Undertaker Says He Enjoyed Wrestling Austin More at House Shows

The Undertaker says some of his most enjoyable moments in the ring with Steve Austin never happened in front of a television audience at all. Speaking on his Six Feet Under podcast, the WWE Hall of Famer revealed that he got more out of working with Stone Cold at house shows than he did during their pay-per-view classics or televised battles.

According to Undertaker, house shows during the Attitude Era gave wrestlers room to breathe that television simply didn’t allow. Without the pressure of hitting exact TV timing or advancing a storyline for the cameras, performers could improvise and feed off the live crowd in ways that rarely made it to broadcast.

“I enjoyed working with Steve more in house shows than I did on TVs or pay-per-views,” Undertaker said. “The house shows, back in the day, that’s when you really got to go out and be creative and be spontaneous and just really do the craft of professional wrestling. It was so fun with him because his character, as intense as it was, he could be a funny son of a b*tch in the ring.”

He pointed to one specific example of Austin’s comedic instincts taking over mid-match. During a live event, Austin poked fun at Undertaker’s signature Old School spot — the move where Undertaker walks across the top rope before delivering a forearm — by performing his own exaggerated version while balancing on the bottom rope instead. It’s the kind of bit that could only really thrive in the house show environment, where nothing needed to serve a bigger televised angle and wrestlers were freer to play off each other and the crowd in the moment.

Undertaker also noted a more practical reason working with Austin was so appealing: with Stone Cold near the peak of his popularity, matches involving him almost guaranteed a hot crowd and a prominent spot on the card. “One of my favorite things working with Steve, one, you were definitely going to be on top, right? Your payoffs were going to be good, your fan reactions were going to be amazing,” he said.

Austin and Undertaker were two of the defining figures of the Attitude Era, trading the WWE Championship and headlining some of the promotion’s biggest shows during a period when WWE’s weekly viewership and live gates were exploding. Their pay-per-view matches are the ones etched into wrestling history, but Undertaker’s comments are a reminder of just how much creative freedom existed on the house show circuit back then — a loose, improvisational style of performing that has largely disappeared as modern wrestling schedules and cameras have tightened around every televised and streamed show.

It’s also a small window into the chemistry between two performers whose rivalry helped define an era of the business, showing a side of Austin’s in-ring character that fans who only saw the televised product rarely got to witness. For longtime fans of the Attitude Era, it’s another piece of the puzzle showing just how much of that period’s magic happened away from the cameras entirely.