On an episode of his Grilling JR podcast, Jim Ross praised Stone Cold Steve Austin and talked about how The Texas Rattlesnake impacted the wrestling business.
Good Ol’ JR also went on to explain why Austin didn’t like working tag team matches. Here’s what he said:
“He’s the best there ever was, and his numbers prove it. You can say, ‘Well, so and so is a better wrestler. This guy was a better technical wrestler’, whatever the hell that means. The bottom line of success for a wrestler is, what do they do to the bottom line? Stone Cold impacted the bottom line enough for a company to go public. That’s significant.
That’s better than drawing a big house in New Orleans on Thursday night and going to Lafayette on Friday. It’s amazing. I’m biased, which I fully admit, but he was the best I’ve ever been around as far as drawing money, adding to the bottom line. Some of those checks I wrote him, or he received, I didn’t write them, were just amazing.
The house show business, as we called it back then, now Live Events, nobody could touch him because he wanted to make all the towns, no matter if it was El Paso in a small building or Houston at the Coliseum, he wanted to be on every card, and he demanded that I book him in singles (matches).
Every now and then, Vince would say, ‘We need to take care of Steve. Put him in a tag this weekend on his next run’, and I would say, ‘Vince, he doesn’t want to be in tags. It makes him angry to be booked in tags, so unless you order me to do it, when we get to the arena, he’s going to not want to work because he’s a singles guy. He’s worked all his life to be a singles main event star, and that’s the only thing that’s going to make him happy.’ So, Vince would always relent.
Anybody that can remember Stone Cold in a house show tag team match, raise your hand. There weren’t many of them.”
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