During a recent interview on the SI Media Podcast, WWF Legend Stone Cold Steve Austin spoke about his legendary ‘Austin 3:16’ shirt, that was created after his epic King of the Ring 1996 promo towards Jake ‘The Snake’ Roberts, whom Steve had just defeated in the tournament final.
Here’s what Stone Cold had to say after the the host asked him how much he made from the merchandise sales of the shirt:
“I don’t know how much. I mean, it’s definitely 7 figures, probably 8 figures now. In WWE, you get your royalty checks every quarter.
I remember when I first came up with that shirt with Jimmy Miranda after I started getting hot and I created a promo.
All of a sudden they came out with that shirt and those shirts were everywhere. I went and had a conversation with Vince McMahon.
I said, ‘Hey man, I see a lot of T-shirts out there and I noticed that my royalty check doesn’t reflect that’.
He goes ‘Well, Steve, what do you think we should do?’. I said ‘Well, I think we need to kind of change the percentages’.
He came up with a number. He goes ‘What do you think about that?’. I said ‘I like it’, and so it was a fair deal. That became known as an Austin deal.
It was time to come out with the royalty checks for that quarter and Vince wanted to hand deliver this one to me.
He handed it to me and said ‘Steve, I’m just giving this to you because I’ve never given out a check like this before to anyone.’”
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