25 Most OUT OF POCKET WWE Attitude Era Moments
9. Steve Austin Kills Jeff Jarrett
Steve Austin, famously, was no fan of Jeff Jarrett.
Pro wrestling apocrypha has it that, in his early days in Memphis, Austin subsisted, and just barely, on a diet of tuna and boiled potatoes because Jerry Jarrett barely paid him. A dejected Austin once looked at his cheque, lost in thought, probably wondering how long he could feasibly survive until the next one. Jerry Jarrett watched on and said something to the effect of “Keep staring at kid, it ain’t gonna get no bigger”.
Some say this grudge against the Jarretts lasted for years, and was felt so ardently that Austin refused to work a main event-level programme with Jeff.
Vince Russo is on record saying that he’s never seen Austin so pissed as when he presented that very idea to him. (It’s also said that Austin wasn’t fond of Jarrett for his promo in which Jarrett accused him of blasphemy.) Jarrett was not alone in this sort of flat refusal, though: Austin also dismissed a pitch to work with Marc Mero in 1998 because he was wary of any heel who’d just got beat up by a chick getting any sort of heat on him. He wasn’t fixin’ to work with nobody like that. It felt a bit more personal with Jarrett, though - evidence of which can be found when Austin, in a very funny and disrespectful scene, ripped the piss out of Jarrett’s strut on January 5, 1998.
Austin’s intentionally stiff parody made Jarrett look like a rubbish Ric Flair, which was probably the idea, and his double bird-flip F-U was delivered with even more intensity than usual.