Batista Unleashed

by Dave Batista

  Maybe I was overlooked. But the fact is, I never really said much. I didn’t do much. I pretty much set up guys for Randy or Hunter; that was my role. I’d have a big match with guys who would beat me and then move on to Randy or Hunter. I was just kind of in the background.

  If I hadn’t gotten better as a wrestler, if all those nights and mornings driving in the car and being schooled by Hunter and Ric and everyone else had been wasted, or their words pretty much had gone in one ear and out the other, if most of all I kept being afraid of being myself, then the odds are I’d have remained in the background. Evolution would have run its course, and I would have gone on quietly, I guess, staying on the edge of success, a guy with potential who wasn’t quite good enough to command the limelight.

  But then one night I went to Buffalo, New York, and had some fun.

  Real fun.

  And the world changed.

  On the Road

  FLASHBACK—WRESTLEMANIA 21

  Writing down my thoughts stirs up a lot of memories. One of the biggest highlights of my career so far has to have been WrestleMania 21.

  It was at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, 2005. The place was packed to the rafters. Rey Mysterio defeated Eddie Guerrero, Edge won a Money in the Bank Ladder match. Undertaker pinned Randy Orton, Kurt Angle took Shawn Michaels. John Cena defeated JBL.

  Some of wrestling’s greatest stars from the past, including Roddy Piper and Hulk Hogan, shared the ring for the induction into the WWE Hall of Fame.

  And then, it was our turn. Triple H and me, in the final event of the night.

  The lights went down. Motörhead began playing “The Game” at the edge of the stage. Fireworks shot off. Triple H rose in the middle of the band, spitting water. The crowd roared over the music as he headed to the ring. Everyone was on their feet. The spotlights caught Hunter as he climbed the ropes, showing off his championship belt.

  “Time to play the game,” said Motörhead’s Lemmy as the band ended their song.

  The lights came up. My music started to play.

  I came out onstage, walked side to side, bounced a few times, then headed down the ramp toward the ring. On the way, I paused and wiped a tear—a real tear—from my eye. I’d come so incredibly far in just a few years, from nowhere to headlining WrestleMania. It was just overwhelming.

  Hunter waited in the center of the ring. As I climbed in, the crowd remained on their feet…

  Five

  CHAMPION

  Evolution put my career on the fast track. But the road to my championship started unexpectedly, really by accident.

  Within weeks, I was on a rocket-ship ride with only one destination: WrestleMania 21.

  STEALING THE SHOW

  November 22, 2004. Buffalo. Raw.

  It started as a big joke. It was so trivial I can’t even remember exactly why we did it. I think we were trying to get Hunter out of a match, give him a reason to take a break or something. And it wasn’t even that big a spot. All I did was tease the crowd a little bit: Hunter gave me shit about a match and I turned on him, just a little, saying that maybe I wasn’t happy with being in Evolution, and maybe I was going to quit.

  The crowd was so sucked into it that by the end of the night they were chanting, “Ba-tis-ta! Ba-tis-ta!”

  It was the first time I’d ever heard that so loudly. And it was a total accident. I just went out and had some fun. The more the fans reacted, the more I got into it. It seemed natural, even easy. Forget a lightbulb going on—the sun had come up in the middle of the darkest night.

  At the end of the night, Hunter and I were laughing. We thought we’d fooled everybody. We figured we’d just go on the way we had been. But after the show, Vince called and said, “Man, it was your night. You stole the show tonight. That’s awesome.”

  Hunter called, too. “We’re so happy for you,” he said. “That was great.”

  A VERY SLOW TURN

  Over the next few weeks, we started playing with the animosity between me and Hunter. Just a bit.

  It was a very slow turn. That was something the business hadn’t seen in a while. It wasn’t an overnight turn. It was very slow and deliberate. That was all Hunter’s doing, too. He was really big on us not having a match until ’Mania. And by then, people were just dying to see it.

  The ratings started shooting up as well. I don’t really get involved in that, and I know it only secondhand, from other people. I could definitely feel the crowds pulling for me, though. While the conflict between Hunter and me was building, the crowd was turning me into a babyface. They were cheering for me and just pushing everything in that direction. And the more they wanted it, the more possible it became.

  Hunter is the one who believed in me enough to make me a star. He pushed me to the highest level possible. Hunter made me a star. He believed in me and he used himself to make me a star. I think Vince may have believed in me because Hunter believed in me, but Vince was good enough to take him at his word and hand me the ball.

  I think I made the connection with the crowd somewhere at the point where I was afforded the right to go out and kind of be myself and not try to be a big bully brute. I’m just not a bully. I’m not someone who’s always growling at people. I’m pretty soft-spoken and, I think, pretty humble and mild-mannered in real life. I’m huge, so don’t fuck with me, but I respect people and try and treat them the way I’m treated.

  Of course, push me and I’m on you with all the vengeance of a wild animal. Unleash my anger at your peril: that’s what happens in a match.

  I think the fans kind of connected to that somewhere and they just started taking a liking to me. Of course, I think too that the crowd likes it that I have an intensity when I wrestle. And I think the crowd’s always partial to guys who are big and muscular. I think that’s a common thing in our business. They’ve always liked guys who are big and muscular, like Hulk Hogan, Goldberg, Ultimate Warrior, The Warlord—big guys who can do serious damage.

  At some point, not only did my showdown with Triple H become inevitable, but it became clear that we would be fighting for the title. And that I had a good shot at getting it.

  A FUCKING KILLER

  Nobody ever came up to me and said, “You know where we’re going with this one.” Or “We’re going to do a title change at ’Mania.” It’s one of those things where you never really ask. You’re afraid to ask, especially if like me at the time you’ve never had the title. You don’t want people to think you want it too badly. Of course you do want it. But it’s such an honor and a privilege to be in a main event of WrestleMania. So you just don’t ask.

  What you do is listen.

  There are rumors and gossip, and just about everyone has an opinion. A lot of times it doesn’t have much to do with anything based in reality, it’s just words. But sometimes I’d hear some of the agents saying things like, “We’re going all the way to the top with this one.” Remarks like that gave me a sense of how real the run at the championship was.

  I remember Arn Anderson was working with me and someone else one time and he made a point about how a match needed to be all about me. He said something like, “We’re going all the way with this one, so this match needs to be right. He needs to look like a fucking killer.”

  Things like that fired up my hopes.

  JUST A BLUR

  The days leading up to WrestleMania 21 are really blurred. I don’t think I slept the whole week before the Pay-Per-View. On top of all the excitement and anxiety, I was having a lot of problems with my back. I had two bad discs in my spinal column. My left leg was pretty much numb. My sciatic nerve had been pinched or injured somehow. Not only was that really scaring the hell out of me, but I was having a real hard time training.

  It figures, right? The biggest match of my career and I was having physical problems.

  Finally, the day of WrestleMania came.

  WrestleMania isn’t just the biggest event of the pro wrestling world, it’s one of the biggest events in the entir
e world. I’ve heard that more people see WrestleMania around the world than see the Super Bowl, and I can easily believe it. The crowds are immense, there are celebrities from just about every walk of life there, and the atmosphere is electric.

  And then there’s the television audience. It’s huge in the U.S., of course, and it’s just as big with our fans around the world. In the more than twenty years since it was started, WrestleMania has been the highlight of the sports entertainment year.

  By slamming Ric, I completed my turn to face.

  WrestleMania 21 was held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California. News reports said tickets sold out in less than a minute—which was a new record for the company. My match with Hunter was at the end of the night, but there was plenty of action leading up to us. Rey Mysterio and Eddie Guerrero had a terrific, terrific match; Undertaker extended his undefeated WrestleMania string by pinning Randy Orton, and Kurt Angle and Shawn Michaels gave the crowd a twenty-seven-and-a-half-minute show before Michaels finally submitted to a Kurt Angle ankle lock. John Cena defeated JBL—John “Bradshaw” Layfield—to take the WWE Championship.

  And then it was our turn.

  As I walked out to the ring I started having trouble breathing because I was so tense. The atmosphere was just exploding. Motörhead did Triple H’s theme song live. The crowd was definitely into the show.

  I don’t remember a whole lot of the match, but I remember that right before I set Hunter up for the Batista bomb, I thought, “Oh my God, this is it.”

  Five years before, I was thirty years old and trying to start a career a lot of guys retire from at my age. Four years before, I was a big kid with a body and little else going for me as a wrestler. Three, two years before, I’d been a pro wrestler, but far from the big time. And a year ago, I’d been a guy so afraid of screwing up that I may have been headed for the discard pile.

  And now I was seconds away from being the World Heavyweight Champion.

  All I thought was, “I can’t fucking believe this is happening.”

  I did my finish, pinning Hunter. The house erupted as we hit the canvas. I pinned Triple H, and I was the champion.

  When I was handed the championship belt, I just broke down. A flood of emotions came out. I cried right there in the ring, for real.

  DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER

  All the boys and everybody was waiting for me when I got backstage. They were clapping. I was crying. They were smiling.

  I mentioned earlier that I didn’t do a good job when I proposed to my wife. It was half-assed, not the classy proposal she deserved. And we were so broke when we got married that we gave each other these cheap silver wedding bands, which she’d paid for out of her very small salary as a waitress.

  Our circumstances now compared to then were as different as night and day. So before WrestleMania, I went out and bought her a diamond engagement ring from Tiffany’s. I’d been looking for something nice for a while, and every place I went to said that they were second best to Tiffany’s. So I said fuck this, I’m just going to go to Tiffany’s. I want the best.

  I gave it to Stephanie McMahon to hold and arranged for Angie to come backstage right after the match. When Angie met me, Stephanie slipped me the ring in its blue box. I had Hunter’s blood all over me and it got all over the box as I handed it to my wife. She’s probably the only woman in the world who got an engagement ring from Tiffany’s in a box covered with blood.

  She opened it and just started crying. I bent over her and I started crying, too.

  Then I asked her if she would marry me, using the words I’d wished I’d used those many years before.

  She kind of fell into my arms. It was a magical night.

  A STORYBOOK CLIMB

  I think it was special for the other people who were back there in gorilla with us, too. A lot of people took pictures. Shane McMahon gave me a copy of one he took. I still have it.

  I also still have the bottle of Cristal champagne that Steph and Hunter gave us. We never opened it because that night I was so exhausted and in pain that we just went right to sleep. We wanted to save it for a special date. That date hasn’t come yet, but hopefully it will.

  That was my night, but I wanted it to be our night. Angie had been with me all along, I wanted to make it special for her.

  Becoming champion was huge, but becoming champion at WrestleMania was even more special. And doing it by taking the title from Triple H—well, if you’re talking storybook, it doesn’t get any better than that.

  This was it. I became the World Heavyweight Champion.

  I rose to the top extremely fast. I always tell people that Ric and Hunter put me on the fast track to becoming champion. If I hadn’t been able to ride with them and pick their brains, I wouldn’t have learned as much as I did, not nearly so fast.

  The funny thing is, since I’d started so late, I was a lot older than most guys when I became champion.

  I think that may have helped me in a way. You take a guy like Randy Orton. He started wrestling really young and became, I believe, the youngest World Champion ever. I think that was his downfall. He just wasn’t ready for it He just didn’t have the maturity and ended up having some personal issues that got a little out of hand. I would like to think that now he does have the maturity. Now he’s older and you can see that he acts more in line with what the profession expects from a champion.

  Frankly, I don’t know how he did it at all when he was twenty-four. If I had gotten the title at twenty-four, I would have cracked.

  PAIN

  In some ways, I almost did crack in the weeks and months right after I got the title. Not because of the pressure of appearances and such, but because of the pain in my leg and back.

  We went to Australia soon after WrestleMania 21, and it was there that I think that I finally broke down and got a prescription for painkillers. I had never used them before. It’s not a regular thing for me, even now. I don’t believe in them. I’ve seen guys get hooked on them, and I’ve also seen guys out of their mind on them. I don’t want to be one of those guys in the ring with half his wits about him. If I ever become dependent on painkillers, I don’t belong in this business.

  The pain in my back was so bad that not even the pills the doctors prescribed could get it under control. When we came back from Australia, the doctors started on this treatment with epidurals in my spine to take care of it. The discs still bother me a little bit once in a while, but proper medication got it down to a manageable level.

  THE COMPANY FACE

  Football players joke that they’re going to Disney World if they win the Super Bowl. A wrestler who wins at WrestleMania and becomes champion definitely doesn’t go to Disney World—unless it’s part of a promotion. One thing’s for sure: he doesn’t take a vacation.

  What you do as champ is pack your bags and hit the road. You’re suddenly in a lot more demand. You’re the face of the organization, and you’re expected to show yourself in as many places as possible. When other guys are having days off, going home and taking it easy, you’re still on the road, doing interviews and appearances, and promoting this or that. Even at home, the champ ends up on the phone a lot, doing interviews for the media or whatever.

  Being champion involves a lot more than just walking out into the arena with a big gold belt. You have to bust your ass in every way possible to fill up the arenas. Your job is to put asses in seats. You work harder, and at the same time, you have to keep yourself in top shape, because a champion can’t look soft. No one can, but especially not a champ.

  You participate more, even in backstage stuff, coming up with ideas and contributing to the show. You work with the younger guys who are coming up. You set an example.

  I can’t tell you how important leadership by example is in WWE. That’s huge with us. I’ve tried to make my mark by remembering that.

  I have to say, Ric and Hunter helped groom me for that stuff. I was definitely still learning when I got the job. But I knew what to expect. I k
new the weight that would be put on my shoulders.

  And I wanted it. I really did. I still do. I still want to be the face of this company. It’s such an honor. Even after all this time, it’s still an honor and a privilege. I don’t mean to sound cheesy or hokey or anything. But there’s a lot riding on the guy who’s wearing the gold. The company is counting on you to carry that weight.

  Greeting the fans Down Under.

  Photo 5

  I accept that. It’s why I’m in this business. I look down on anybody who doesn’t aspire to be the champion. I don’t even understand how they could even be in the business if they didn’t want to be on top.

  There are sacrifices, though. Your family takes a hit. It’s hard to be a pro wrestler without some stress and strain on your family, some emotional injuries.

  In my case, though, a lot of the wounds were self-inflicted.

  On the Road 2/4/07

  CHICAGO, BOUND FOR OMAHA

  I literally travel thousands of miles every week. The majority of times, maybe nine out of ten, things go pretty smoothly.

  Maybe four out of five.

  The bad times tend to bunch up, and after the Super Bowl Sunday show in Urbana, Illinois, they come in a pile. I’m traveling with Ken Kennedy and Bobby Lashley; we meet up at the airport and hit the only food place just before it closes, buying out the last of the tuna salad and nacho cheese dip. Kennedy has his fifth and sixth cans of Red Bull energy drink for the day, while Lashley struggles with one of the rudest airline ticket clerks going—and they’re a rude breed—trying to make sure he’s booked on the right flights.

  Through security, we find out that our plane to Chicago has been delayed—a bit of a problem, since we have to make a connection there to Omaha.

  There’s nothing to do but wait. The plane shows up about forty-five minutes late, which happens to be exactly how much time we were supposed to have to make the connection at O’Hare.