Steve Austin On Why He’s Unhappy With His SummerSlam 1998 Match With ‘Taker

During a recent edition of The Steve Austin Show, Steve Austin looked back on his 1998 Summerslam match with the Undertaker.

On His Summerslam 1998 Match With The Undertaker: “We were out there trying to work our ass off, and prior to that match, I’m not the toughest guy in the world, but I’ve never been knocked out in my life. And part of the match, I hit the ropes, Undertaker goes for a backdrop, I kick him in his chest, he’s going to straighten up and no-sell it, and when he does, the back of his big ass head hits me right under the chin. And, boom! Knockout blow. He flashed me. I went down on the mat. I was knocked out. I was only knocked out [for] maybe two [or] three seconds. All of a sudden, I’m laying on the mat on my back in Madison Square Garden. [I] don’t know where I am. The referee of that match was Earl Hebner. Earl Hebner looks down at me. He kind of has this little grin on his face. He goes, ‘God dang, boy! Are you alright?’ I looked up at Earl. I said, ‘where am I?’ He goes, ‘God damn it, boy! You’re in the Garden!’, so I get up and we continue the match. And one of my biggest disappointments in that match [was that] we [were] on our way to a hell of a match [and] I got knocked out. From that point on, I don’t remember the rest of that match! I remember laying on the table. I remember Taker getting on the top turnbuckle and dropping that leg. And I’m thinking, ‘we kind of talked about it. I don’t know if he’s going to do it or not, but I was going to stay there anyway because that’s what you do’. But all of a sudden, that’s one of the things I do remember about that match was Undertaker taking a courageous bump there and dropping that leg off that top turnbuckle. I’m like, ‘alright, this is going to be interesting’. He lands. Everything crashes. We finish the match.”

On He And Taker Not Having The Best Chemistry: “I think the characters of The Undertaker and ‘Stone Cold’ were in many ways similar, you’ve got two bad ass guys and just neither one of us are true sympathy type babyfaces, if that’s what you want to call us. I’ve got nothing but respect for Undertaker and I’m pretty sure he probably thinks pretty well of me. We didn’t have the greatest in-ring chemistry like I had with Bret [Hart], that he had with Shawn [Michaels], that he had with Bret, or I had with some of the other guys.”

On His Unhappiness With The Match: “The reason we were not happy with the caliber of that match [was],” Austin continued, “we knew that we could have had a better match. The crowd wasn’t hanging on every single move or every single section of the match. And it wasn’t a cookie cutter, prefab match. We had five [or] six bullet points and the rest was fill in the blanks. We knew that we had not captivated the crowd to the degree that we had them hanging from the rafters, waiting on the next move. Who was going to win? The drama wasn’t high enough. The dare I say, interest, at the proper depth because when you go back to some of the matches that Taker had with Shawn, [or] maybe the one I had with Bret or maybe The Rock, when people were hanging on every single thing you do, we didn’t have that [on] that night. And we knew that we could have done better and we didn’t hook the crowd enough. Bottom line, we didn’t hook the crowd enough. You can ask Taker and he’ll tell you the same thing.”

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