Steve Austin Discusses If He Ever Considered Staying in ECW Longer, Working With Vince McMahon, His Mount Rushmore of Wrestling

In an interview with Peter Rosenberg of ESPN, WWE Hall of Famer Steve Austin discussed if he ever considered staying in ECW longer when WWE called him, working with Vince McMahon, and his Mount Rushmore of wrestling. Highlights are below.

Steve Austin on if he thought about staying in ECW for longer or if he knew it was time to go when WWE called: “Knew it was time to move on, because you know, and of course, I was just talking to Paul down there in Florida the other day and we’re very, very close, but hey man, everybody knew that you’re going down there, they’re the main roster and those guys are gonna stay there for a little bit, but if I guy like me was gonna get a call to go to New York, man, I had a wife and I had a house payment and all that other stuff, bills coming in the mail just like everybody else, so I needed to go to the place where I could make the most money, and that was New York, that’s what we called it, the WWF at the time. Working one night a week doesn’t really cut it. If I coulda stayed down there for six, eight, nine months, who knows what we coulda done, a year or two, there’s all kinds of stuff we coulda done, but you’re in business to make the money and really, when you’re in the trenches, even when we were in WCW, and we were battling WWF at the time, it wasn’t the Monday Night War, but it was a war, and we kind of felt like we were putting on a better wrestling product, but when you get the call, you knew that the WWE, then F, was the show, it was the big show.”

Steve Austin on working with Vince McMahon: “Vince can read a crowd, and he plays to that crowd, and he just loves to be, as a heel, he would love to be hated so much, and of course, I was so over as a babyface, it magnified, what I did magnified what he did and what he did magnified what I did, so just great chemistry. Pretty much always on the same page.”

On his Mount Rushmore of wrestling: “The two I will give you, you gotta have Hogan, you gotta have Flair, I’ll stop right there, because those are the two that if you’re building a Mount Rushmore, those are the two you gotta have, and I won’t say anymore than that.”

“Hogan, Flair, or Flair, Hogan. There’s not a 1-2, there’s not a 2-1, that’s just the two guys on it.”

If using any of the above quotes, please credit ESPN with an h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.