Stone Cold Steve Austin Reveals His Regrets Over WWE WrestleMania 38 Return

It was the moment we thought we’d never see again, when Stone Cold Steve Austin came out of retirement to wrestle Kevin Owens at WWE WrestleMania 38. But Austin has some regrets about the match.

Austin and Owens would have a wild brawl to close out night one of Mania 38 - 19 years after Austin’s retirement at WrestleMania 19 - but during a conversation with The Takedown on SI, Austin noted disappointment with how parts of the match panned out:

"I was happy in a moment, but, you know, they didn't send me a ring down," Austin said of his WrestleMania return. "I didn't have any timing. I think they interviewed Triple H, The Undertaker, and Hogan. Each one of them said something that was so true; Paul [Levesque - Triple H] said, ‘you can come back, but you don't know what you have, because you haven't been out there’. Undertaker said, ‘you're not going to have any timing’. He was right. I didn't have any timing. Hell, I hadn't hit a set of ropes in 19 years. Hadn't thrown a punch in 19 years. Hogan says, ‘you know, you're just not calloused up. Your body is not as hard as it used to be’. And he was right, because when you when you take off, people talk about ring rust, that's timing. So, I had no timing.

"Hogan was talking about being calloused up... those ropes hurt. Those bumps hurt. If you make a long comeback, it takes you two or three months to get those callouses back, so that your body doesn't hurt after every single match. You build up an immunity to it, so they each made valid points. And like Paul said, you don't know what you got until you get out there, because you can think you got it, but you don’t.

"And when I went out there, I think I couldn't hear the crowd as much as I wanted to. When I watched it back, the crowd was into it. It was very, very loud, yes, but I wish I would have taken more time, savoured more moments, and worked the people a little bit more than I did. I think I was in a space of not knowing what I had and trying to be a little too frantic. I could have slowed down drastically and made that better. And I wish that I would have. I haven't told too many people that, but I told you."

Austin hasn’t appeared for WWE since WrestleMania 38, although the legendary ‘Texas Rattlesnake’ is set to be in town during WrestleMania 41 in Las Vegas this coming April.

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