Steve Austin on his 2001 heel turn: “If I could go back in time, I would not have done it”

[That was your call?] Yeah, and I wish Vince would have shot me down, or I wish I felt it in the ring at night. I should have just said, ‘Hey man, we’re changing this. Watch the Stunner.’ And I should have just stunned his ass and never went down that road.

But as a means to an end, I was leaving Christian a voicemail and kept saying, ‘What? What?’ I just turned it into this thing to berate somebody, to belittle somebody as a heel. I used that as a mechanism to do that—as a means to an end—to try to get heat. That whole attempt was over-trying, just trying to compensate and gain ground on getting heat.

I remember Hunter and myself as the Two Man Power Trip just whacking people with chairs. I mean, you know, trying so hard through violence to get heat, which is not always the best way to get heat, especially by laying stuff in.

It was an interesting period, the heel thing. If I could go back in time, I would not have done it, because I didn’t need to. I think Jim Ross said it best: nobody ever wanted to hate John Wayne. I wasn’t John Wayne, but I was the anti-hero. I got over by being the way I was.

So to turn bad, to try to do worse things—it didn’t work. It wasn’t successful. We got a chance to push the character in different directions, in different dimensions, but I don’t think we were really ringing up the box office doing that.”