by Dave Batista
I got a call from Vince. He started ripping me apart, saying I was being unprofessional. Which I thought was kind of ridiculous. I mean, I was busting my ass here, but then I missed one thing and rather than being tired or something, bam, I’m unprofessional.
I started laughing, kind of out of a little bit out of nerves, I guess. The more I laughed, the more pissed he got. He really laid into me. Vince is one of those guys, he’s pretty intimidating. By the end of that phone call, I felt about two inches tall.
I haven’t missed a photo shoot since, and don’t plan to, either. Tired or not.
Vince also trains harder than most of the guys I’ve ever met in my life. Which always impresses the piss out of me. I watched Vince go through a couple of training sessions. He used to train with this guy Gary who was in security for us for a while. Man, they literally busted their asses. You think a guy sixty years old is not going to train that hard, but man, he’s hard-core.
THE COURSE OF EVOLUTION
The Evolution story line built up from late fall 2002 until the end of January 2003, when the “stable” was officially announced. Ric and Hunter were the heart of Evolution; they linked the past and present together. Randy and I were seen by a lot of people as the future. Some of our best opponents over the year and a half or so that Evolution ran included Kane, Scott Steiner, Booker T, Shawn Michaels, Chris Benoit, Edge, Chris Jericho, Goldberg, Shelton Benjamin, and Maven. I’ve probably forgotten a few; blame it on the bumps they gave me in the ring.
In his book, To Be the Man, Ric talks a little bit about how great an honor it was for him to be part of Evolution. He also talks about Hunter and how great a performer he was. According to Ric, Hunter had been talking about putting Evolution together from the beginning of 2002. Ric talks about how Evolution seemed to complete a circle in his career. For me, it was an incredible launch.
At one point—Armageddon 2003—we held all of the WWE championships: the World Tag Team Championship (Ric and I), the WWE Intercontinental Championship (Randy), and the World Heavyweight Championship (Triple H). But before that happened, both Randy and I went out with injuries.
TRICEPS
We’d only been doing Evolution for a few months when I tore my triceps in March 2003. I felt terrible at the time, because I was working my way toward my first WrestleMania, at that point only about a month away. The injury was pretty serious and took me out of play for several months.
Randy got injured in the same match. It was brutal. We were in Pennsylvania, doing the television show. It was freezing cold, and we didn’t get a chance to warm up or anything before we went on. Randy and I were facing the Dudley Boys—Bubba Ray Dudley and D-Von Dudley—in a tag team match.
Right off the bat, I ran into Bubba awkwardly. I felt my triceps strain. The triceps is the long muscle that runs along the underside and back of your arm. Most of the time, we take it for granted, but if it weren’t there, we’d never be able to extend our forearm or have our shoulder muscles do any useful work.
My arm felt funny, but it didn’t really hurt; it didn’t feel as if I’d completely torn anything, though I could tell I’d done something a little more extreme than a pull. So anyway, I started wrestling in the match and my arm started hurting a little more. Then a little more, then a lot more.
I went over and tagged Randy, and told him I did something to my arm.
I swear not more than thirty seconds later, he came back and was tagging me, saying, “I think I broke my foot.”
I’m laughing just thinking about this, but it wasn’t very funny then.
“Well, my arm’s killing me,” I told him.
I went in just the same. D-Von was in the ring with me, and I told him I did something to my arm. He called a spot while I had him in a hold and I reminded him, “Hey, I got something wrong with my arm.”
I forget now exactly what he wanted me to do, but I think he wanted me to catch him in a cross-body block. In a cross-body, which is also sometimes called a flying cross-body, one wrestler jumps onto you, ordinarily across your chest, and puts you down to the mat. Two good hands to catch the other guy are pretty much required, which is why I wanted him to do something else.
For some reason D-Von ran the spot anyway. I caught him, but as soon as I hit the mat, I felt this hot, excruciating pain. My triceps had been ripped.
BUBBA DUDLEY IS AN ASSHOLE
The match continued for a while, and it was just a nightmare. When it ended, they hauled Randy out in an ambulance. I followed in a car. Even Bubba Dudley got hurt, injuring his back.
Or so he claimed.
See, the thing that really, really drives me crazy about that night was that Bubba Dudley bitched out Randy while he was being put into the ambulance. Bubba started yelling at Randy, claiming that because of landing on Randy’s foot, he had hurt his back.
Excuse me?
Because Bubba broke Randy’s foot by landing on it and crushing it, Bubba’s back hurt and it was Randy’s fault.
Yeah, that’s it. Randy’s in the ambulance with a broken foot and Bubba’s screaming and yelling at him.
And you know, usually if somebody gets injured in your match, or even if it’s just a guy you work with, at some point you try to give him a call to check on him and see how he’s doing. You want to show a little bit of concern. He’s a coworker, and whether you were responsible or not, it’s just a polite thing to do. The right thing to do. Show you care.
Needless to say, Bubba never gave me or Randy a call just to see how we were doing. Nothing.
In my opinion, Bubba Dudley is a jerk-off. He’s one of those people who used to always bully guys and throw his weight around just because he had a good position in the company. He’d been around for a long time and he was one of those veterans who’d always treated the rookies like shit. He treated me like shit. He treated Randy like shit. To this day, I can’t forgive him.
I don’t have a whole lot of bad things to say about people, but Bubba Dudley will always be a piece of shit in my book.
MY FIRST BAD INJURY
So anyway, I went to the hospital and had an MRI done. It told me my triceps was torn. I had to have surgery to repair the tear. Of course, injuries are an occupational hazard for wrestlers, but this was the first really bad injury I’d had. It took me out of the ring for nearly seven months.
Part of the reason I was out so long was that I reinjured myself maybe two and a half months after the surgery. I was trying to get back into shape. I was gung ho, and was looking forward to starting to work out and get back into full shape so I could wrestle again. But while I was out running, I fell and re-tore the muscle. I just fell and landed on it wrong and it popped apart again. It actually didn’t hurt that much, but it was obvious that I’d torn it. I guess I hadn’t had enough time to heal and the repair wasn’t strong enough yet.
For some reason, people started spreading stories about what happened. I just don’t know why they’d do that, but they did. People were spreading rumors on the Internet that I was on a treadmill and fell off and re-tore it. Others “suspected” I was in the gym lifting weights and I re-tore it. It’s kind of strange that people spend energy coming up with stories about things that they have no idea about.
Not to discount the physical injury, but I believe I hurt emotionally more than anything else. It was pretty heartbreaking. I’d been really hoping to be in WrestleMania that year, and of course that couldn’t happen. And, since I was still new with Evolution, I was afraid that I would lose my spot. No matter what anybody tells you, I think you’re always just a little bit afraid that if something goes wrong it will blow your career. At least that’s the way I felt.
And they did start talking about replacing me. If I’m not mistaken, at one point they even looked at guys who might take my slot. I was very fortunate that Hunter felt strongly that Evolution wouldn’t be the same without me. So they held out and waited through the spring and summer for me. That’s a very long time in the wrestling world. I’m still t
hankful for that.
I should also probably mention that most wrestlers don’t get paid while they’re injured. In my case, I went back to my guaranteed salary, which wasn’t that much; it was barely enough for me to live on, though I was grateful for any income at that point.
Of course, when I came back to work, because I had already exceeded my guarantee, in effect I had to pay the money back. Which really sucked.
Wrestlers are paid according to a complicated formula. When you get hurt, you don’t get paid anywhere near your normal salary.
So you might think about that the next time you hear or read a rumor about someone faking an injury.
I’M BACK
I remember my first night back was on Raw, October 20, 2003. We were in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. I did a run-in on Goldberg, flattening him. According to the story, Hunter had put a contract out on Goldberg, and I saw that as the perfect opportunity to get myself back into the ring.
Coming back against Goldberg was big for me on a personal level, because Bill was one of the guys I really followed when I started watching pro wrestling again as an adult, just before I made the decision to try it myself. I was a huge Goldberg fan. I still am, as a matter of fact.
Bill made his name in wrestling with an undefeated string in WCW in the late 1990s. He won something like 173 matches—some sources give different numbers—from the very beginning of his career until a match against Kevin Nash in 1998 at WCW’s Starcade Pay-Per-View, a fight he lost because Nash’s friend Scott Hall nailed him with a taser. His streak included a win over Hulk Hogan for the WCW championship in July 1998. After WCW was bought by World Wrestling Federation, he wrestled for a short time in Japan and then in 2003 came over to WWE; he wrestled with the company for about a year before retiring.
The thing that made Goldberg and especially his unbeaten string so impressive was his intensity. You just believed he was wiping the mat with these guys. God knows he’s not the best worker in the world—Bill admits it himself. But that intensity. He just makes people believe. And he’s a great guy in real life. I can’t think of one bad thing to say about him. I don’t think anyone could.
A STIFF PRICK
That match in 2003 was the first time I’d ever faced Goldberg in the ring. It was brief—I did my run-in, grabbed a chair, and crushed his ankle. It was supposed to put him out of business for good.
Of course, the next week he came back with a cast on and killed us all. He beat the shit out of Evolution for the next few months.
I mean that literally. Goldberg is one stiff prick.
I’m joking, because he’s such a great guy with a big heart and a good sense of humor. Bill really is “stiff” in wrestling terms. For anyone who’s still new to the sport, stiff means that the wrestler hits his opponents harder than most other wrestlers do, not because he’s trying to hurt them, but because he can’t make the spot or whatever look real without doing that.
Bill would never intentionally hurt anybody. He’s just a big, strong, physical guy, and a lot of his stuff looked real because it was real. We’d bounce around for him in the ring and by the end of the match we’d be lying on the mat, bruised and battered.
I’d yell over at Randy, “Randy, you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay. Hunter, you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay. Batista?”
“I’m still here, man.”
We always checked with each other to make sure we got out alive.
BUSTED NOSE
Sometimes the most dangerous time for a wrestler isn’t during a match. What’s that statistic or saying about bathtubs being the most dangerous places in the world? Whatever it is, I can top it—a birthday cake busted my nose.
We were in Seattle doing Raw—this must have been toward the tail end of 2004, though I’ve forgotten exactly when. Anyway, we did this thing where we had a huge cake set up in the ring. It was supposed to be a celebration of Evolution’s birthday, because we’d been together for a year or so. A stripper was supposed to come out the top. I’m sure you’ve seen the gag a million times.
Except this time, instead of a stripper, Randy Orton popped out. He jumps out and the first shot he throws is an elbow to my nose.
Bam. He shattered it. My nose exploded all over the place. It was still bleeding later that night on the red-eye flight back east.
I couldn’t get it fixed for something like two months, because I couldn’t take time off until our Christmas break. It swelled up to about twice its normal size. Not only was it broken, but my septum was deviated. The septum is the cartilage in the nose that separates your nostrils into two separate paths for you to breathe through. Screw it up badly enough and you have trouble breathing. In my case, there were days it was almost impossible to breathe, and my asthma didn’t help much. A lot of nights I couldn’t sleep. I was one miserable son of a bitch until I finally got it fixed.
I think the week or so after surgery was even worse. I had these tubes shoved up my nose to keep the passages open and I was so irritable and grouchy that my wife went and stayed with her mother. She just had to get away because I was being such an ass. I couldn’t blame her, either.
ARMAGEDDON
Evolution ran a little more than a year. There were a lot of highlights, a lot of good matches, especially as time went on. I had a good show with Bill Goldberg, an Evolution run-in at WrestleMania XX that people still talk about, and some nice spots with Kane and Shelton Benjamin.
But maybe the biggest night for me came at Armageddon, December 14, 2003.
That was the match where I had my first really big single showdown with Shawn Michaels. I remember being in the ring first and watching him make his entrance. It was so surreal, it felt like a dream. It felt like I was watching TV. This is Shawn Michaels, a guy that I had watched and admired for years. The fact that I was there just didn’t seem real.
Shawn Michaels was known as a great technical wrestler and heel well before he and Triple H launched one of the all-time great heel cliques, D-Generation X, in 1997. D-Generation X helped push World Wrestling Federation and wrestling in general in a whole new direction. Together with WCW’s New World Order, D-Generation X helped make attitude an important ingredient of professional wrestling. Together with Stone Cold Steve Austin, D-Generation X helped bring millions of new fans to pro wrestling.
Recently, Shawn has been part of a resurrected D-Generation X, or DX as it’s come to be known. A whole new generation of kids are turning on to our industry because of Shawn.
He and I worked a house show right before the Pay-Per-View, because he wanted to feel what it was like to be in the ring with me. I remember Shawn telling me that he was thrilled to death, because I was a big muscled kind of guy but didn’t try to manhandle him inside the ropes. He was very surprised that I was relaxed in there. I learned something important from him that night, and it was like that lightbulb going on in my head that I mentioned earlier.
I’d always thought going into the “heat”—the point at which the heel really has his moment to shine, when he pulls some sort of nasty or dirty move and it looks like he might win the match—that the heat had to be a big elaborate thing: the heel has to hit somebody with a chair or kick him in the balls, do something really nasty and underhanded. But when I went in there with Shawn, I learned that the heat can be a lot simpler, and therefore more effective.
We were calling the match in the middle of the ring. I think we were in for two minutes when he said, “Shoot me off and give me a clothesline. Rip my head off.”
So I shot him off and gave him a clothesline.
“What next?” I asked.
“Nothing. We’re in the heat.”
The crowd was with us, just on that simple move. He sold it, and then we turned it up. The crowd was so into things that we didn’t need anything nastier. He sold what I did to him, and the more I hit him, the more they wanted to see him get into his comeback.
ME AND “THE MAN”
It was at that same Armag
eddon that I won the Tag Team Championship with Ric Flair. Even today, it’s one of the highlights of my career. My name is linked with Ric’s in the history books forever, which to me was like a dream come true.
The match was a Tag Team Turmoil match, which has two teams start off in the ring; once one team is down, the next team comes on. The Dudleys were the champs going into the match. There were six teams; we weren’t on the original card. The Dudleys were the third team in, I believe, and it looked like they were the winners outlasting the others. But then Eric Bischoff—he was playing Raw’s general manager at the time—came out and announced that one more tag team was waiting for its turn. Ric and I came out and we flattened the Dudleys.
Believe it or not, not only was it the first time I won a championship, but it was the first time that Ric had won the World Tag Team title as well. It’s hard to believe, since he’s been around so long, but it’s true. We held the title until March 2004.
You know what pops into my head sometimes when I’m talking to Ric?
I think, This is not real. This can’t be real. I’m sitting here talking to Ric Flair, one of the greatest wrestlers of all time, and he’s my friend. I won the championship with him.
Amazing.
IT CLICKS
Being in Evolution was fantastic for me. But my role was small compared to the other guys’. I think that at the end of 2003, the beginning of 2004, everyone was focused on Randy Orton as the future of the company. I don’t mean that as a jealousy thing from my point of view, or to suggest he didn’t deserve being looked at that way. Randy has got a hell of a lot of talent, and tremendous potential.
