Batista Unleashed

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Batista Unleashed Page 11

by Dave Batista


  Arn has always been real big on making things very simple. As a wrestler, he would do things people could relate to. They weren’t huge spots. Like he’d kick somebody in the knee. You kick somebody in the knee, that’s dirty. That hurts. It’s something nasty, especially if you’re a guy like me who’s big and usually wrestles guys who are smaller.

  Why would somebody my size kick somebody in the knee? Why? Because I’m a dirty fucking prick. I’m a nasty-ass heel.

  Arn taught me something else that has always stuck with me. Heels make you uncomfortable. One example: when I was in the ring beating up on somebody, he suggested I lean in over them. He told me to get uncomfortably close. Hover over them, be in their space. It’s a bully thing.

  That’s what a heel is.

  Arn was never a big physical specimen. But he made people hate him. He was just a nasty prick in the ring. I wish Arn had extended his career, because I would have loved to have had a chance to work with him in the ring. He was forced to retire because of injuries. Wrestling fans missed out on a lot when he went out.

  ARN AND RIC

  The funny thing is that even though Arn and Ric are the greatest of friends, really big friends, Arn would just cringe at some of the things that Ric does in the ring. Arn is very serious, a brutal, serious heel. Ric is just—well, over the top.

  Hilariously goofy.

  Ric is famous for doing a spot where a guy will give him a sunset flip and end up pulling his trunks down. Ric will run around the ring with his ass hanging out while the crowd roars.

  We were doing six-man tags with me, Hunter, and Ric during Evolution. They wanted to do a three-way thing where we would do a triple sunset flip and end up with our trunks down, running around the ring. I at first refused to do it. My character was serious; I had the enforcer role and it didn’t seem to fit. But Ric and Hunter did it, and of course everybody loved it. So Ric and Hunter gave me shit about it, just tons of heat, so the next night we all did it. Of course, we made total asses of ourselves—excuse the pun—running around with our trunks down to our knees, dragging guys around behind us.

  Arn Anderson was the agent on the house show, and he was backstage. We walked back into the locker room and there he was, up on a chair, one end of his belt tied around his neck, the other in his hand about to be tied to a pipe.

  He’d seen enough. He was about ready to hang himself.

  It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

  BOUNCING FOR THE FACES

  Part of being a successful heel is making people hate you. You watch someone like Mr. Kennedy, for example. He just goes out and practically from the first word out of his mouth he’s egging on the crowd. He just riles them up until any one of them would give a year’s salary to spit in his face.

  But there’s a lot more to being a successful heel than getting people to hate you. When we were in Evolution, we were badass heels, but look what we did for the guys who came in against us. We’d bounce around for them and make them look like a million fuckin’ dollars.

  Even guys who weren’t the best workers, in terms of making a match look real. Take Goldberg, for instance. He’s a great guy, but he’ll tell you, he’s not the best worker. He has a hard time with the psychology and story that you tell inside the ring; it’s hard for him to translate that into something with his body that sucks the fans in. The people he works with have to do a good job to make the match look good.

  A babyface’s success depends a great deal on the heels he’s facing. It’s all in how you make them look. A good heel will make your babyface look like Superman. Or you get a guy like Scottie Steiner, who was an awesome worker, but by the time he came to the company, he physically was having so many problems that it was hard for him to do anything. And he’s a great guy, by the way, so I don’t by any means want to show him any disrespect. Take nothing away from Scottie. His matches when he was at his peak were excellent, entertaining as hell. But by the time he got to our company, he had a lot of physical problems. He really needed a break. We’d bounce around for him and by the time we were done he looked like the baddest motherfucker on the planet. Even with Randy Orton—who started out as a heel with us on Evolution—when we turned Randy into a babyface and started bouncing around for Randy, by the time we were done, Randy was the man.

  Doesn’t happen without a good heel.

  SUSPENDING DISBELIEF

  There’s a technical term that we use in our business for sucking the audience into the show. We say we’re trying to get the audience to “suspend its disbelief.” I think the phrase actually comes from theater, but it really fits pro wrestling.

  The first time I heard it was when I was at OVW. Jim Ross came down and talked to us. He was still head of talent relations back then and he gave us a whole lecture on it. I didn’t know what the fuck he meant at first. Even when I understood the words, it took a long time to translate them into things that I could do.

  People come into a wrestling event or turn on the television knowing that what we do is entertainment. They don’t believe it’s real. In order for us to entertain them, we have to get them past that disbelief. Basically, we’re making them forget that they’re watching entertainment. We don’t want people to say, “Gee, that looked fake.” We want people to say, “God, that looks like it fucking hurt.”

  Sometimes the way we do that is by doing things that do really hurt.

  I’ll give you an example. Probably my favorite match of all time was a Hell in a Cell match with Triple H at the Vengeance Pay-Per-View not too long after I’d won the championship for the first time. We used a chair wrapped in barbed wire for the show. The cameras did a close-up after he whacked me and you could see the blood spurting out of the holes in my back.

  This isn’t the sort of thing kids should be copying, by the way. The stunt was carefully thought out and planned.

  We didn’t do any rehearsals, though—I only wanted to go through that once. It’s one of those things where you just kind of brace yourself and say, “Fucking hit me!”

  And he did.

  But whether it’s big spots or little spots, these things are tools we use to get people sucked into the match. Once we get them on the edge of their seats and make them want to see who’s going to win, that’s when they’re in the palms of our hands. That’s the art of it. And that’s not easy to do.

  MR. MAGOO

  Right at the start of Evolution, I rode in a car with Ric, Hunter, and Randy Orton. The old-timers will tell you, you learn more in the car than you learn anywhere else. Believe it. If you get with a veteran, you’re going to get schooled. You leave a show and the match is still fresh in your mind. The older guys will tell you what you did wrong, and what you should try. Do this, do that. They take it apart for you. They also tell stories about how what you did relates to something somebody did five, ten, twenty years ago. There’s this great oral tradition that goes back, way back. Riding with Ric and Hunter was like getting an advanced seminar in wrestling every night.

  But being in the car with them was fun, too. They were entertaining as hell, whether they were telling stories or just doing funny stuff.

  I have to say Ric and Hunter are two of the messiest guys I’ve ever known. They would start the day off with a nice clean shirt. By the end of the day, both of them would have stuff all over their shirts. Ric would start it off in the morning, because he never got in the car without a cup of coffee. It never failed; there’d be coffee all over his shirt within minutes. If we went out to eat, both of them would get barbecue sauce and whatever splattered all over themselves. They’d dip their cuffs in their drinks. They were just messy.

  Driving itself was an adventure. Hunter used to always refer to Ric as Mr. Magoo. I think Ric’s legally blind in one eye. And he’s very easily distracted. His wife, Tiffany, always says that he’s got adult ADD—attention-deficit disorder—and that he’ll stop at everything that distracts him. He’ll go, “Ooh, something shiny!” That’s it, he’s distracted. He s
tarts talking, he gets distracted.

  Put those two things together when you’re driving, and you’re going to get lost. A lot. And Ric is always lost.

  But he insisted on driving. One time, we were going to Norfolk to do a show. Ric was at the wheel and we were lost, of course. We were completely on the wrong side of town. Ric tried to convince me and Hunter that they had moved the highway from one side of Norfolk to the other, and that’s why we were lost, not because he had taken the wrong turn or anything.

  “I’m telling you, I’ve been coming here for thirty years,” he said. “They moved the freaking highway.”

  He was serious. And Hunter started giving him shit, and Ric started getting hot, trying to convince us they moved the highway from one side of the city to the other side of the city. He just insisted he was right.

  It wasn’t uncommon for Ric to go up a one-way street the wrong way, or to go ninety miles in the wrong direction. But we were always so entertained by him that we didn’t learn our lesson and kept letting him drive.

  LIFE LESSONS

  To this day, I won’t take driving directions from Ric, but I always tell people that Ric has taught me tons in the ring, and more about life.

  Ric is one of those guys who enjoys every second he’s breathing. He makes life tolerable on the road. He finds the best in every place he goes. He’s one of those guys who seems to bring the party around with him. He has a good time, enjoys life, and shares that joy. If he’s there, the party’s there. He just enjoys people.

  I can’t really pinpoint a specific wrestling lesson he taught me. Ric never sat down and said, “Here, let me teach you this move.” It was really more about wrestling as an art form. How to get the crowd on their feet. How to get the most out of your match. When and where to do things, where to put things in your match, at what point you want to start bringing the crowd up. I learned by watching him do it.

  Typically, Ric makes Hunter and me look like we don’t know what we are doing.

  Sometimes it took a while to figure it out. We used to do six-man tag matches a lot in Evolution. Sometimes Ric would lose us.

  Hunter and I would be standing in the corner and Ric would be in the ring. We’d look at each other, baffled.

  “What the hell’s he doing?” Hunter would ask.

  I wouldn’t have a clue. He was out there improvising on his own, and he was four or five steps ahead of us. He’d go through all these things and we’d finally realize he was making up something that moment to suck the crowd in.

  That was really the thing that made him so good: he knew how to read a crowd.

  I think a lot of fans don’t really know why certain matches are better than others. I don’t think they can pinpoint it. But I think subconsciously, they know one guy’s match is a lot better than another guy’s match.

  For the most part, we all do the same moves, so there may not seem to be that much of a difference. But the way Ric explained it, a lot of the difference comes from when and where you put those moves in. It’s how you sell the feeling to the crowd. A move at the right time has much more impact than the same move, or even a better one, at the wrong time.

  For Ric, it comes down to listening to the crowd. If you’re paying attention to the crowd, waiting for them, pumping them up and giving them what they want—then you have a great match. Two different sets of guys can have two identical matches, doing the same moves in the same order. One set listens to the audience, takes its cue from the fans, really sells the match. The other set doesn’t. Who’s going to have the crowd on their feet by the end of the day?

  I think you can learn that—I did—but I also think that certain guys have more of an instinct for it than others. I think Randy Orton, for example, has it naturally. Maybe because he grew up in the business. He had more instincts for it.

  RANDY ORTON

  Randy didn’t last too long riding around with us. I think he felt like he was riding around with a bunch of old guys. He needed to be with guys who were a few years younger, a little more tuned to a younger lifestyle, younger tastes. He can be such a moody bastard, too. You couldn’t be moody in front of Ric or Hunter.

  Randy came at the business from a much different angle than I did. His father is Cowboy Bob Orton, who’s in the WWE Hall of Fame. His grandfather was The Big O—Bob Orton, Sr.—and his uncle was Barry Orton. Their friends included guys like Andre the Giant and Roddy Piper. Weekend gatherings at the Orton house were like wrestling hall of fame shows.

  Like me, Randy put in his time at OVW, coming over to WWE in 2002. He’s got a great look and great physical strength. Even though he’s run into some troubles during his career, I still think he’s got intense potential.

  My thumbs-up, thumbs-down thing came out of something involving Randy when Hunter kicked him out of Evolution. Of course, it was kind of a ripoff from the Roman Empire and the gladiators in the Colosseum. Thumbs-up, thumbs-down, does the gladiator live or die?

  Then later on I did it to Hunter when I turned on him. Vince McMahon saw it and loved it so much that he wanted me to keep doing it. Now people get with it. They throw their thumbs up with me, then down with me. They’re ready for the finish. They’re calling for me to feed my opponent to the lions. And I’m happy to oblige.

  STONE COLD

  I was lucky enough to get to work with Stone Cold a little bit during Evolution. Physically, he was still recovering from his neck injury, so it was a pretty small spot. But it was still a thrill for me.

  I went out and had a little physicality with him in the ring. I can’t remember what it was, but he wanted me to start beating him up. And it was one of those things where I’m saying to myself, “This is Stone Cold Steve Austin. I don’t want to mess up.”

  I forget exactly what I did, but at one point I suggested he do something to me. He said, “No, go ahead. This is for you, kid. Get yourself over.”

  He let me beat up on him a bit. He was very generous about it. He was trying to give me a little rub, and he did.

  There was another time we were doing a backstage television vignette together. He was very helpful. I remember him saying, “Why don’t you do it like this?” And he got up in my face and he started doing my lines.

  “Does that feel uncomfortable to you?” he asked when he was done.

  I said, “Yeah, it really does.”

  “That’s how it should feel.”

  Exactly. When you get a lesson like that from Stone Cold Steve Austin, you don’t forget it.

  I don’t know Steve that well. But I do know that when Stone Cold walks through that fucking curtain, there aren’t many people in the world who can compare to him. He’s a phenomenon.

  His Austin 3:16 (“…I just whipped your ass!”) and his Stone Cold single-finger salute were where that whole WWE attitude thing came from. He’s got an electricity about him. He would make the whole crowd stand up on their feet just with his entrance alone.

  But he’s another one of those guys who is no great physical specimen. He’s not huge by any means. You’ll never look at him out on the street and think, This guy could kill me with his bare hands if he wanted to. When he hits the ring, though, he’s the baddest motherfucker on the planet. He’s got the it factor coming out of his ass. When he’s in character, he believes it, and the crowd believes it. He also happens to be one of the best workers of all time.

  The funny thing is, he got fired from WCW before he came over to our company. I believe Eric Bischoff, who was running WCW at the time, said he wasn’t going to amount to shit. And look what he did. He really changed the whole tone of wrestling. He’s a good dude. I wish I knew him a little better, because I’d sit down and pick his brain.

  Man, I bet he has some fucking stories.

  STEAL THE SHOW

  Not all of the advice I received in my early days in Evolution came from other wrestlers. Some of the best advice came from the boss.

  Soon after I started in Evolution, Vince McMahon pulled me aside. I was still tenta
tive. I wasn’t wrestling very aggressively, and Vince knew it. He felt that I should be more full of piss and vinegar.

  “What the fuck’s wrong with you? Why don’t you have a little attitude?” he told me. “You walk around here, you always try to stay low-key. It’s good to be humble, but we really need you to have a little bit of an attitude.”

  This is the boss of the company telling me this. Forget his character on the show—this is the guy who made sport entertainment what it is today.

  “Dave, I want you to get in there and be aggressive. I want you to steal the show,” he said. “I’m giving you license to do whatever the fuck you want.”

  He wanted me to be a star. He wanted me to steal the spotlight. He encourages that. Vince loves hams—guys who are going out there trying to steal the spotlight. That’s where it gets competitive. We’re trying to top each other. That’s all part of being a star in this business.

  It’s not easy to steal the spotlight with guys like Ric and Hunter right next to you. But that’s what I had to do if I wanted to succeed, and Vince made that clear.

  VINNY MAC

  Vince is a fucking character. I think a lot of people take him wrong. Don’t get me wrong, he can be a fucking asshole. He’s ripped me apart on a few occasions. But I think deep down, Vince is just a real locker-room guy, one of the boys. He’s down to earth. Probably even a little bit shy. He’s someone you can always talk to on any level; you don’t have to talk business with him. He’s even interested in goofy shit that happens on the road. “Hey, Vince, I was out last night, and this hot girl showed me her tits.” He loves to hear those stories.

  But Vinny Mac is the boss.

  Right before the last Survivor Series in 2006, when I won the title back, I blew off a photo shoot I was supposed to do. I had a reason for blowing it off. I had been scheduled for appearances on both of the days just before it, one in New York on Friday, one in Houston on Saturday. That Saturday night I had to fly up to Philadelphia. By the time I got back to Philly, it was late and I was exhausted. The next day was going to be a big deal for me, because I was going to win the title back in the Survivor Series. So I decided to get some sleep and not go to the photo shoot that Sunday morning. I didn’t think it was a big deal.

 

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