Stone Cold Steve Austin: WWE legend's horror 1997 neck break

Stone Cold Steve Austin will take part in a KO Show segment at WWE WrestleMania 38 alongside Kevin Owens at the big show on April 2 this coming Saturday.

On August 3, 1997, the WWE Hall of Famer broke his neck, with the horror injury changing his career from that point forward.

At the SummerSlam pay-per-view event in 1997, Austin went one-on-one with Owen Hart in a match for the Intercontinental Championship.

Austin may have won the match title, but he walked out of the Continental Airlines Arena with more than just a new title belt.

The multi-time WWE Champion actually broke his neck, as can be seen below, after landing directly on the top of his head from an Owen Hart piledriver.

Stone Cold Steve Austin has spoken about the injury before, speaking about the pain and how he had to deal with temporary paralysis.

While he may have just broken his neck, the match didn’t end right then, with Austin going on to pin Owen Hart and win the title belt.

Man, I’m laying there, and now the pain’s starting to set in. I couldn’t use my hands yet, but I could turn over and use my forearms to crawl.

“It took me a long time to straighten my knees to be able to… [but] there was no way I was gonna lay there and let some ambulance or bunch of paramedics carry me out of that ring. And then finally, I can start using my hands. I hit him with the roll-up… it looks like s*it”.

The broken neck saw Austin, understandably so, take a prolonged period of time away from in-ring wrestling, but he did remain as part of active storylines on TV.

Austin was able to return later that year through and even managed to get physical and interfere in matches before that.

However, Stone Cold’s neck was never the same again, and while he would continue to