WWE Hall of Famer Stone Cold Steve Austin recently spoke to Ring Rust Radio to promote the upcoming season of Broken Skull Ranch. You can see the full interview at this link, and submitted highlights below.
Ring Rust Radio: This is the fifth season of Steve Austin’s Broken Skull Challenge, which last year averaged more than four million weekly viewers. What can fans who have never seen the program expect when tuning in?
Steve Austin: It’s just bad-ass competition. It’s very simple, very basic, very strenuous, very hard and in a tough environment. Basically, we film this on top of a mountain in the desert right outside Los Angeles. Everything we are using from boulders to barrels to logs, there’s no scientific nothing out there. It’s bracket-style competition. Eight athletes come out each week through three rounds of competition and you either win or you lose. If you win, you go on, and if you lose, you go home. At the end of the day, out of eight competitors, one will be left standing. That competitor will come back the next day and run my obstacle course and it’s called the Skull Buster. It’s a half mile course with ten obstacles standing in your way. If you can beat a bench-mark time, you get $10,000 and remain there until someone can dethrone you. It is a very simple formula to understand. If you have never seen it before, you can tune in and understand exactly what is going down. What is going down is extreme, hardcore, physical competition. There ain’t no reality, the only reality out there is you either are going to win or lose, it is a challenge show.
Ring Rust Radio: Steve Austin’s Broken Skull Challenge has built quite a fanbase since its debut. Did you expect the show to take off the way it has and how many more seasons do you think you have in you?
Steve Austin: Man, I love doing the show. I love being outdoors, I love competition and I love to be able to help motivate people to push their bodies and their minds to the absolute limit. I am never bored out there and I am having a great time. I’m not out there trash talking or cutting promos like I did in the wrestling business. I am out there trying to motivate some of the best athletes in the United States of America; there is a big difference there. So, it’s fun being around such driven people that are pushing themselves so hard. I was hoping, and in anything you do you want to have some confidence and want to believe in yourself, but at the end of the day it’s up to the people who watch and if the product is good enough. So far, it has been and I would love to keep doing this for as long as we can. As long as we can keep making this thing challenging for the athletes so that they want to come out and get their challenges met and see how tough they really are. If people are still interested in the show, I would love to keep doing it for a long time.
Ring Rust Radio: It obviously takes an incredible athlete to be able to conquer the Broken Skull Challenge. From your perspective as the host of the show and a WWE Hall of Famer, how do the top Broken Skull Challenge competitors compare to WWE Superstars in terms of their athleticism?
Steve Austin: In many ways, the athleticism, because this people are training specifically for these tasks and what I am asking them to do. Whether they are coming from the world of Cross Fit, Spartan Race, obstacle course racing, they are training specifically for these types of events. We will shake it up so they never know what we are throwing at them. The guys and gals in the squared circle these days, and I’ll speak of WWE because that’s where I spent the bulk of my career and that’s where I am from and who I am basically with, man those athletes there are off the charts from the generation that I came up. They are outstanding athletes in their own rights. They are extremely tough athletes in their own right. Living that road schedule, getting in that ring every single night, pushing their bodies to the limit in the ring, and then stepping into the gym to stay in tune with what they do. They aren’t training to come out and do what I do, but if you put the athletes from the Broken Skull into a squared circle and have a match, they wouldn’t be able to do it. The athleticism I would say is equal, but both parties are training for uniquely and specifically different endeavors.
Ring Rust Radio: For the Steve Austin Show on Podcast One, you have to watch the WWE product as much as you can. Who are some of the current Superstars that get Stone Cold excited when they show up on TV?
Steve Austin: You know what, I watch as much as I can. I DVR the show just to fast-forward through the commercials. It’s hard to watch because three hours of Raw every Monday and then two hours of SmackDown, but because I am still involved with the business, I try to watch as much as I can. Brock Lesnar is an absolute beast. I enjoy watching him and seeing what AJ Styles is up to next. Waiting to see if Finn Balor will continue to find his way. Waiting to see what they will end up doing with Shinsuke Nakamura and give him a green light push with that great background he brings from New Japan Pro-Wrestling. With the women’s division, their athleticism is just off the charts now. They have been main eventing Monday Night Raw, SmackDown and pay-per-views. I like the entire product and it has changed a lot since I have been gone. It’s sped up a lot since I have been gone. It’s a different world. So, when I watch with the old school mentality that I have, I have to try to lose myself in it and suspend disbelief and enjoy the ride.
