The ultimate benchmark of success for a pro wrestler is to grow bigger than their sport. Look at The Rock, for example, it's sometimes difficult to think of him as a pro wrestler because it's such a small part of what he does now. There's one pro wrestler though, who grew bigger than his business by only being a part of it: Stone Cold Steve Austin made pro wrestling cool at the turn of the millenium. He became a pop culture icon and a living and breathing catharsis for every blue collar workers on Monday nights during his tenure as the WWE champion. STONE COLD STEVE AUSTIN: THE BOTTOM LINE ABOUT THE MOST POPULAR SUPERSTAR OF ALL-TIME (this title is a bitch to write) is the story of how he got there.
Steve Austin's road to the big leagues started in a promotion named World Class Championship Wrestling but it's in the USWA that he started getting some recognition. His path to the WCW was rather straightforward, he was more agile, daring and charismatic that his fellow local wrestlers, but the craziest part of Stone Cold Steve Austin's story is that it almost stopped there. It seems crazy now, but the WCW brass didn't think he was marketable. They didn't believe kids would pay to play with his action figures and that no one right in their mind would buy a t-shirt of the man then named Stunning Steve. So they fired him. They gave the budding superstar his walking papers after an injury kept him sidelines for several weeks.
Getting fired turned out to be a key event in Stone Cold's career. He eventually joined the ranks of the ECW, ran by his friend Paul Heyman, and started shooting some amazing promos around that theme. There's a memorable one (which I tried really hard to find on YouTube) where he has tears in his eyes. In these promos, he prototypes the character that would come to define him and influence a entire generation of young men. Austin was so scorching hot in the ECW that he got the call from the WWE the very same year. He went from being unemployed to getting into the big show in only a couple years. He's had to fight off a bad gimmick in order to become Stone Cold though, but once Vince McMahon asked him to find his own angle, history was made.
Austin was one of many wrestlers who put Bret Hart in his own signature move.
The Stone Cold persona was at first meant to be a heel, a bad guy. It's not a rare thing though that when the heel is fun, and well-played by the wrestler, fans fall in love with them and care for them more than they do for the good guys. Stone Cold was also meant to be a redneck character, but the genius idea of having him feud with the company owner Vince McMahon brought him somewhere else. He became a symbol for the liberated working man, a form of catharsis blue collar workers would indulge on a weekly basis. It's why they flocked at live shows. it's why the Austin 3:16 t-shirts are still a common sight today. It's why Stone Cold Steve Austin will always be remembered. Of course, he had to back up his outrageous claims every week in the ring, but what made Steve Austin a legend was far more conceptual than that.
I often say that pro wrestling is a form of soap opera for men. One could argue that all of professional sports are, but it's a little more true for wrestling which has a drama component to it. Stone Cold Steve Austin was one of these superstars that blend the drama and the athletic components together seamlessly. The cohesiveness and the relatability of his storyline was something unseen before, in the WWE and not often equaled in the history of pro-wrestling (the WCW vs NWO storyline is the only one else that comes to mind). Stone Cold Steve Austin was a wrestler that was bigger than wrestling, even when he wrestled. He was a bit of freedom we enjoyed after the longest day of the week, and it all started the day he got fired...