Steve Austin Says Wrestlers Have To Work Harder To Win Over Madison Square Garden Crowd

In an interview with Sports Illustrated, Stone Cold Steve Austin spoke about RAW at Madison Square Garden tonight and said that wrestlers will have to work harder to win over the audience. Here are highlights:

On returning to Madison Square Garden: “Walking through those doors at the Garden is still special for me. That’s the WWE’s backyard. Even though they’ve been away for a couple of years, that’s a very special building to Vince. Some of my most iconic moments happened at the Garden. They play at the Barclays a lot, but they wanted to go back home to the Garden and I’m thrilled to be there.”

On the MSG crowd: “That crowd is a tough crowd, and if you win them over, you’ve really done something. It’s a crowd that you’ve got to work really hard for to earn their respect, and I love that about that building. Vince would always show up at the Garden, even for the house shows. And when the old man rolled into the building, we made sure we worked our asses off even more than we already were because Vince was watching.”

On how popular he was back in the day: “I remember when the business got so hot back in the day that when you would drive your rental car into the Garden, the fans would line up and wait for you on the way out. Depending on how over you were as a babyface or how much heat you had as a heel, they would tear off your side view mirrors and rip off your antennas. People tearing up your automobile was almost like your reward for being over or having heat. We didn’t like it, but that was how it was. And eventually it started meaning something to us. They’d stick me in the back of an ambulance and someone would drive my car 10 blocks down the road. The ambulance would pull over, I’d jump out, jump in my rental car, and haul ass. I got a lot of great memories of the Garden, and I can’t wait to be back.”