During a recent interview with Pardon My Take, Steve Austin sat down to discuss his career in WWE. 

Among the topics that were discussed was his heel turn and his refusal to job to Brock Lesnar. 

On how he regrets his WrestleMania 17 heel turn: “I’ve re-thought that thing so many times, and if I could call the audible now, I would have just told him, ‘Hey man, I ain’t feeling it,’ because here’s how I was feeling leading into that. I thought I was starting to flatline just a little bit, and I said, ‘OK man, a change is good,’ and Vince always likes to do something big at a WrestleMania, well we didn’t really have anything big there, so I was like, ‘Hey, I’ll turn heel, that’s what we do, you get hot, and then you turn heel, and then it’s even hotter.’ Most times, yes, but it has to be warranted and it has to be for a reason. And all of a sudden, when I did that that night, if I could go back, I woulda just said, ‘Hey man, I’m calling an audible,’ watch the stunner, and then stun his ass, woulda maintained my babyface run.”

On refusing to job to Brock Lesnar in 2002:“And the time they wanted me to fly down to Atlanta for Monday Night RAW and put over Brock Lesnar. The night before, I was working in Columbus, Georgia working with Ric Flair in a cage, so I was like a kid in a candy store working with the GOAT, so of course I didn’t show up because it wasn’t time for me to do the favors yet for Brock in an unadvertised match in a tournament style TV match whereas, hey man, I love Brock Lesnar, I’d lose to him any day of the week, but build it up so we can all make money off of it and it’s going to mean something. And when you get a guy red hot, and I just had Hogan on the podcast, and I’ll put myself there, but when you get guys who really, really draw stupid money, it’s a very delicate balance that you just don’t take stupid liberties with or you’ll kill it off and you can never recreate it. So I was very protective of myself, maybe too much so, but it took me seven and a half years to get there so no one was going to yank the carpet out from underneath my feet, not even Vince.