Steve Austin spoke with Complex for a new interview. The highlights are below:
On how he and Vince McMahon got Donald Trump to take a Stunner at WrestleMania 23: “Vince says to me, ‘Steve, I’m going to see if I can get Donald to take the Stunner.’ I said, ‘you think?’ He says, ‘Oh yeah, it’ll be great, it’ll be great.’ He goes up to Donald and says, ‘Hey Donald, this is Stone Cold Steve Austin.’ I shook Donald’s hand. He goes, ‘Listen, I want to know if after the match, when everything is done, if Steve could hit the Stone Cold Stunner on you.’ Donald says, ‘You think it’d be a good thing?’ and Vince goes, ‘Oh, of course it would be. It would just blow the roof off the place.’ And Donald’s right hand guy was saying, ‘No, no, no! You don’t need to do this, we got other things to do!’ He’s trying to talk him out of it. And Donald says to Vince, ‘You think it’ll help?’ and Vince goes, ‘I promise you it’ll help.’ And Donald says, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’
On how Trump actually took the move: “It wasn’t a picture-perfect stunner. but I give Donald Trump a hell of a lot of credit for being a man. He was a stand-up guy, he was there to do business and we did business, so I respect the man for that. If I see him giving a speech on the TV, I don’t think, ‘Hey, I gave this guy a stunner.’ We were doing business and we did business. The fact that he is going to be the next President of the United States, it’s a hell of a story.”
On the difference between young wrestlers working on the road versus today’s system: “You still have your independent scene but those guys aren’t working five to seven nights a week like we were in WCW or in USWA,” says Austin. “We were working six or seven times a week. You get good a lot faster when you doing something every single night…They (WWE) have NXT and FCW as a training camp in Orlando, but a training camp is a training camp, and it’s world class,” he says, “but when you’re out there on the road slugging it out, and you got to make money, it seems to just pour into you in a more dynamic fashion.”
