Batista Unleashed

by Dave Batista

  She got really excited and said, “Don’t kid around. Don’t joke.”

  I said I wasn’t kidding. I was nervous, you know, and not very good at sharing my emotions about something as important as that. Maybe I was worried she’d say no. I sure wasn’t kidding.

  She said yes right away.

  I think that might have been a Friday or a Saturday. We went and got married on a Monday. We just went to the courthouse in jeans. Angie bought us a pair of silver wedding rings. They were thin and simple, all we could afford. Mine didn’t even fit. When we got to the part in the ceremony where you put the ring on your spouse’s finger, she had to settle for jamming mine only halfway up.

  We left the courtroom and went over to the motor vehicle department to get her license changed so her new name would appear on it. I think they weren’t supposed to do it right away for some reason. But the clerk felt so bad because Angie was so excited, so happy about being married, that she did it for us. That was the only wedding photo we had, Angie’s picture on her license. I still smile, thinking about that.

  There was a hot dog stand down near the courthouse. So we got chili dogs and orange Gatorade. That was our wedding feast. On every anniversary, that’s what we would eat, chili dogs and orange Gatorade.

  We were broke. We lived in a tiny apartment. We had no furniture to speak of. We had a bed and a TV, but nothing to put the TV on.

  But man, were we in love.

  WRESTLING

  It was during the short time that I was up in Minneapolis that I became interested in pro wrestling in a serious way.

  Sometime around then I started watching the shows, which I hadn’t really done since I was a kid. I loved DX, D-Generation X. I was a big fan of Shawn Michaels and the other guys in that stable. And Goldberg. I’ve always been partial to the big wrestlers, large guys who could just dominate an opponent. And then there was The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin. How could you not love those guys, especially Stone Cold? I just loved his fuck-you attitude. Little by little, watching all those guys, I started to think about what I might do if I were a wrestler.

  Curt Hennig, whom I’d admired for a long time, and the original Animal, Joseph Laurinaitis, both used to train at the gym I worked out at, which was called The Gym, over in Plymouth, Minnesota. In fact, J. R. Bonus, the owner of the Powerhouse Gym—which was in Roseville, another suburb of Minneapolis—had wrestled for a short time in the American Wrestling Association, or AWA, which used to be based in Minneapolis and was one of the great old wrestling franchises in its day.

  I mentioned Curt Hennig and his career earlier. As I said, injuries shortened his time with the company, but he was still working out and in good shape when I met him in the gym around 1997 or 1998.

  Like Hennig, Laurinaitis was also originally from Minneapolis. He began wrestling as the Road Warrior in what was then Georgia Championship Wrestling back in 1982, but it wasn’t until the following year when he joined with Hawk—Michael Hegstrand—that he started getting some real heat in the profession as a member of the Road Warriors. At that point, Laurinaitis became known as Animal. He and Hawk wrestled in Japan and for the old NWA before coming over to World Wrestling Federation, as WWE was called at the time.

  They would come into the gym and work out and were very encouraging to me. They thought I had a good look and suggested that I might be interested in wrestling.

  This was at the height of the competition between World Championship Wrestling and World Wrestling Federation, the so-called Monday Night Wars which pitted WWE’s Raw against WCW’s Nitro. Wrestling boomed incredibly in the 1980s and 1990s. The first WrestleManias were cultural phenomena, bigger than anything the sport had ever seen. They were as big as the Super Bowl and twice as fancy. The competition from WCW in the late nineties made pro wrestling even bigger. The two companies went head to head for a while, and it seemed like everyone in the country was into wrestling. These were the days of D-Generation X, the New World Order, Hulk Hogan’s monster turn to “cool” bad-ass heel. Wrestling wasn’t just big, it was titanic.

  A lot of bodybuilders looked at it as something they wanted to do. Most of them, I have to say, thought it would be easy.

  For some reason, WCW decided to hold open tryouts around that time. They were advertised on TV. It kind of sparked my interest, and when I got back to Virginia, I decided to take a shot.

  I still really didn’t know what the hell I was going to do with myself. I thought I looked the part, people had told me I could do it, and so I said, “Hey, I can be a professional wrestler.” I really had no fucking clue what I was in for.

  I’M A DYING COCKROACH

  The tryouts were held at the Power Plant, which was WCW’s training facility at the time in Atlanta. I went down with a buddy of mine, Lance Treadway. Lance was just about the same size as me; I was about 340, Lance was about 320. We completely dwarfed every other guy trying out in the class. I thought we had pro wrestler written all over us.

  But the lead trainer didn’t.

  They called him Sarge. He’d wrestled in the mid 1990s as Buddy Lee Parker and I believe his real name was Dwayne Bruce. I think he was five six. Maybe. He was a little midget. He really was. He looked like a little fire hydrant, a jacked-up fire hydrant with stubby legs.

  We got out there and he jumped right in our faces and started running us into the ground. He started with free squats, which are your very basic squats with no weights. He was relentless. He put a bucket under our ass, and he made sure our butts touched the bucket every time we squatted.

  Now, you have to understand, we’re big guys, and after a while, those squats were literally killing us. We couldn’t breathe and our legs were water. The guys behind us, they were 170 pounds, 180 pounds, and they were doing half squats and laughing at us.

  Sarge worked us to the point where my buddy’s nose just exploded. He started bleeding all over the place.

  Me, I began puking on the floor. But I did keep going.

  Sarge just kept running us into the fucking ground, with these squats and other calisthenics. I was doing them right in my puke. Then he told us to lie on our backs.

  Except that wasn’t good enough.

  “Scream ‘I’m a dying cockroach,’” he told me. “Scream ‘I’m a dying cockroach.’”

  Doing that—yelling anything—takes what little breath you have away. But I did it.

  We were starting to get really pissed now. Lance was really mad. I think he bumped some guy who got a little too close to him. It wasn’t a gentle bump, either.

  Sarge kept dumping on us. I think he had the biggest Napoleon complex of all time. He was determined to run us into the ground and prove that he was better.

  Finally, when we were completely exhausted but somehow still alive, he came up to us.

  “Forget it,” he told us. “You guys are out of here. You’re done. You’ll never be professional wrestlers. You guys don’t have the fucking heart. Get out of my class.”

  So we left.

  HEARTBROKEN

  It makes you think.

  I had this guy who never amounted to anything tell me I would never be a professional wrestler, that I didn’t have what it takes. And a few years later, I was headlining WrestleMania. What does that tell you?

  I wonder how much talent he chased out of there. The goddamn WCW went under not too much longer after that. Maybe there’s a connection.

  In my opinion, Lance had a lot more potential than I ever had. Except for his nose. But Sarge and the experience at the Power Plant stifled Lance’s wrestling ambitions for a long time. He still has a dream, believe it or not, of being a pro wrestler, but he hasn’t made it yet.

  Hey, Sarge, if you’re reading this—I think about you every day, you fuckin’ piece of shit.

  Yeah. You’re a fuckin’ piece of shit.

  On the one hand, though, maybe Sarge did help me, because he pissed me off enough to say, “Fuck, I’m going to make it.”

  On the other hand, that
sure wasn’t what he was trying to do. He was trying to humiliate us, and he pretty well did that.

  On that day, when I went home, I wasn’t feeling like I was going to show him up or prove I could make it in WCW’s rival or any other wrestling franchise. All I was really feeling was heartbroken.

  Photo 3

  On the Road 2/4/07

  SOMEWHERE IN ILLINOIS

  More nights than not, I’m the last one out of the locker room. Which is a pain for the security guys, because they can’t move on until I’m out of the building.

  They’re patient tonight. By the time I’m done, the truck has already been packed and is heading up toward Urbana, Illinois, and tomorrow’s show. It’s past midnight; they have a couple of hours of driving ahead of them.

  So do I.

  It’s started to snow and the Lincoln is covered with a light frost. I brush it off and get into the car. I’m real lucky tonight—not only did a friend of mine start it up for me so it’s nice and warm when I get in, but none of the boys played with the seat or the radio. A lot of nights I get into the car and my knees are slammed against the steering wheel and country music is blasting in my ears.

  I like all kinds of music, but not that. Not at one in the morning.

  Or is it two?

  The GPS system gives me directions and I head out of the parking lot toward the highway. Sixty seconds later, I’m stuck in a back alley behind a utility building, squeezed tight against a fence and a stack of cement blocks.

  I can see the highway, at least. I back out, fishtail around and ignore the one-way signs, and finally find the road.

  Most weeks, our shows are at night, and I can sleep late the next day. But tomorrow is Super Bowl Sunday. To make it easy for people to see the game after our show, we’re starting early, at one o’clock in the afternoon. Because of that, I had to change around my hotel reservations. I know from experience it will be best to get up to Urbana first and then sleep; the hotel is only a mile or so from the arena, and even if I get to bed late it’ll be easier to get up in the morning and get there on time. But it means driving when I’m exhausted, at the end of a long day.

  I break the long, post-midnight run from Carbondale with a stop at a Denny’s somewhere in the dark Illinois countryside. A young waitress who says she’s just working the midnight shift to bring home a little extra money for her family shows me to a table in the back. She looks at me kind of funny as she hands over the menu.

  “Anyone ever tell you that you look like Batista?” she asks, ducking her head a little bit as if she’s trying to poke her eyes under the brim of the cap I’ve pulled low over my face.

  “Man, I am so tired of hearing that,” I say. Partly that’s a joke, and partly that’s a plea to get away unrecognized.

  She seems to think I’m serious and goes away. Truth is, with my cap and street clothes and heavy winter coat, I don’t really look like the World Heavyweight Champion who was strutting into the ring just a few hours ago—at least I don’t think I do.

  But the fans know. It’s dumbfounding—and humbling—but they sure do know. It turns out that the waitress really did know but was trying to be polite.

  The restaurant manager comes over with my iced tea a short while later. “We do know who you are,” she tells me. “But we want to respect your privacy.”

  Fair enough. I appreciate that.

  While I’m waiting for my food, I try to call home to see how my daughter did on a test she was going to take today. I have some other calls I’m supposed to return, too, and even though it’s ridiculously late I take a stab at it. But one by one people start losing their shyness and come over to see me. There’s a little girl who’s crying she’s so excited about getting an autograph, and then a waiter comes to talk about how his little brother would really be amazed to get an autograph.

  Once you’ve been on TV, people want your autograph. Some fans are really cool about it, waiting until I’m done eating or whatever and asking very politely. Others, a few, can get pretty obnoxious. A few think that the price of a ticket or just turning on the TV entitles them to every part of your personal life. And since you’ve given up your personal life, they can have an autograph any time they want it, even if you’re on the phone or eating—or trying to do both at the same time.

  Those are the extremist fans, though. Not everybody’s like that. A lot of people are really pretty polite. And some are so nervous, they don’t even realize they’re being rude.

  Tonight, I end up posing for photos with the whole staff. They’re so jittery they have trouble with the camera, and it’s quite a while before I’m back on the road.

  When you’re tired and hungry, the attention can be a bit of a strain. But the truth is, I am grateful for my career and I understand what the fans are looking for. They want to connect with the good guy, have a hero in their lives who struggles against all the bad shit that happens to them in this world—a crappy day at the office, tough times at home. It’s all stuff I went through, and still do.

  Outside, the snow has stopped. I gas up the car at an all-night gas station nearby and get back on the road…

  Three

  DUES

  In 1999, I turned thirty years old.

  In a lot of professions, that’s nothing. If you’re a CPA, a lawyer, a teacher, a businessman, you’re really just getting started at thirty. You can look forward to another thirty-five or forty, maybe even fifty years in your career.

  But in wrestling, thirty is damn old. And it’s one thing if you’re thirty and you’re in the prime of your career. If you’re thirty and you haven’t hit the big time, it’s pretty ridiculous to think that you’re going to go anywhere. A lot of wrestlers have to hang up their gear by the time they reach their midthirties. Their bodies just won’t do what needs to be done.

  A guy like Ric Flair is an obvious exception—he just keeps going and going—but even Ric was a champion at age thirty.

  Me?

  I wasn’t even in the ring yet.

  CRUSHED

  I really had my heart set on wrestling. Despite my fiasco at the Power Plant and Sarge’s bullshit pronouncement that I didn’t have what it takes to be a wrestler, I wanted it in the worst way.

  Most bodybuilders think to themselves that they can become a pro wrestler, but most who try to do it find out it’s a lot harder than they think. Instead of trying to change their way of life to make it, they give up.

  I didn’t do that. I pursued it with everything I had. It was really out of passion and desperation.

  I say desperation because I really was desperate. I didn’t know, I didn’t want, to do anything else. It was all or nothing.

  It had taken me forever to figure out what I wanted in life. I’d drifted into bouncing and working in gyms, not really with much of a plan. It was good work and I liked it. I even got paid pretty well at times. But when I started taking an interest in wrestling, it was different. There was a real passion there.

  I’m not going to compare it to love. Love is a different thing, something between people. You know that and I know that. But I really felt a deep desire to make wrestling my life. I started watching the shows a lot and thinking of myself as a wrestler, figuring out what I would do. I was really into it. Every other possibility in life suddenly closed off. That was what I wanted.

  Being told that I didn’t have what it took, that I would never be a wrestler, crushed me.

  For two or three days. Then I started making phone calls.

  “YOU SERIOUS, SON?”

  One of my calls was to World Wrestling Federation. I was just a voice over the phone to them, but whoever answered initially passed me along to someone. I don’t remember who, but I do remember what he said:

  You serious, son?

  I said I sure was. He recommended that I go to wrestling school first to learn the basics, and told me about the Wild Samoan Training Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He may also have mentioned that I could talk to Jim Cornette, who was helpin
g spot young talent, the next time WWE came to town.

  It just so happened that World Wrestling Federation was coming into town for a house show at the MCI Center in D.C. right around that time. So I went down there and went up to someone and asked if I could speak to Jim Cornette.

  I’ll take a little time out here to mention Jim Cornette’s background. A lot of his two decades or so in the business has been spent helping develop new talent and getting guys ready for WWE. He’s also done booking and on-camera work, been a promoter, and most recently was with TNA Wrestling. Some fans might remember that he started Smoky Mountain Wrestling in the early nineties. By the time I heard about him, he was with the company, helping develop new faces. I ended up training under him a year later or so at Ohio Valley Wrestling, or OVW.

  So anyway, I went down to the arena beforehand and just walked in. Nobody ever said anything to me. I was there for a little bit. One of the promoters at the time, Doug Sharfsburg, came up to me and asked me what I was doing.

  “I’m looking for Jim Cornette,” I told him. “I was told I could meet him here.”

  “What do you need him for?”

  “I was trying to get a job, and—”

  “Security!”

  Doug called security on me, and before I could get much of an explanation out of my mouth, I was thrown out of the building.

  Nobody was going to make this easy for me.

  Photo 16

  That’s me with Afa.

  AFA

  Doug was just doing his job. A couple of years after that, when I was with WWE, we were doing a house show at MCI and I ran into him. I reminded him of that night.

  “Oh my God, was that you?” he said.

  He felt so bad that from that day on, whatever I asked Doug for, tickets, whatever, he’s given me. He’s probably apologized a hundred times. But he thought I was just some guy who wasn’t supposed to be back there. And at the time, I guess I wasn’t.