who was that big of a freak about 24 7 loving this business so i had great times great matches with him then we had a falling out thank god we made up before he passed away you know and uh i'm missing to this day i only got a chance to barely meet him i did a job for him at the orlando tv tapings when we started filming down the way back in the day of course i was a huge savage fan just like everybody else was i wanted to work a program with him but at the time you know the powers that be i was just that guy but my question to you is because i've heard uh dallas page talk about him and you know they had a couple of good matches together but you're traveling with him you're one of his best friends did the guy ever relax because even some of the the old interviews i used to see him on youtube i don't know if he was talking about you or not but i mean he he's so high strong was it did the guy ever relax that's who he was you he never relaxed he was and maybe this isn't the word he was so paranoid because because when he first came to poughkeepsie vince said hey peek out the curtain look at this guy think you can draw money with him and i saw randy walk in and he had a pair of jeans on with patches on he's trying to be the match man he had just a little headband like this leopard's getting headband his hair was hanging out with shades and he didn't really have his wardrobe thing together and i said who's the girl and then says oh that's his wife said well if the girls with him i definitely can make this work i just really didn't know about him but when i saw the girl with him you know and i knew from ron fuller and some of the guys up in knoxville and ronnie randy's dad was running opposition they said randy was real intense and a pretty good worker and just all kind of stuff and i'd seen him in memphis a couple matches and i knew i could work with him but i had the girl i knew we could really you know have a lot of liberty with the finishes and stuff like that so when i first met randy one of the first things i did was i took him to the guy that made all the clothes for jimi hendrix and my rock and roll man this guy named michael lebron and randy was real paranoid was this a setup where are you gonna be dressing up like this he was really freaked out that the tassels and the stuff was a rib on him phew yeah he thought it was a rib but then he realized it was not a rib i mean yeah yeah he got it and man he he was the best at everything i love working with him you know he was just so much fun in the ring he's real intense you know the only really [ __ ] we had was uh paris france one night we had shot an angler elizabeth was my manager and we went to the ring in paris there were no steps elizabeth was was probably 95 or 100 pounds soaking wet so i reached over the top rope reached all the way over where she was standing next april and grabbed her by the armpits picked her all the way up over she had a dress on picked her all up in the ring and i put her in the ring because there were no steps you son of a [ __ ] you grabbed your boobs i'm glad randy where'd he go [ __ ] you you [ __ ] i'm gonna beat you call randy come on we lock up he grabs a headlock on me but he puts that shoot [ __ ] side headlock on me yeah i'm hanging in there i'm hanging in there and i didn't want my ball to pop out so i grabbed his waist and i hooked him like a shoot and i squeezed i said randy if you don't let go i'm gonna dump you on your head no loosen up bro i did not grab elizabeth's tits you know he was so pissed at me the match sucked we had a horrible match i was so [ __ ] mad we went back to the dressing room in paris i walked in i said randy we need to talk right now no i'm not a tough guy but i was mad i reached to open the door and when i pulled the door i ripped it off the hinges the door was so old and so rotted by termites where where it was screwed in you know it looked like i pulled a blue ferrigno you know and ripped the door but the truth was the door was barely hanging on there so i ripped the drop and all the boys were like oh they popped you know yeah so me and randy went in the back and hey man i'm sorry i got mad i said randy i'm sorry too i didn't mean to touch her inappropriately but there were no steps we talked about but i think the door was the thing that kind of cooled everything down you know but it was hanging on by a thread when i pulled it i was just lucky you know it helped my bluff a little bit you know i would have come back to randy about a big time match when you wrestle andre at wrestlemania three but uh the other the other thing uh if it's not too far out of line you said you had an ultimate warrior story you know we'd had uh a situation with a warrior where oh my gosh it goes way back to where he quit on vince one time then he came back to the garden oh my gosh he came back to the garden and i was in a tag match and vince came to me and said hey man the ultimate warrior is putting the gun in my head he wants a couple hundred grand before i go to the ring and so i said well shoot don't forget him in there he won't break his legs and then he goes oh my god don't do that don't do that well somehow or another ended up on videotape that in the self-destruction of the ultimate warrior somehow or another i even i can't remember if i relayed the story or who filmed it or whatever it was but in a deposition they asked me if i said that i said well i don't remember and they played the tape and i i had set it so maybe i'd ran my mouth to somebody but it was on tape so we had a little bit of a run in there but he went ahead and wrestled and you know vince did what he had to do to make it work and then you know pull it away you know what i'm saying but but anyway it all worked out fine and then the warrior quit again and all of a sudden he started doing all these videos on youtube about coming to my house and stuff that i tried to do and my ex-wife tried to do hitting on him and all this insane stuff and he was staying at my house and staying in my guest room and we were i had a at the time i had a plane i had a hawker we were flying around on my plane going to the towns and he was playing with my kids and stuff and all these weird things came up in youtube about stuff that i'd done and stuff with kevin nash and just all weird stuff was coming up so he was getting some heat on himself and when we went to wrestlemania 30 all the boys were staying in the in the hotel but the warrior was staying at a house on the outside of town somewhere and vince told me he goes when you go to the hall of fame and you go to and i was sitting next to you with jennifer that night when we go to hall of fame i don't know why they put me right in front of me when you go to hall of fame or you go to to uh wrestlemania or monday night raw we do not want you talking to the warriors saying anything about him we're gonna fly you guys to connecticut and have a sit down after we get to the weekend sure enough we go to the hall of fame i'm sitting right in front of him you probably don't remember there was one little jab thrown out and i just sat there and i didn't say anything there's one little jab thrown out i let it go really want to roll right up on that stage but i let it go and then the next night at wrestlemania we were in that damn superdome from noon on and me and my son nick got bored because nick goes hey dad there's a golf cart there i said well there's a key and nick goes yeah let's go ride around and that's such a long ride you know that all of a sudden as we're riding around we're riding around we're riding around this must be a mile around the place it felt like all of a sudden we're we're driving to go back to where we were about halfway around the place and i see this guy in a suit and his his back is to us and he's wobbling and he's rocking like like this and he's a robot looked at him stop next stop it was the ultimate warrior i jumped out of the car and i at the time i could kind of jog a little bit i kind of jogged back to him i was just so excited to see him and when hey jim you open his eyes he goes no no no no no he went no no i said no brother i'm cool i love you man i'm cool so i went and i had no idea they had a camera on him at the time wwe had one of those handhelds watching he's drenched in sweat and we've had a talk and i said brother first thing i want to do is just apologize for whatever i did whatever i did i want to apologize i really you know i'm sorry you know for whatever i did to piss you off and you know i just want to be friends with you this night another we shook hands he goes oh god damn it hulk well what am i going to tell all my fans those stuff with me so what you you know what you were telling them wasn't true i don't know what you're going to tell them but what was being said wasn't true about me and my wife and all this other stuff i said but i just want to be friends with you and you know could we possibly start over he goes oh damn it hulk you know yeah i really want to start over it's all it's all on tape they wd filmed off so we we shook hands we told each other we loved each other and you know then i went back to vince and i said vince i know you're going to be pissed but i accidentally ran into him accidentally on purpose when i saw him i jumped out to talk to him and i said vince it's okay don't worry we're cool we love each other shook hands said we loved each other everything's good one thing led to another um we do the wrestlemania and then we do the monday night raw and i'm sitting next to vince was out there put a little mask on his turn aggressive vents get the camera off him he doesn't something's wrong he doesn't look right you know and he get out of the thing and he's drenched in sweat again he comes to the back warrior and patterson take a picture and then the next day he passed away but that whole thing was when i went to the warrior and i said i'm sorry i'm sorry and we talked for a few minutes he said he forgave me he said hey brother it's all right man i love you too love you too well then after that some other people in his family kind of like said some other stuff but all like all i'm going on is what he said to me you know not what other people in his family might have said but because there's some other people in his family that still don't like me but that's okay all i care about is what he said to me and the last thing that he said to me was that he forgave me i was glad that i got to see him too before he passed away one of the things i was talking about earlier and i'm trying to wrap his podcast up and god dang i could talk to you all day but i just want to shoot the breeze with you uh we talked about your salesman shipping the ring you would just sell your ass off and man here comes the fire and making that come back but one of the things you did was the hulk up and to me if not done properly if not a hundred and twenty percent committed to yeah could be conceived yeah if you watch it without sound it could almost be comical yeah but you were committed and hulkamania was running wild and and that comeback that commitment still holds up today i was watching it last night my question to you is how did you come up with that and you got to be all in mister and you were talk to me about that well i watched growing up you know i watched boba brazil when he'd come to tampa when he'd take that turnbuckle and not sell it you know i actually watched uh certain people in tampa they'd get suplex and they'd stand up at the same time as the guy that suplexed him and for some reason even though it didn't make any sense and it wasn't rationally it worked you know and so um part of the whole thing was the wu ferrigno character you know where his clothes would rip off him when he hulked up that kind of like started one night in chicago and greg and and jim ripped the shirt off me when i was standing there and they just ripped my shirt off me for no reason when they announced my name i went holy smokes that worked so right away i stole that but that whole selling thing you know when people would come up out of the rear chin lock and they'd start coming up and the crowd would get with them and then they'd get cut off sometimes they'd get cut off because it wasn't time for the comeback and sometimes the heel would cut them off and totally screw up that moment that you can't get back again but the commitment i made kind of like came out of i saw i saw dusty rose one time do the finger okay so i'm like he doesn't do that all the time so let me steal that you know and then one time in the ring i saw austin idol do the ear thing down in mobile alabama i went that works but he's on a small stage nobody sees that so let me take that up to new york and steal that you know and then there's this whole beatlemania thing going on and then one time i heard austin idol say idol mania i went hmm he's on a small stage down here in memphis let me steal that so i kind of like took some of the things that i saw but once i realized somebody puts that rear chin lock up on you you put the finger up you one two three after they drop your hand twice and the third time when you come up you can't go back down and so once i started coming up i just would never let anybody stop me you know what i mean even if they gut shot at me or punched me or whatever it was no no no once i came up it was a total commitment and what you like you said if you do watch it without sound it looks hokey and comical as hell but when you hear that arena yes and you start hulking up and you oh man it took me a while it took me a while before i'd sh you know i i'd take one punch i'd look at the guy the second punch i'd start shaking the third punch i'd come up off the knee and walk the circle and then the fourth punch i'd stop and you but it took me a while to figure that out a lot of times i'd stumble around the ring in a circle and they'd go to hippie next time i just started the comeback so it took me a while to even figure out you and i tell the heels i'm pointing at you you don't want any of this just back up back up and then throw the punch block it one two three big foot we go home but it took a while to get that but it always worked it made no sense it was comical as hell but boy if you were in that arena the people bought it and they believed it but it was like you said it was a hundred percent commitment once you started you couldn't back off otherwise you'd look like a goof i ain't gonna lie to you i was sitting there watching terry hulk up and go through and talk me through this i got mesmerized and lost my train of thought and forgot my question so i'm gonna continue on with another question before we go home uh we talked about that comeback uh we talked about the salesmanship who gave you and the big boot dropped the leg or how did you come up with that the big boot dropped the leg after the patented come back well when i first broke in the business everything was like an oklahoma roll up or sunset flip or some type of octopus submission hold or something like that but it just didn't work for the character over in japan you know for some reason after i teamed up with stan hanson uh they called the clothesline that i did actually boom ba you know and the only thing different between me and stan was stan would throw somebody in the ropes and take their head off i'd throw him in the ropes and i'd go back and hit the other ropes and meet him dead center of the ring so for some reason nobody was using the leg drop you know but i really screwed up because people always ask me if there's any one thing you could have changed in the wrestling business would you go back and change anything and at this point i would say yes my finish because when you walk around telling everybody you've got the largest arms in the world why wouldn't you use the sleeper in out of it work the hell out of it you know all kind of stuff but the leg drop the big boot i kind of like stole from andre because i loved when he hit people with that boot real high so i kind of hit people with a boot and the leg drop just seemed like the natural thing to do you know nobody else was doing it i mean everybody in the world has their finish it's i mean back then it was hard we weren't as innovative or as athletic as some of these kids that could do the triple somersault these balancing acts and all the stuff that they do but no one was using the leg drops so uh that seemed like the way to go the next time we cross paths i want to uh go back to i guess it was 96 when you went back down to wcw and then you joined or started the new world order along with the outsiders so there there's a whole bunch more years to talk about but my last question is any advice or what advice would you give someone today that aspires to be or is trying to get in the business or is in the business and trying to get over because what do you think the keys were i mean you meant dude there's so many things on you the litmus test is just for the eyeball test the charisma the wrap the ability so get a lot of things going for you but but if you're trying to tell somebody how to get over what would you say to them because i think everybody gets over in a different way based on uh the physical and mental abilities or capabilities they bring to the squad circle does that make sense yeah it does you know we got the standard bearer of the the wwe and it's just such a different it's all it's it's almost like going out and catching uh you know a big grouper out here when you go fishing or catching a sea bass or something like that or a sailfish you're out in the wild every fish has a different personality when you reel it in you're in for a different fight as compared to going so like a buddy of mine steve cardillo just sent me 12 lobsters from a lobster farm the guy that makes the belts yeah right and and so usually when we go get lobsters we dive for them down in key west we pull them out of holes and cracks and we're catching these wild lobsters they're all different shapes and sizes but all of a sudden i get these 12 lobsters they're all two pounds they look exactly the same so back in the day when you're getting over you had a chance to go out and you know in the wild wild west whoever's the quickest draw or if you learn from stolen cold or david schultz or ox baker you'd you'd learn stuff as you're out picking stuff up and everybody was different shapes and sizes and they'd have a different read on how to get over nowadays the standard bearer you've got a bunch of people coming out of the same facility being trained by the same exact people learning how to hit the orbs the same way with the same drop down high spot and there's a certain way to roll and do that the other so i'm not saying they're all the same but it's it's really hard for a person to develop how to get over when you're you know coming out of the same environment like those 12 lobsters are all the same people are getting trained the same by the same trainers i don't know if these trainers are main event trainers if they're preliminary guys or just technicians or guys that come in from not the wrestling world and train these people i really don't know who's training them down there but instead of getting over it almost you almost got to get in the business and get by all that and get on the big stage well before i i had a chance to figure out how to get over before i got on the big stage now you get put on the big stage and then when you're there you better figure out how to get over and they and they they they feed you the the the content as far as creative most of the time they feed you the verbage so somewhere in between all this someone has to shoot the gap somewhere and figure out what really separates you and will get you over from just the other person that was trained the same way as you that's getting handed the same version by the same guy that wrote the same thing for the other five wrestlers so somewhere in between that stuff that has to be instinct you know you have to have some type of instinct to sniff out that that edge you know so a lot of guys go out there like when i saw kevin owens i saw him in nxt and i watched two of his matches and i watched him really grind i watched him really chop me and i went okay there's a brother right there that's got heat everybody i talked to the wwe wasn't real real high on him like i was at the time you know the look a lot of things you know that he didn't have going for him they kind of pointed out but i said no i'm telling you you give this guy a chance to get over he'll chop me and he'll grind and this and that the other and so i was kind of like betting on the farm and i didn't know kevin i just ran my mouth and i said you know there's a guy in nxt that i saw them so i think you could really get over and back in the wild wild west days it would have been a different story and even with the way they set things up and everything was like a cadence or this is how it works then we go from here to here to here and monday night raw he still got over he found that spot in between the cadence to shoot his angle and get himself over so it's really hard you got to have a you know the first thing is to get by the rigmarole to get in the business and then once you're in the business you need to have all your feelers out and you got to find that spot somewhere in the middle of what they want you to do and what is a little different that can change it and then once i found out if you got balls enough to shoot your own angle out there they want you to grab that brass ring and one run with it because they may tell stone cold what they want but once you get out there whether it's shooting the bird or the beer or this and the other you can shoot your own angle and take a chance and get over you know that's how i would tell them if you got a gut instinct for something you think it might work don't tell anybody but go out there and try it i agree i won't get into the it factor that or the x factor because i think some people are born with it and some people can you can or you can be born with a little bit of but i also think it can be learned you know guys with extreme gimmicks they thought of them they're just normal people not everybody is just super charismatic but there is that it factor that has turned them into a draw that's all another conversation last question i just read and we can not put this on the podcast if you don't want to but i heard that they were going to make a movie a biopic or whatever a movie about your life and uh chris hemsworth was going to play the part of hulk hogan right is this true and how's this going about are you a part of it yeah i am a part of it it was uh it uh it was something that uh eric bishop and i started working on about six or seven years ago and uh you know eric approached me with and i said let's give it a shot he had a couple little writers that worked for imagine studios and ron howard that eric sent down here and i talked and told him the hulk hogan story and they kind of like wrote the script and stuff and i gave it to wwe first and they passed on it five or six years ago seven years ago and then the script kind of flopped around and there was a development time you know that they had a certain amount of time six months or something to sell it when they didn't i told eric no big deal it's extended do what you need to do it went away for a while and then a couple years ago eric said hey man or would you would you care if i tried to resurrect this thing i said no man go for it so all of a sudden out of nowhere this todd phillips guy that does the hangover movies and war dogs and wolf of wall street and all these things he called me up because hey man i'm a big wrestling fan i like to come down here and talk to you so he flew down here and we had a meeting at the sam pro hotel over here and he goes i really think this could be a huge movie and chris hemsworth is a huge fan and he's never played a real person before he thinks he can win an academy award playing you and i'm like wait a minute hold on i've done no holes bart or wrestling movie i've done a bunch of low budget movies i saw the wrestler mickey rourke and he did a great job you know kind of close but no cigar and i know a couple guys that may be where he's at but to win an academy award for a hulk movie i just thought of it it's a goof wrestling movie well you know i kind of saw the trailer for joker which uh todd phillips just finished and when the joker's coming out joaquin phoenix he's walking down the hall the way they shot it it looks like jurassic park where the dinosaurs when i saw it i went oh my god that's how big of a movie they want to make i went ahead and signed the deal with him and todd phillips is on board the star chris hemsworth is on board and most of the time you don't have that when you go to like netflix or somewhere and so they went to netflix and they've got the budget and everything like that already for the movie we've been working with this guy uh uh scott silver who wrote eight mile and a bunch of other things he took the script that me and eric did and he said this is a real piece of [ __ ] and he rewrote it you know and that's what he's doing now and so uh we got the budget we got the main actor got some major characters that may play the heels they want to see the script first but uh it's just getting a green lit and you know we have high hopes um because you usually don't go to a production company with a producer like that and the actor already on board without a script so we're going to see what happens you guys hardest thing in town is to get something green lit but like you said to roll in with the director and the main guy attached that should pull some weight uh last but not least where can people find you on social media and is there anything else you'd like to plug do you have an upcoming appearance anything that you'd like to promote on a podcast give to give the people some 4-1-1 and i thank you for your time and i know i'm going to hang out with you a little bit longer but but we've got to do this because we've got to do part two there's no way to cover your career or all the hijinks headaches hassles and horseshit in a couple hours so we've got more to come but tell people where they can find you or what you're up to well i'm the worst guy in the world as far as social media i got a kid named ron howard not the actor i call him the almost famous ron howard who runs my little beach shops hogan's beach shops and he's got me on uh what do you call this thing twitter no not twitter on instagram i think it's at hulk hogan i'm on twitter too i don't know what that is you're terrible and i've got a facebook and i'm not sure what that is either but i got like he told me the other day between uh i mean i know it's not a lot of people compared to you or the other guys but it's i know i've got about 10 million people between facebook and twitter i don't know if that's good or bad that's good yeah and uh i just deal i do the twitter myself every once in a while but he handles the facebook and the instagram stuff but other than that the only thing i got going really is i've if you're ever here in florida over here clearwater beach i've got a little memorabilia shop called hogan's beach shop where i've got all kind of wrestling stuff and belts and then in orlando off sand lake road right across the street from the biggest mcdonald's in the world i've got another hogan's beach shop there and that's a much bigger one and it's got a lot of cool stuff in there for the fans but i'm getting ready to open up a new bar and restaurant this is my fourth attempt and this is going to be called hogan's hangout right on clearwater beach but other than that i'm just hanging out man and living life and i'm the biggest wrestling fan in the world i record and watch everything i'm always around somewhere man it was just spending a day with you thank you thank you brother thank you for joining us for another classic episode of the steve austin show please leave a rating and review on apple podcasts and tell your friends for more steve austin show go to podcastone.com that's podcastone.com [Music]

Channel: PodcastOne

Views: 110,503

Keywords: podcastone, podcast, podcasting, podcaster, vodcast

Id: uSaQ9lg3Eqo

Length: 109min 9sec (6549 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 11 2021