GARDNERVILLE, Nev. — The south end of the Carson Valley is flexing. The still-rising sun pops in and out of sight between the leaves, and an insignificant breeze blows through these farmlands. Robins engage in a game of tag. The serenity at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range, however, is emphatically interrupted as a camouflage-colored ATV barrels down an elongated driveway toward a black steel gate.

The driver, the sunlight bouncing off the sunglasses, triggers the automated gate to open then turns the ATV and races off without a word.

When I catch up and exit my Ford Explorer rental in front of a massive garage, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, the most beloved and defiant professional wrestler to ever duck through the ropes, stands with a pink camo coffee mug in hand and a camouflage hat perched atop his head.

“How we doing?!” he says in a gravelly south Texas drawl that once roused sold-out crowds into a collective rapture.

He leans on the hood of my rental car with his huge forearms, peering out west, and talks about the microburst winds that often tear through this area and points out the California-Nevada state line just beyond the alfalfa fields.

It’s here, an hour south of Reno, that Austin is comfortably away from the spotlight that followed him for decades as the beer-guzzling, middle-finger-throwing protagonist in jorts who became a worldwide phenomenon during the height of WWE’s popularity nearly 30 years ago.

“I’ve told those stories so many (expletive) times, dude,” he says, fiddling with a skull ring on his right hand. “That part of my life is long gone. … I’m good here in Nevada. I will not be anywhere I don’t want to be. I just won’t.”

I ask for a tour of his 40-acre nirvana: Broken Skull Ranch 2.0. The original, in Tilden, Texas, a little more than an hour from San Antonio, was sold off in 2017.

I want to see the spacious multiroom chicken coop that was nearly torn apart by a nosy black bear and the air-conditioned apartment studio for cats Pancho and Macho made famous on Instagram. I want to learn how, in just over a year, he’s become one of the top endurance desert racers. Most of all, I want to find out who Austin is now months shy of turning 60 in December, and if Stone Cold still exists somewhere deep within despite Steve Austin being retired for over 20 years.

“I used to think they were kind of one in the same,” he says. “But as you can see right now, you’re probably not talking to Stone Cold. There is that part of me that’s buried underneath. Because if the (expletive) hits the fan, that’s who I am. You better (expletive) be ready. That’s who you’re dealing with, because I ain’t going down easy.”

Steve Austin says his “Stone Cold” days are buried deep inside, but he’s found a new way to fire his competitive juices. (Courtesy of Jeff Waldaias)

The walk around Broken Skull Ranch features a pond stocked with fish that are too easy to catch and vast fields of alfalfa. Dancing inflatable tube men are positioned outside the chicken coop and the horse barn to ward off potential inquisitive predators. The studio apartment for Rudy the Chicken is built atop a dolly with wheels.

The lights are out at 10 p.m. every night. By then, Austin and his wife, Kristen, have checked on the chickens, Pancho and Macho and their two horses, Sunny and Rebel. There’s never more than an hour of TV a night. Most recently, they rewatched one of their favorite shows, HBO’s “The Last of Us,” about a zombie apocalypse.

He’s usually up at 4 a.m., but he tries to stay in bed until 5 a.m. as the day’s to-do list permeates his mind. It’s so often topped by work in and out of what he calls “the buggy,” the Kawasaki UTV (utility terrain vehicle) he’s been racing all over Nevada, one of the only things that will get him to leave the ranch.

He still yearned for the competitive arena after his wrestling days were through in 2003. He started by competing against only himself, seeing how fast he could drive from the old ranch in Texas to Los Angeles.

Even in retirement, Austin had the staying power to live the Hollywood life. He’s acted in movies with Adam Sandler, Burt Reynolds, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. He hosted a podcast, “The Steve Austin Show,” for nearly seven years, featuring interviews with wrestlers, athletes, actors and comedians until it ended during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2023, he starred in “Stone Cold Takes on America,” a 10-episode reality series on A&E that featured Austin working at a fast food restaurant, bowling with seniors, officiating a wedding, delivering the weather report and participating in his first off-road buggy race.

Endurance dune buggy racing requires Austin and a co-driver to be strapped in for anywhere from 13 to 15 hours, traversing through dirt, rock and brush at speeds as much as 82 miles per hour. Maxing out at top speed, hollering out “hell yeah!” while soaring off a berm, that’s where Stone Cold can reappear even for a fleeting moment. Even in this obscure sport, Austin is a self-described cutthroat behind the wheel.

“It’s kind of like when it’d be time for him to go into the ring and wrestle, it’s game on and it’s 100 percent,” said Shane Kisman, the owner of Austin’s racing team, GFIRacing, and his co-driver. “There’s times in this, because it’s endurance racing, that I have to rein him in.”

To even have a shot at contending, the two drivers must be in lockstep. Kisman studies a 10-inch mounted GPS monitor that tracks the course, along with oil temperatures, tire pressure and everything necessary to ensure Austin can keep his foot to the floor. Racers compete against the elements, which is why Kisman routinely hollers instructions to Austin to prepare for certain turns he may not even be able to see due to the dust kicked up.

“I like driving, I like going fast, and I like the mastery of learning to drive a car,” Austin says. “I like to challenge myself, dude. I ain’t getting that much stronger in the gym. I’m post-prime. But I get better every time I get in that buggy.”

In his first race in Yerington, Nev., in April 2023, a 250-miler, Austin ended up rolling. He and Kisman had trouble turning the buggy back over and lost 45 minutes but eventually finished the race.

A month later in Hawthorne, Nev., a dust plume obscured their view and they ended up crashing into another car and totaling the UTV. In July 2023 in Fallon, Nev., their car caught on fire.

“Anything can happen in the desert when you’re hauling ass,” Austin says.

Back in Yerington for a 300-mile race last September, Austin and Kisman finished second. Kisman said Austin couldn’t stop grinning. “On Cloud 9,” Kisman remembers. Then in October, Austin won his first race, a 350-miler in Virginia City. He’s won every race since — five straight heading into his biggest and most challenging competition to date, a 550-mile point-to-point race from Las Vegas to Reno on Aug. 16.

Inside his garage is a gym where Austin still puts in work every day. There’s a sauna he uses to prepare for the heat of race day. He has a cold plunge tub to help heal his muscles. Two green North Texas football helmets signify his days as a college football defensive end, hanging along with framed posters of high-profile pay-per-view events and mounts of deer.

“Racing in buggies, that’s coming close to wrestling, but it’s still a distant second,” he says. “I love racing those buggies. Outside of my wife, there’s nothing in my life — not playing college football — I’ve never loved anything as much as I’ve loved that business.”

Steve Austin says he loves “racing those buggies.” (Courtesy of Jeff Waldaias)

At one of Austin’s races last year, a fan sneaked into the race pit and zip-tied a Stone Cold Steve Austin action figure to his buggy window. Austin raced hundreds of miles before noticing it at the finish line.

“People who are local to those areas come out of the woodwork,” said Laura Butcher, CEO of the Valley Off Road Racing Association (VORRA), the circuit Austin competes on. “You get a sense of that megastar.”

Austin wants to be just another driver. Another competitor covered in muck at the finish line enjoying a cold beer. But to millions, he represents an untouchable time in wrestling history. Stone Cold made people feel seen. He made them laugh. Above all else made them believe.

Whether it was his famed feud with WWE CEO Vince McMahon that endeared him to fans or legendary rivalries with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson or The Undertaker or Triple H, Austin carved out core memories in the minds of his fans with his tenacity, deadpan humor and flippancy.

“A lot of America is blue collar: They work 9 to 5 and they drink cold beer,” said former WWE host Jonathan Coachman. “At our core, and I don’t think it matters what job we have, we’ve all had bosses we don’t like and bosses we don’t want to work for. He created a character that went after the big boss and went against the system.”

At his WWE Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2009, the sold-out crowd in Houston gave him a standing ovation that lasted more than three minutes. It went on for so long he eventually had to plead with them to stop.

“I’m just a scrub from South Texas and got lucky with the career as Stone Cold,” he says. “They’ve always given a (expletive) about me. I really meant something to somebody at some time.”

Austin was forced to retire at age 38 due to a series of injuries that became progressively more painful, none more so than the serious neck injury suffered at the 1997 SummerSlam event that left him with a bruised spinal cord and temporary paralysis. To this day, a cold shower can make the bottom of his feet feel like nails are being driven straight in.

On the cool concrete floor of the garage, Austin is splayed out on his back pressing the rewind button on that night 27 years ago when Owen Hart sent the top of his head to the mat with a piledriver.

“It certainly put a limit on the back side of my career, for damn sure,” Austin said. “Once you’ve been the guy, to go back and try and do something different when you’re the guy who got people on fire, there’s nothing that can take its place.”

Any online listicle of professional wrestling’s biggest stars has Stone Cold as No. 1, ahead of fellow legends like The Rock, Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, Macho Man Randy Savage and others.

Because of that, wherever he goes, fans find him. They’ll bring 30-year-old memorabilia to races for him to sign. Butcher routinely gets messages on social media from fans wondering how she got Austin to follow her. They ask if she can send them an Austin autograph or just relay their name to him so he knows there’s one more fan out there still thinking of him.

It may be hard to believe, but he once competed with long flowing blonde locks. He wrestled under pseudonyms like “Stunning” Steve Austin and “The Ringmaster.” The genesis of “Stone Cold” was created when his first wife offered him a cup of British tea and told him he better pick it up before the temperature turned, well, you guessed it.

Once upon a time, he was driving a forklift with aspirations of following in the footsteps of the renowned Von Erich family he once watched from the stands at the old Dallas Sportatorium in the 1980s. Compare that to the heights reached, to the immediate euphoria any arena was sent into when the noise of broken glass signaled Austin was soon to be strutting down that ramp.

“It’s a complete adrenaline spike because I’ve walked out as Steve Williams to flea markets in Dallas, Texas, to no music, to a symphony of silence,” Austin says. “I know what it’s like to feel like nobody gives a (expletive).”

When he first joined VORRA, fans drove hundreds of miles to small desert towns all over Nevada to get a glimpse of the man driving in the 316 Kawasaki buggy.

“People send me video clips of times of him back when he was at his peak on WWE. It’s still Steve,” Butcher said, “but at the same time, it feels like a different person. I have seen him turn it on, which is an incredible thing to watch.”

Stone Cold was fully resurrected, for at least one night, at Wrestlemania 38 in April 2022. There was one catch, though. Austin didn’t know it would be billed as a full-fledged match against Kevin Owens. If he knew it was going to be a nearly 40-minute show, he might’ve thought otherwise about accepting the invite. Expectations for Stone Cold are forever going to be too high and too impractical.

Even though the sold-out crowd inside AT&T Stadium knew the glass was eventually going to shatter, it didn’t minimize the collective roar released when Austin competed in his first match in 19 years.

Wrestlemania 38 found Stone Cold back in his old comfort zone. (Bob Levey / WireImage)

Back home in Texas, fans flung their arms in the air in honor of Austin. Thousands of phones were instantly raised recording the moment as if it were something out of a radical wrestling fan’s dream. Nobody ever thought Austin would be back in the ring again, let alone all these years later. It was nothing like the heyday, but it didn’t matter to Stone Cold loyalists. He rode a camouflage ATV down the ramp to the ring. It became a core memory.

For Austin, it was something that’s left him wondering.

“(Owens) got in the ring with the name Stone Cold Steve Austin, but he didn’t get in with the true Stone Cold who was a (expletive) machine,” Austin says. “When the ball rang, I was an (expletive). And he didn’t get that guy. That’s what I was mad about. I wanted him to know what it was like to be in there with the (expletive) when he’s on.”

After he pinned Owens, Austin found a familiar way and place to salute his fans — the turnbuckle with two Broken Skull beers tossed to him to chug as he attempted to catch his breath.

“The whole time I was drinking beer? I wasn’t advertising my beer,” he says. “I was just wetting my whistle because I didn’t know where the water was. I should’ve been more revealing at the moment. I wasn’t satisfied with it.”

Austin is a realist. About his age. About his history with serious injuries. About the necessary work it would take to get into shape to put on the type of spectacle needed to warrant another appearance of Stone Cold. Has he gone from the ring for good? Does Austin ever allow himself to go there and think about the next potential opportunity?

“You try to be the guy you were, you try to be in that alpha state. Although your mindset is there, physically you are not,” he says.

For now, he’s perfectly fine staying in Nevada, flood irrigating the alfalfa fields when necessary, bouncing from one endurance race to the next to be about that buggy life. He was recently invited to participate in a leg of a 1,000-miler next year where some racers voluntarily have catheters placed so they don’t have to pull over for bathroom breaks.

“A thousand miles?! That’s a challenge. I’m not going to do half of it and then turn the (expletive) wheel over to someone else,” he said. “I want to Iron Man. I just want to finish it. Because if you finish it, you won. In theory, finishing is a win.”

The sun is nearing its apex of the day now beneath the Sierra Nevadas. The breeze is picking up pace. Austin has practice buggy time planned in a couple of hours. He’s taken his watch off and is fiddling with it in his hands, eager again to get behind the wheel and zip through the desert’s dust. Then while thinking aloud, it suddenly smacks into him, like an old rival in the ring sending him to the floor.

“I said I won’t leave Nevada. It’s hard to get me out of this state,” he says. “But … Wrestlemania next year is in Vegas. That’s in Nevada.”

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic. Photos: Courtesy of Jeff Waldaias)