Original Plan For Stone Cold Steve Austin vs. The Rock At WrestleMania 19

By TC

Posted on December 25, 2022

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• Original Plan For Stone Cold Steve Austin vs. The Rock At WrestleMania 19

During an episode of his Grilling JR podcast, WWE Hall Of Famer Jim Ross talked about Stone Cold Steve Austin vs. The Rock at WrestleMania 19 in 2003, which was Austin’s final match for 19 years (before he came out of retirement at WrestleMania 38).

The original plan for this match was to main event the show, but it got changed to Kurt Angle vs. Brock Lesnar for the WWE Championship due to Austin spending the night before WrestleMania at the Hospital due to his health issues.

Here’s what Good Ol’ JR had to say about why WWE decided to book a 3rd WrestleMania match between Austin & Rock and how hard it was to call this match, knowing it was the last match of The Texas Rattlesnake:

“There was only one option. I guess it is a case where we’re overthinking it. In all due respect, Austin owed Rock a win, and he was hell-bent on delivering it. That’s old school way of looking at it.

Austin had won two WrestleMania matches with [The Rock], 15 and 17, and he felt like he owed Rock that return. Because number one, Steve’s health was deteriorating, as we all know, it is well documented. And you know, the night before that he had his health calamity.

So we were, there’s no other match that we thought about doing. What are you going to do with so and so? Well, we know that Rock is gonna wrestle Austin, period. And Rock is going to get put over, was going to be getting his hand raised finally.

So no, there was never any debate or discretion on who is going to be in that. The only tweak that was made based on Steve’s hospital stay the night before. You know, who’s gonna go on last?

Yeah, out of safety sake and precautions. We decided to put Kurt and Brock on last, because they seem to be the healthiest guys. And so yeah, it was Austin all the way. That’s what the audience wanted to see. You know, we could do Austin win three, could Rock win one, that story.

[Rock & Austin] delivered a hell of a match and, and it was hard. It’s probably the hardest match I ever called because of my closeness with Steve and my friendship with him, to know that this was his last match. And he’s not one of those bullsh*t guys that’s gonna say, well, he’s gonna, I want to, I’m gonna unretire.

I just I don’t know, just he’s just a different guy. When he said it was his last match and he told me that, then it was troubling because I did want to see the company without him, without Steve, because he was so valuable to what we were doing and what we had done, what we had built.

There’s no way in the world in my opinion now, and I might be wrong. There’s no way that I would think that the WWE would have gone public with such fanfare and success if Stone Cold had not been Stone Cold.”

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