Stone Cold Steve Austin is one of WWE’s greatest stars ever. However, WWE Hall of Famer Eric Bischoff believes the iconic character was created by Austin himself, not Vince McMahon.
Before becoming Stone Cold Steve Austin, Austin debuted in WWE as The Ringmaster. The gimmick failed before he eventually transformed into the character that defined the Attitude Era.
Eric Bischoff says Stone Cold was Steve Austin’s own creation
Speaking on 83 Weeks, Bischoff was asked if he regretted releasing Austin from WCW before his massive WWE success. Bischoff replied, “It never would have happened. And listen, anybody listening to this, do not take my word for anything I’m about to say. There’s not a chance in hell because Stone Cold Steve Austin would never have happened, ever would have happened, according to Steve, if I hadn’t fired him. Vince McMahon didn’t come up with that character.”
“When Steve Austin left ECW to go to WWE, he was going to be the freaking Ringmaster. Carnival kind of Ringmaster. That was the genius creative for Stone Cold Steve Austin. To take the guy that got so over in WCW, just being Steve Austin. But when he got to WWE, he went through the cookie maker and came out all shiny and called the Ringmaster. And it sucked.”
Bischoff added that nobody connected with the Ringmaster character. “The character that Steve portrayed when he got to WWE after I had fired him, and he did a little layover in ECW, was the Ringmaster, and it sucked. Steve wasn’t feeling it. The audience wasn’t feeling it. Nobody was feeling it.”
He continued, “And Steve, I don’t remember the transition either. He just went out and did it, or he talked to Vince about it and just tried it with some support. But Steve, in his words, and again I encourage you to go back because I can’t remember the exact way he said it, but essentially the way I interpreted it, at least, was that he just went back to what Steve was feeling after I had let him go, and he was trying to find his character in ECW. He found Stone Cold Steve Austin, if I remember the story correctly. Steve found that character, so to speak, during his time in ECW.”
Bischoff said Austin eventually decided to simply be himself. “And when the bottom fell out of the Ringmaster gimmick and everybody finally went, ‘That’s not working,’ Steve, one way or the other, said, ‘Hey, let me just go be me,’ and went out and became Stone Cold Steve Austin, improvised the whole most probably a lot or all of it because that was his character and he knew it.”
He also insisted the character was never handed to Austin by WWE. “It wasn’t written for him. It wasn’t handed down from above by the creative genius. Vince is really good at picking out other people’s really good ideas and tweaking them and making them better. But the idea, at least in my experience with him, never heard one.””
“Steve created that character. It only would have happened if he had still been working for WCW. He would have gone through that, not to make it sound bigger than it is, but that kind of creative soul-searching. He would have been doing whatever he was doing. And would he have found that character in WCW? I don’t think so.”
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