Batista Unleashed

by Dave Batista

  Where I did belong was in wrestling school, the Wild Samoan Training Center, to be exact. Taking lessons from the Wild Samoan himself, Afa Anoa’i.

  Afa is a legend in the pro wrestling world, but not too many people know that he joined the U.S. Marines when he was only seventeen. This was during the Vietnam era, when most people thought joining the military wasn’t really the coolest or smartest thing you could do. He came out of the service and began wrestling during the 1970s.

  He was pretty successful, but it wasn’t until after he taught his brother Sika to wrestle that he really catapulted to fame. In the 1980s, Afa and Sika formed the Wild Samoans tag team. I’m not sure how many championships they won altogether, but I know they had the World Wrestling Federation titles at least three times.

  Since he’s retired, Afa has become pretty well known in the industry as a trainer. There’s a whole flock of Samoans related to Afa who found their way into the sport because of him. Just in his family, there’s an all-star cast of guys he’s helped: Samu (his son), Rikishi and Yokozuna (his nephews), and Umaga.

  Afa’s school is located in Allentown, Pennsylvania. There’s a lot of wrestling history in that area; Vince McMahon’s father used to do television tapings there before World Wrestling Federation expanded into a national franchise. It’s not so far from New York and other big cities that you can’t get there in a few hours, but it’s far enough off the beaten track that a young guy can learn the trade without being completely distracted.

  MY FRIENDS WERE THERE FOR ME

  Like any other school, the Wild Samoan Training Center charges tuition. Not only did I have to come up with that, but I needed money to live on. Angie was working, but she wasn’t making all that much money and there was no chance of her supporting both of us.

  So I talked to my friends Jonathan Meisner and Richard Salas. Both Jonathan and Richard have been my friends for a long time; even today, they’re still two of my very closest friends. I’ve known Richard since high school, when he and I and his brother Wilbur—another close friend—wrestled together. He’s Filipino and we had a little clique going back then. I still kid him because he hooked me up with my first wife—though believe me, I don’t hold it against him. I met Jonathan a few years later through Richard, and we’ve been incredibly close for years and years. He still helps me out. I can’t even tell you how much he helps me out. He’s my closest friend in the world.

  When I went to them and told them what I wanted to do, they put their money where their friendship was. They bankrolled everything for me. It was probably around $150,000 altogether. They never ever once said no; they never even asked when they were going to get the money back. All they said was, “We know you can make it.”

  Really, they made my dream possible for me. They bankrolled the whole thing. They just did it on friendship. Those are friends. Real friends. I love them both very much.

  WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?

  We all went up to Pennsylvania together, my wife, Angie, and Jonathan and Richard, to check out the school.

  Afa was there. I recognized him immediately.

  And in a way, he recognized me. He came up to me and said, “Where’ve you been?”

  It was like I was the student he’d been looking for his entire life. He treated me like a son right off. Afa, he’s a big guy. He’s from a family of big guys. But there were no big guys for him to train there. Until I came. I was kind of like his pet project—his little toy.

  To this day, I think of Afa as a member of my family. I call him Pops. Anytime Pops calls me up to do an appearance, if my schedule permits, I make it my business to help him out. I’ve helped him raise money for his charity organization. It’s a debt I owe to him as a wrestler, and also as a person. He’s really been that good to me. I love him for that.

  ALLENTOWN

  We moved to Allentown, close to Afa. We packed our stuff in a tiny car—my wife owned a Honda Del Sol. I don’t know if you remember the Honda Del Sol, but it was a very small sports car, smaller than today’s Civic. You should have seen me in a Honda Del Sol. It was ridiculous.

  Anyway, we moved up to Allentown. The training center was in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, which is about forty-five minutes away. For a while, Angie was traveling back to Virginia to work, because it was so hard to find a job up there. We lived in the nicest apartment complex around, but just outside of where we lived, there were a lot of real rundown buildings.

  I don’t know about now, but at the time unemployment was real bad. Allentown was part of the “rust belt.” America’s industrial heartland had basically rusted by the late 1990s, as old industries suddenly found they couldn’t compete. A lot of jobs were lost when manufacturing started going overseas. Unemployment surged. Whole cities and regions were suddenly poor. You had a lot of social problems; still do.

  That pretty much described Allentown when I was there. There wasn’t a lot of work, and seeing young teenage girls pushing strollers around was not uncommon.

  I actually didn’t train with the class much when I was at the school. I was Afa’s own little pet project. He and his son worked with me a lot, personally, just one-on-one. Simple things. I learned how to run the ropes, how to take falls. Very, very basic stuff, but I had to learn it all.

  There was a gym in town called Phoenix Fitness. I couldn’t really afford a gym membership, but one day I went in and, hoping for a cheap rate, introduced myself and told them that I was trying to become a pro wrestler. They actually gave me a free membership for myself and Angie. They felt that I was going to make it as a professional wrestler. I’ll never forget their kindness.

  I’d never done much cardio work during my weight-lifting years. I started doing it in the ring, trying to get in better shape. That’s one reason that throughout those early years I consistently dropped weight. You can look back at the pictures and see me getting progressively leaner.

  I did a few matches while I was at the school, but they weren’t really matches. I’d go out there and hit the guy with a couple of things and kind of kill him. It’d take about thirty seconds and the match was over; I was out of there. I still had a lot to learn.

  THIS GODDAMN ARM

  I also had my first injury while I was training with Afa. It was a torn triceps, the same one that’s given me problems in WWE. I believe it must go back to a really early injury when I was lifting weights that were way too heavy. At the time, I didn’t notice any real problem, but I may have been setting myself up for problems later on. It was one of those things that you don’t realize at the time because you’re young, full of piss and vinegar. As you start to get older, the stuff starts catching up with you.

  Anyway, I was in the ring and I was doing front bump drills: you jump up in the air and land on your stomach. My arm had been bothering me, God, for a couple of years, to the point where I couldn’t do bench presses anymore, or even push-ups. I never really knew what was wrong with it, but it hurt like hell if I pushed it.

  That day it just snapped. It hurt like hell—and then some. I went to the hospital, and they said, “Oh you just pulled a muscle.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s swelled up twice as big as normal. I don’t think that’s a swelled muscle.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said one of the doctors. “Just take some Advil and you’ll be fine.”

  Uh-huh.

  That same night, my arm swelled up some more. The pain was so bad I had to go to the emergency room. They had MRIs done and we found out it was torn. I had to have surgery to reattach it.

  I was out for a few months. Soon after I came back, Afa decided I was ready to move on. He made a phone call to WWE and set up a tryout for me. The next thing I knew I was headed up to WWE headquarters in Connecticut.

  AUDITION

  I was terrified.

  I went up there with a bunch of other guys who were being tested for possible contracts. One had been at WCW for a while. He was very experienced and seeing him try out, doing all these high spots and comp
licated moves, made me feel like an idiot. I think Tazz was up there, too, working out. He’d just come over from ECW and was in the ring that day, working on some moves. I’ll always remember how good he was to me that day, just a real gentleman to me and my wife.

  The tryout was completely different from what I’d gone through at WCW. It was very one-on-one, very personal. I got in the ring with Tom Prichard. He knew I really didn’t know how to wrestle that much. What he wanted to do, I think, was check out my footwork, see if I had good balance, find out if I was agile.

  “We’ll just do what you know,” he told me, and away we went. We got in the ring and locked up a little bit. I hit the ropes. He had me show him some body slams and stuff like that, did a little bit of chain wrestling, and then I showed him my footwork. Tom wasn’t looking to bury me or run me into the ground. He just really wanted to know if I was athletic.

  Wrestling is not ballet, it’s very physical. But there is a dancelike element to it. You have to have enormous control over your body, how you move. Obviously, the look is important, but if you don’t have the athleticism and technique to back that up, you’re not going to be any good.

  You also need judgment and a kind of restraint. No matter what it looks like, we can’t manhandle guys in the ring. A wrestler had to use his strength in a way that not only entertains the crowd, but also protects the guy he’s working with. It takes even more strength sometimes not to hurt a guy than to just go ahead and pummel him. And it takes craft and art to make it look good while doing that.

  I was always afraid of hurting guys when I was starting out. I didn’t want to be overly powerful. That became a problem after a while. Because of the way I look, if I take it easy, really supereasy on a guy, it just looks like shit. The crowd is expecting me to be this big killer, which is basically the way I wrestle. If I lie back, that makes whoever I’m wrestling against look like a wimp. I have to go at it for real. They have to look good so I look good, and vice versa.

  I can brag about one thing: I have never, ever hurt anyone. To me, that means a lot.

  I think Tom saw that I understood that part of wrestling, even though I wasn’t at the stage where I could do it like an experienced pro could. I’m sure he liked that I was a real big guy but wasn’t clumsy on my feet, that I had real good balance and was athletic.

  And I also had the look.

  Bruce Prichard—Tom’s brother, who was in charge of development—walked by the ring while we were working. (Hard-core wrestling fans probably remember Bruce as “Brother Love,” the preacher man who helped ignite a number of feuds during the late eighties and the nineties. Brother Love managed Undertaker during the first year or so of ’Taker’s career at WWE.) Bruce took one look and kept going. Then he stopped in his tracks, took a hard look up, this time really watching me. I remember that look clearly to this day.

  It meant I could make it, if I worked hard enough.

  “IF I WERE YOU…”

  Bruce Prichard called me the very next day and said, “We want to offer you a contract.”

  I told him I’d like some time to think about it.

  “Well. This is what it’s going to be,” he told me. “We’re offering you this. You get your foot in the door and if I were you, I’d take it.”

  So I took it. There was never any question about it, actually.

  I was hoping they’d offer me a lucrative contract, but the truth is they didn’t. It was $650 a week. It was a yearlong contract, a typical developmental deal.

  Well, not typical. When I got out to the training facility, I found out I was the lowest-paid guy down there.

  I didn’t really care. Like Bruce said, I had my foot in the door. Angie and I packed the car and headed out for Louisville and Ohio Valley Wrestling.

  OHIO VALLEY WRESTLING

  Ohio Valley Wrestling—or OVW—is one of those regional wrestling franchises that can trace its roots pretty far back in our profession. Most recently, though, it’s been known mostly as a development circuit for WWE. Some of the biggest stars in the business right now have come out of OVW. John Cena, Boogeyman, Ken Kennedy, Randy Orton—I can’t possibly name all the people who worked at OVW and are now wrestling on Raw or SmackDown! or ECW.

  OVW has a regular wrestling school with different levels of training; the students range from kids who are really just getting a small taste of the business to veterans who’ve been injured and need to get back into show shape. Just as important from the fan’s point of view, though, OVW has a full slate of live matches as well as a television show. The television show is shot in the Davis Arena in Louisville. OVW house shows, which of course aren’t televised, are held throughout Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio.

  In a way, OVW works like the minor leagues work for baseball. WWE calls up OVW wrestlers for its own live events from time to time. This gives the people at WWE a chance to look at how the new talent is coming along, and gives young wrestlers a taste of the big time. And OVW wrestlers are all working toward the day when WWE calls and gives them a chance to appear as a regular or semiregular with one of the three “brands.”

  IN A WAREHOUSE

  Angie and I didn’t have much when we moved to the Louisville area. We had a futon and our clothes. At first they told us that they were sending us down to Memphis, so we made our plans for Tennessee, but then just a week before, they called and told us things had changed; we were headed for OVW.

  Anyway, we got all our shit together and we packed up a U-Haul trailer, attached it to the Honda, and drove out. I remember the first day we pulled in front of the training center, which was across the bridge from Louisville in Jeffersonville, Indiana. Now, I had thought it was going to be a high-tech facility. You know, “WWE TRAINING CENTER!!” A big-lights, latest-technology, top-of-the-industry, nothing-too-good-for-us kind of place.

  It was the biggest shit hole on the face of the earth. It looked like a goddamn abandoned warehouse with the windows all knocked out.

  I think my wife started to cry. And they weren’t tears of joy.

  BOOT CAMP

  It was tough for Angie at first, moving there. It was tough for me, too, but I was pursuing my dream.

  The inside of the training facility was just about as desperate-looking as the outside. There was nothing fancy about this place, believe me. When I got there, we had a ring that was such a piece of shit. If you stood in the middle of it, it would sink down about ten inches. They ended up putting in a new ring only because Big Show, who was a WWE star at the time, injured his knee and came down to OVW to rehab.

  Training was like boot camp. Drills, drills, and more drills. God, they’d just drill us to death. Then we’d do matches. I had tons of matches. I even had a few with big names. Every once in a while, we’d have big shows in Louisville. I remember a big match with Kane, and one where Kane and Undertaker tagged against me and DDP—Diamond Dallas Page.

  The first guy I did a practice match with was Scotty O—Scott Oberholser. I think he wrestled with WCW and us, but I don’t think he ever made it onto TV. The match was god-awful, because I didn’t know how to wrestle. The funny thing is, I ran into him recently at a WrestleMania and we were both amazed at how far I’ve come in the last few years. But back then I knew a couple of moves and that was it. And the matches were completely scripted for me, written down on pieces of paper: get in, lock up, shoot the guy off you, body slam. I had a lot of matches, but I never really got to work, to really push myself the way a good wrestler has to. All I was taught to do was string a few moves together. They showed me all the moves, but I never felt as if I really got control of them the whole time I was down there. And I think I touched the microphone like once, maybe twice, on the TV shows in two years.

  LEVIATHAN

  Jim Cornette was a talent developer and part owner at OVW. He created a character for me, Leviathan, which was pretty cool. It was kind of old-school, a little cheesy and hokey, but it was still real cool. I had a lot of fun with it, and a lot of people still remembe
r Leviathan. Every so often, someone even asks me to sign autographs as Leviathan.

  I was supposed to be a demon raised from the Ohio River. We actually went down there and shot it on video. It was pitch-black. I got in the water, which of course was freezing. Somebody had told me that there were alligators in the river. Being from the streets, I didn’t know much about rivers or alligators, so I believed them. The whole time I was in the river I was shitting myself, I was so afraid that some alligator was going to come up and snatch me.

  Synn, my manager, started doing this incantation, saying all this crap that nobody could understand. And I walked out of the water toward this bonfire they had going on the shore and growled like I was Frankenstein or something. There I was: Leviathan was born. Thank God we got it in one take, because I didn’t want to go back in—I didn’t want to get eaten by alligators.

  From then on, I was Leviathan. I was kind of an indestructible monster wrestler, not really human. Week after week, they broke everything imaginable over my head, bricks and chairs, just to show I was invincible. Meanwhile, I’d go home every night with a headache.

  But it was really cool. That was my first taste of being on TV, and of course I was wrestling every week. The problem was, the matches I was in were really short. I’d come out and squash whoever I was matched up against. That was the kind of character I was. Who’s going to beat a superhuman monster?

  Leviathan. A good character,

  The bad part is, I never learned how to work because the matches were over so quick. And the character really didn’t have much to say. I looked great—I had the body of a wrestler. But I really didn’t know how to use it.

  To show you how bad I was: I remember this one match I was having with Kane in some casino. It wasn’t for OVW, it was some independent circuit. Kane was wearing a mask at the time, and while we were wrestling, he was laughing under his mask. Really roaring, because I was stinking up the place so bad. There was one point where I was supposed to give a spear. He yelled, “Spear, spear!” So I gave him a half-assed attempt at a spear, but it looked like I just ran up and gave him a big hug. And that’s the way the first half of my career was. I looked like a million bucks, but I didn’t know how to wrestle and I just stunk.