WWE Legend Admits Popular Chant Upset A Lot Of People

This WWE Hall of Famer began a chant that is still used today

WWE legend Stone Cold Steve Austin is a rare once-in-a-lifetime performer who is considered among the greatest of all time. His combination of great charisma and in-ring work, combined with his trash-talking, care-a-damn attitude, helped lift WWE and wrestling in general to new heights in the 1990s and beyond.

One key factor during Stone Cold’s rise in WWE was the “What?” chant that he began when he was a heel. The chant was shouted out by WWE crowds during Stone Cold’s promos in between sentences whenever he would pause (He would later start doing promos in a certain rhythm to accommodate the chants).

It caught on so much that crowds started chanting “What?” during other wrestlers’ promos, and it gets chanted to this day in WWE.

The 13-time World Champion recently revealed his feelings about the chant to Chris Van Vliet.

WWE Legend Stone Cold Says If He Could Go Back In Time, He Wouldn’t Turn Heel

Stone Cold spoke candidly on the Insight podcast with Chris Van Vliet about his career, and when asked by the host about the “What” chants, he said that it upset a lot of people and, in hindsight, wishes he hadn’t started it or even turned heel because he felt it took the character to places too dark to be commercially successful.

Yeah, a lot of people wish I wouldn’t have done that. But it just turned into something to do, because when I turned heel, not everybody wanted me to turn heel, but I was just set on turning heel, because I’ve always liked working heel so much. [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. So I use that as a mechanism to do that as a means to an end, to try to get heat.

Austin admits that he resorted to forceful violence to generate heat from the crowd but it didn’t work too well.

And that whole attempt was over-trying just to compensate and gain ground on getting heat. I remember Hunter and myself as a 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, and 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, I don’t know, just 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.”

h/t: 411mania.com

Also read: 13-Time WWE Champion Confirms He’ll Probably Never Wrestle Again