Revealed: How Vince McMahon reacted when Stone Cold quit WWE over Brock Lesnar push

"Stone Cold" Steven Austin left the WWE in 2002 over a disagreement about him putting over Brock Lesnar on the latter's path to becoming "The Next Big Thing".

Now, SmackDown Live commissioner Shane McMahon has opened up about the incident and revealed how Vince McMahon reacted when the Texas Rattlesnake quit the company.

Shane, on the recent The Steve Austin Show, said the superstar leaving the WWE was "devastating" and Vince was personally hurt because "you guys had been building a good relationship".

Shane said Austin should have had talked about it with Vinny Mac, but instead he just walked out never thinking about how his departure would impact the company as he was the guy "that was drawing the houses and everything was built around him".

He continued: "So when you have that much equity at stake and you have your number one player in there and that's the one who draws money all of a sudden say, 'I'm out,' well, it's very devastating, obviously, to everyone else underneath and everyone felt it, just like, 'wow', so [Austin] specifically, you let a lot of people down.

"If you guys did have a disagreement, you'd settle it quickly and talk about it."

Recently, on the Lilian Garcia: Making Their Way to the Ring show, Austin said he felt the script "didn't make sense from a booking standpoint" when he was doing extremely well with tickets sales and merchandise in his career.

Austin, however, admitted that he should have told Vince about how he felt. "What I should've done was gone to the building man to man, face Vince McMahon and said 'Hey you know I don't really like Ed and here's why I don't like Ed'".