Kevin Nash says the most over person he ever saw in wrestling was Steve Austin, and he arrived at it by watching a Billie Eilish documentary on a plane.
Nash explained on Kliq This that he had watched it twice on his last set of flights, at his son’s recommendation, and that the second time he actually took it in.
“I watched it, but I kind of nodded a couple of times, and I didn’t absorb it. So on the way home, I watched it. Everything. I mean, just how it was shot, how it was edited, like I do a film.”
He described the relationship between the performer and the room.
“I knew that she had a very strong fan base, and I knew that she was an earth angel, and I knew that there were so many people, and I hate to use the term, but there was a band called the Misfits, and a lot of her people that follow her and that love her, I think they feel as misfits. A lot of them don’t feel like they fit in society.”
“There’s so much going on right now, and her music, her vibe, her concert arena, everything is a safe place for these people, and they know it’s a safe place.”
He drew a line from that to wrestling.
“There are so many guys in our business that have thought at one time or another, like I’m so over, and they’ve had these moments.”
He named Austin.
“Personally myself, the most over person that I saw in my career was Steve. When the glass broke, that pop was always there.”
He put the reason down to how easy Austin was to relate to.
“I think because he was that everyman kind of a guy, he was so easy to relate to, for so much of that wrestling community, especially in ’97.”
He did not think the two reactions were the same thing.
“Steve would be probably the closest. And I don’t mean this in any disrespect to Steve or Steve’s overness, but when you watch Billie Eilish, and she’s singing, and everyone in a 20,000-seat arena is singing with her, they’re crying with the same emotion.”
Nash and Austin came up together, and Nash has said elsewhere in the same episode that Austin was in the tier of friends he made immediately below his oldest ones.
“Austin was that next tier, because he came the next year, and he and I traveled. I traveled with Steve almost.”
Austin’s run in 1997 and 1998 is the period Nash is referring to. Austin won the 1997 and 1998 Royal Rumbles, won the WWE Championship from Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania 14, and WWE’s television ratings passed WCW’s during that stretch after 83 consecutive weeks behind.
Nash said the difference is in the kind of connection. An arena reacting to Austin was reacting to a character. An arena singing back to Eilish is doing something else.
Elsewhere in the episode, Nash talked about the security operation around modern touring, having worked for high-end security groups earlier in his life, and described watching Eilish being moved from backstage to a satellite stage inside what looked like an equipment cart. Eilish has been touring the Hit Me Hard and Soft record since 2024.
Nash worked as Diesel in WWE between 1993 and 1996, holding the WWE Championship for just under a year, before leaving for WCW and forming the nWo with Scott Hall and Hulk Hogan. He is a two-time WWE Hall of Famer.
Austin was inducted in 2009, and last wrestled at WrestleMania 38 in 2022 when he went over Kevin Owens in a No Holds Barred Match.
