Steve Austin explains why he walked out of WWE in 2002

“When I look back, I was running so hard and the level of intensity was so hot and I was just white-hot in the business and I made a knee-jerk reaction to, they wanted me to do a job in Atlanta in a really non-publicized match with Brock and I thought that was real piss-poor business and it was. I’ve always been willing to do business, when it was time to do business, but that wasn’t business. When you have a guy, and I never blow smoke up my own ass, but when you have a guy like me that draws big money, you don’t just job him out on a bulls–t Monday night TV, so I got to jazz up the language because that was something I was very passionate about and it really comes from my heart and my guts. That being said, I shouldn’t’ve got on an airplane and taken my ball and went home as they said. But hindsight being 20/20, yeah, I should’ve (gone) to the arena. I should’ve talked to Vince and said, ‘I’m not doing it,’ but just stayed with the company. I would have handled the situation much differently today and it would’ve been great had I handled it differently back then. I lost a lot of money. They lost a lot of momentum. We all lost a lot of money and the crowd lost a part of the product that they loved to watch.”

Source: Sam Roberts’ Wrestling Podcast