Free THE STONE COLD TRUTH by Steve Austin, J.R. Ross, Dennis Brent, J.R. Ross

under your arm so you can listen to him talk to you.”
    All of a sudden, I got it. My opponent was attempting to communicate with me, trying to call the match to me, but I didn’t hardly hear a word he said. Dutch balled me out for about two minutes, just ripping into me.

     
    Then he said, “You see that chair out there?” There was a steel chair standing up against the wall. “You get that chair and you sit in the doorway, and you watch every one of those matches out there in the ring. That’s the only way you’re going to learn.”
    So from that day on, for virtually my whole career, I’ve watched every single match on the card. Not so much in the last year or two, but damn near every single match on every card before that. And I did it because Dutch Mantel told me to. He was a big influence on me. “Dirty” Dutch was a damn good teacher and a much better booker than he’s been given credit for.
    Dutch knew I didn’t have any money, but I did have a car, so Dutch and Chris Champion started riding with me. Since we rode in my car and I did the driving, I didn’t have to pay for the gas. Sometimes “Dr.” Tom Prichard, one of the top heels in the Tennessee territory, came withus as we traveled around in my 1988 Hyundai Excel, which cost me $154 a month to own. It almost got repossessed several times, but I never let it happen because my brother Scott had cosigned for it and I didn’t want to screw up his credit.
    Riding down the road and listening to Dutch Mantel run his mouth was a wonderful experience. The guy’s a great talker and tells great stories. Great promo guy, great worker and a great mind. Sitting there listening to Dutch, you can’t help but learn a few things.
    Dutch would always sit in the front seat, chewing
my
chewing tobacco, and Chris would be in the back doing whatever he did—nothing I would recommend to anyone, I’m sure. The more I rode with Dutch, the better we got to know each other—and the better I got to know Dutch’s cutting sense of humor. He was just a trained, highly skilled wise ass. But he was a wealth of information too, because he really knew the wrestling business.
    One day we were just sitting there, talking. I was asking questions as usual, and he was being real nice to me and explaining things.
    Then Dutch said, “You know, if you ever turn heel, you could be a real cocky son of a gun and call yourself Stunning’ Steve Austin.”
    So that’s how I got the name “Stunning” Steve Austin. Dutch Mantel gave me that one too. Of course, I wasn’t trying to be “stunning” with my look. It was more of a mind-set for me. But that was my first bit of education in what a character meant and how I was supposed to “be” it or portray it. For a while, I was riding to the wrestling arenas with Tom Prichard and another wrestler, Brian Lee. We were shooting the bull one time and Tom started talking about gimmicks and personas in detail.
    He’d say, “‘Prime Time’ Brian Lee … what’s so prime time about you? ‘Stunning’ Steve Austin … what’s so stunning about you? You’ve got these tights and that long hair, but that’s about it. Why should the fans think you’re such hot stuff?”
    He had a valid point and I understood what he was talking about. But I didn’t have any money to do anything about it.
    When I first went to USWA in Tennessee, Prichard was working against Eric Embry or Jeff Jarrett and he had a damn open cut on hishead for about three weeks where he was gigging every night. It’s funny what a person remembers looking back on a wrestling career. To this day, Tom has a forehead full of scars from his matches in the Tennessee territory.
    When I first got to Tennessee, I was living in the Congress Inn in Nashville, where a lot of the other wrestlers lived. It was owned by real nice people.
    At first, Tom Prichard and I were living on different ends of the Congress Inn, fifty yards apart. But when we started traveling to the shows together