How Good Was 'Stone Cold' Steve Austin Actually?
Time’s Test
On Twitter, or X, the Wrestling Observer Newsletter’s Dave Meltzer finds himself at odds with almost everybody. The man who implored his readership to vote Paul Levesque as 2024 Booker of the Year summons bile for his supposed AEW bias. Dave’s star rating system is ever controversial, but devotees of women’s wrestling might hate it even more than the WWE ultras.
Dave’s most recent battle is against the wrestling historians, who fiercely dispute Dave’s take that wrestling is in a constant state of improvement.
Dave reckons the wider accessibility of tape to study, and a greater emphasis on great matches as a selling point, has informed a golden artistic era. The counterargument is that a formulaic cynicism has crept into the structure of many matches.
Dave also believes that the very best matches of yore haven’t aged particularly well, since the wrestlers were performing to ensure return business as opposed to building a timeless legacy. This isn’t mutually exclusive - great art can endure regardless of authorial intent and time and place - but what of Austin’s?
Austin’s twilight years TV work often isn’t worth the bother. This is where Meltzer has a point: so many peak Austin matches were in fact designed as a backdrop to an angle. The action in many matches, while hot in the buildings, was by design immaterial and inconsequential. He had to wrestle to get screwed, allowing him to exact vengeance on Mr. McMahon, before the cycle began anew. Austin’s Attitude Era output was a cynical, ephemeral exercise in getting the viewers to tune in the following week.
On pay-per-view, mostly, Austin’s work holds up. He was the biggest star of the 1990s, but he doesn’t feel like a product of the decade in the way, say, Hulk Hogan feels like a babyface that could only belong in the glossy 1980s. Austin made his entrance to a Rage Against The Machine soundalike, a very ‘90s composition, but he could have rampaged down the aisle to a classic rock or punk track. Any loud racket from any era of rock n’ roll would have fit him.
Austin, as Stone Cold or some persona close to it, could have torn up All Japan Pro Wrestling as a wild man in the 1980s. He could have sent the fans into frenzied bloodlust, taking on the Four Horsemen in Jim Crockett Promotions that same decade. Austin did in fact make a huge impression in Extreme Championship Wrestling; he could have headlined there at his leisure, if it weren’t for the money being so poor.
Wrestling appeals on a primal level. Since the dawn of the very form, people have wanted to watch a guy they like beat the sh*t out of a guy they don’t. Nobody did that as successfully as ‘Stone Cold’ in his prime.
Moreover: if he turned up to peak Ring of Honor as ‘Stunning’ Steve Austin, he’d have elevated the promotion with his cocky personality while keeping up with the very best it had to offer as one of the best wrestlers in the world.
In the exceedingly low chance that his act wouldn’t get over today, that would be an indictment of the industry, and its obsession with counters, athleticism, and melodrama, and not Austin. Austin’s work is so timeless and universal, in fact, that modern wrestling could really do with trying to somehow recapture it.