Batista Unleashed (17 page)

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
Armageddon
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.

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.