Steve Austin Reflects On Longtime Feud With The Invisible Man

WWE Hall Of Famer Steve Austin recently welcomed indie wrestler ‘Jumpin” Joey Janela to 317 Gimmick Street for an episode of The Steve Austin Show podcast. Among other things, they discussed Janela’s recent work wrestling 10-15 minute matches against…The Invisible Man.

“I’ve actually wrestled The Invisible Man five times, so it is quite the rivalry now.” Janela said, “I think it started off with, I would joke with this guy. He was running local shows in New Jersey and he said, ‘who do you want to wrestle,’ and I said, ‘yeah, I’ll wrestle The Invisible Man.’ And then, ‘when are we going to do it?’ I think one of my shows cancelled running that night and I said, ‘hey, can I come wrestle The Invisible Man?’ And he said, ‘yeah, sure!’ So I just showed up and on the fly, I did what I did. A couple of other promoters wanted to see me versus The Invisible Man, and then, I wrestled The Invisible Man in England at Blackpool Tower.”

During the discussion, Austin revealed that during his time in WCW, he too used to wrestle The Invisible Man before TV tapings.

“I used to do a deal down in WCW where I would wrestle The Invisible Man before TV at CenterStage and I was only going a minute-and-a-half.” Austin mused. “[Janela] put in, like, 15 [or] 20 minutes against this cat. And the crowd, I’m watching the crowd, like, they really bought in and [Janela] [was] totally committed and were in the zone. And the referee did a phenomenal job. [Janela] [was] kind of almost doing a standup routine while [he] [was] doing this.”

No word on if there is a tag bout in the future featuring Austin & Janela vs The Invisible Man & The Shadow.