by Jeb Tennyson Lund
OnlineOnslaught.com/CitizenScholar.net

When it comes to building excitement for feuds and stories, WWE personnel have yet to learn the rule that less is more. Sadly, when it comes to wrestling books and videos, they've yet to realize that more is more. Perhaps the most interesting parts of Stone Cold Steve Austin's autobiography, The Stone Cold Truth, are all the ones that simply aren't there.

WWE's book and DVD division needs to arrive at the realization its fans have come to: that the only people buying these products are people like us — devoted fans, smarks, those raised on or in love with wrestling. Granted, there is some crossover appeal, and infrequent wrestling fans might buy the book to read on a plane. But, by and large, when Edith Snortlewacker is on vacation and in a Target, looking for something to read on the beach, she's more apt to pick up something from Oprah's book club than the Hardy Boyz' Exist 2 Inspire — no matter how much she might like inspirational self-help books.

Thus, the people buying WWE books already know the basics, the fluff. They don't need 300 pages of gloss and instead want 700 pages of details. They want what they don't already have. WWE is slowly coming around to this notion in video, releasing multi-disc compilations for Ric Flair and Shawn Michaels. They realize most fans can pick up (or have picked up) a copy of Mind Games or a Bash at the Beach, and that what fans really need is a DVD that anthologizes all those matches that are difficult or impossible to collect. In the biography department, however, this attitude has yet to take hold.

Clocking in at 312 pages of aired-out type, large photos and menu-like first pages for each chapter, The Stone Cold Truth by Stone Cold Steve Austin with Jim Ross (as told to Dennis Brent) doesn't dare to break the mold. Virtually anyone who's read a sports or wrestling autobiography could quickly brainstorm a list of topics and wind up naming the majority of this book's subject matter.

Austin cites the importance of family, respectable and strong parental role models, an awareness of the importance of education (one that clashed with a restlessness in his twenties), the need to listen to older stars, the importance of hard work, psychology, cooperation, assertiveness and creativity, regret for mistakes and a need for humility. A fan with a decent knowledge of Austin's history could plug those "important life lessons" into a timeline, correlate them to significant events in his career and probably wind up with a book remarkably similar to this one, even with an outsider's perspective.

Such an experiment might work because, in this book, insights into events are of a generic kind. When one of Austin's marriages fails, we are told that it's a shame and that he could have done some things differently. This bland commentary is proffered throughout, for both the direst and most inane of issues. Jim Ross is given special boldfaced paragraphs in the middle and at the end of chapters to offer his special commentary on the same events Austin addresses. Sadly, J.R. takes few opportunities to deviate from the generic path, and his comments largely echo Austin's, as opposed to outlining a meaningful counterpoint.

Compounding the glibness is a tendency to shift focus at random and for no clear purpose. The book lacks a linear narrative: Austin jumps years at a time to spend a page or two on a subject. Then, if or when he returns to his original shaky timeline, the reader finds that a few years have passed; events have been glossed or omitted. Whereas Mick Foley, in his book, leapt through time in order to tell an anecdote that illuminated a particular point in the overall narrative — then returned to part in the story where he left off — Austin veers off topic often never to return.

Foley's book addressed a kind of circle of life: moving forward and further and gently curving until the reader and author returned to a basic insight about the author. The Stone Cold Truth, on the other hand, is like a lit Fourth of July sparkler: brilliant flashes of potential amusement or depth shoot randomly into the night, each spark independent of the other, each fading out and ultimately forgotten, none returning or adding to the source.

The lack of focus and structure could easily be forgiven if the book provided interesting talk on interesting subjects. But Austin barely scratches the surface of stories that can already be found on the internet or in other books. (Foley, in his book, had more insights about some aspects of Austin's career than Austin does.) The subjects he chooses to explore more fully are not those one assumes the audience is interested in.

For instance, he spends more time talking about misbehaving with his brothers, pumping iron and buying a lemon of a car (all before going to college) than he does about Chris Benoit, Mick Foley, Eric Bischoff and ECW combined. Foley and Benoit each receive a roughly two-page treatment. The catchphrase, "What?" gets nearly four. If Chris Jericho's name was mentioned more than once in the book, I missed it. I can't tell if I forgot Austin mentioning his series of matches with the Undertaker or his management by Ted DiBiase, or if they were mentioned so fleetingly that they don't even register in the brain. Whole feuds and wrestlers disappear from the narrative. Dr. Lloyd Youngblood is discussed twice as much as Paul Heyman. In a possibly mordantly fitting way, beer plays a bigger role in the book than Austin's ex-wife Debra.

As a stark contrast to wrestler-related omissions, almost a good twenty pages are spent lavishing praise on Vince McMahon, all with a disingenuousness and almost saccharine coziness that is both jarring and out of character for the Austin described in the rest of the book. This is territory already covered with insipid non-critique in The Rock Says by The Rock (with Joe Layden).

Foley is thus far the only WWE writer to paint McMahon as a person with flaws and favorable traits in almost human equal parts. Austin tosses out the word genius in relation to McMahon so freely and unqualifyingly that it quickly loses all meaning. Perhaps the only illuminating comment made about McMahon is that he once loaned Austin money to buy a house and later, when Austin had nearly paid it all off, waived the final $30,000 due and told him to forget about it. It's a nice story, but it would have more power in a Bank of America brochure than in the saga of one of the most famous wrestlers in the world.

Even the length of the book is cause for complaint. Here we have a middle-aged man who once stood at the pinnacle of professional wrestling — while redefining it — yet his reminiscences only amount to 312 widely spaced pages. Compare that to Mick Foley's account of a less fantastically successful life, one that required over 500 pages (and a subsequent book) to cover it. Or, worse, compare it to Lita's book. Hers is the story of a young woman of mixed success; it's roughly the same dimensions as Austin's book, and yet it's 40 pages longer. Did someone in the WWE marketing department decide that Austin would be a less interesting person to read about than Mick Foley or Lita?

Relevant and vital data presented in this book can be reduced quite easily to a few bullet points:

• The night before his WrestleMania XIX match with The Rock, Austin suffered an intense panic attack, brought on by nervousness, insufficient diet and overconsumption of coffee and energy drinks. Austin spent the night in a hospital for observation, as the doctors were worried he might have a pulmonary embolism.
 
• Austin's walking out on RAW when he was booked to job to Brock Lesnar owed more to his deteriorating condition than it did to the booking. Granted, he abhorred the decision to job him in an unadvertised match, on free TV, when the match could easily provide more drama and buyrates if properly sold for a later pay-per-view. But he saw that decision as the straw that broke the camel's back. His primary concern was the deterioration of his neck, which was already quite advanced, and which had already afflicted him with various pains and uncontrollable tremors in his legs.
 
• Austin deeply regrets Owen Hart's death and sympathizes with Bret Hart and the entire Hart family. However, he blames Owen — not mere accident — for his broken neck and the resultant neck worries, leg tremors, pains, etc. He claims that he made sure before the match that Owen could execute the Tombstone Piledriver, and that they had this conversation:

"Now, Owen, I don't trust just anybody to do a piledriver to me, but you can do it, right?"
And he said, "Yeah."
I said, "You're going to go to your knees, right?"
And he said, "No, I'm going to drop to my ass."
Then I said, "Well, you need to go to your knees, right?"
And he said, "No, I drop to my ass."
That's two times I said that. And I was thinking, I'm dealing with Owen Hart, brother of Bret Hart and son of Stu Hart. I guess he knows what he's doing. He's ribbing me about dropping to his ass instead of his knees....
So I figured, Owen's got it, he knows my concern. I had asked him twice about it, and that was the big spot in the match....
Eventually, he set up the piledriver spot. I spun Owen around and he landed on his feet. Then he picked me up, upside down, and WHAM—he dropped straight to his ass. There was simply no room for me to protect my head.
If you watch the videotape, my head's about six to eight inches below his ass. (p. 172-3)

He adds that he never felt any real animosity toward Owen and that they were never uncivil to each other in the locker room afterward. Apparently, he kept waiting for Owen to apologize, and Owen was so shaken by what happened that he hadn't the nerve to confront Austin and bury the hatchet. Despite Bret Hart and J.R.'s urgings that Owen just call and apologize, Owen never got around to it before his death.
 
• He mentions that he and Debra were equally headstrong and confrontational people. He claims that details about their fight and divorce are withheld not because he is unwilling to admit wrong and apologize but because a gag order from the court prevents him from discussing the issue.
 
• He closes with general comments on how to improve the business. (I've included only the most striking.) First, promos should be unscripted, thus enabling wrestlers to find their characters and click with the audience. When wrestlers get involved in their characters and riff their own promos, they are both more motivated and more believable to the audience. Moreover, he feels wrestling matches should be as unscripted as possible. When wrestlers follow a script, they tune out or exclude the audience. On the other hand, when they structure the match around audience reaction, the match is more engaging, vital and must-see. He also prefers women's matches in the style of Fabulous Moolah or Sherri Martel: women's matches shouldn't be a female version of men's matches, but instead have a distinct style all their own. He also notes that gimmick and special matches should be more infrequent, since they're starting to lose their impact. Finally, he thinks certain big moves and gimmicks should be reserved for main-event matches — instead of having table spots and big moves opening the show, being used in the mid-card and most other matches, then having no effect for big payoff matches.

The disappointment with this book is that its surprises and unique parts occupy only the tiniest fraction of the text. It exemplifies the WWE policy — in books and older DVDs — of "less is less." We're given an all-access pass to the Stone Cold we already know very well; and the glimpses of the unfamiliar Stone Cold are both fleeting and fairly shallow.

It may seem unfair to judge a wrestling autobiography with the same standards one expects from conventional autobiography. But, for one thing, this book costs as much as any other; and, if it parades itself as an equal to anything else on the shelf, it should be treated as an equal. More pointedly: if Mick Foley taught wrestling fans and mainstream readers anything, it's that wrestling can be just as poignant and exploratory as any other topic and can be presented with humanity, humor, drama and significance.

This book doesn't take its lead from Foley's example. Instead, it ignores it and falls far short — no mean feat, considering three people had a heavy hand in its creation. If anything, it's probably best that we come to grips with the fact that no wrestling autobiography will be as good as Foley's Have a Nice Day. Yet, even if we didn't have that work as a tool for comparison, we would still be able to reasonably gauge the worth of other wrestling biographies. And, on its own merits, it is very easy to take this book lightly.
 

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Jeb Tennyson Lund is a regular columnist for Citizen Scholar, an online
journal. If you want to read his sadly less wrestling-oriented columns, go
to www.citizenscholar.net.

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