Batista Unleashed

On the Road: Leaving St. Louis

one
DEAD MEN

On the Road: Carbondale

two
WEIGHTS

On the Road: Somewhere in Illinois

three
DUES

On the Road: Urbana

four
EVOLUTION

On the Road: Flashback–WrestleMania

five
CHAMPION

On the Road: Chicago, Bound for Omaha

six
THE LOVE OF MY LIFE

On the Road: Halfway to Sioux City

seven
SMACKDOWN!

On the Road: Sioux City

eight
COLLATERAL DAMAGE

On the Road: Omaha

nine
BACK ON TOP

On the Road: Omaha

ten
ROAD STORIES

On the Road: Omaha

It’s Saturday afternoon, February 3, 2007.

I’ve just arrived at Lambert International Airport in St. Louis, Missouri. It’s a little after one, and I have a show tonight at seven thirty. That sounds like a hell of a lot of time, but the show is in Carbondale, Illinois, a hundred-something miles away. Not only do I have to get myself over there, but I want to find a gym and a tanning salon beforehand. And I have to eat, because I’m starved.

There’s a problem with the car rental—the car hasn’t been reserved. It takes quite a while to work it out. Finally, the computer coughs out the right paperwork and I’m on the road.

So much of this business is on the road, traveling. As the highway unwinds, I have a million things on my mind, including this book, which the publisher has been after me to finish for a few months now.

When they first asked me to write it, I was flattered, but I really wasn’t sure about doing it.

What do people want to know about me? And why do they want to know? I don’t pretend to be a deep thinker. I don’t talk that much. When I do, I say what I honestly feel, and I say it plainly, in just a few words. That’s rare today, maybe—enough to have gotten me in trouble at different times—but that’s not a reason to write a book.

I went ahead and agreed to it, but even then I hesitated, stopped and started. Finally, I figured I would just plunge in and see what came of it. Doing it has made me think about things that have happened to me—events that rushed past me at the time. And it made me think about pro wrestling, why people connect to it, and how wrestlers go about creating our art every night.

I’m still not sure that’s enough reason to write a book. But this is it.

Every story has a beginning. Mine is in Washington, D.C., in 1969.

Washington, D.C., in the sixties, seventies, and eighties was one of the poorest places in the country. Murder was common. Crack cocaine was just getting its start. Life expectancy for kids was worse than in many third world countries. The politicians were corrupt, homelessness was at its peak, and even law-abiding people viewed the police as the enemy.

But to me, it was home.

I won’t say I was unaffected by the poverty and crime around me when I grew up. It’s not like I lived on a safe cul-de-sac around the corner from the ghetto, either: three people died at different times in my front yard before I was nine. But to me, D.C. wasn’t the life-sucking hellhole it was for a lot of people. And the big reason for that was my mom.

FAMILY

I was born January 18, 1969.

For some strange reason, the date is a big controversy in the wrestling world. At some point very early in my career, someone wrote a story somewhere saying that I had been born in 1966. That year seems to have stuck with a lot of people for some reason. There have been other dates published, too. There have been so many, in fact, that when I give the right date, some people think I’m lying about my age.

I swear to God, it’s like it’s a big deal.

Just last week some guy told my girlfriend I was lying about my age, that I wasn’t really thirty-eight, that I was forty-two. Maybe he was trying to pick her up, I don’t know.

I don’t lie about my birth date—I try not to lie about anything, but especially not that. It’s no secret that I came to the business really late. I was almost thirty when I got into wrestling. That’s real old for a wrestler starting out. I never lied about my age then, so it would be really crazy to lie now. And if I
was
going to lie about my age, I wouldn’t say I was thirty-eight. I’d knock at least five more years off.

I have a sister, who was born about a year later than I was. Our parents weren’t very original when it came to naming us. I was named after my father, David Michael Bautista. I’m Dave Junior. My sister was named after my mother, Donna Raye Bautista. She’s a junior, too. It made it easier for people to remember our names.

(I spell my name Batista for wrestling, but on my birth certificate it has a
u
after the first
a
.)

My father was born in Washington, D.C., but his family was from the Philippines, and as a wrestler I’ve always felt a strong bond with the fans in the Philippines because of that family connection. His father, my granddad, was in the army; he didn’t talk much about what he did, but I know he was in World War II and was wounded or hurt in some way. The family legends have him down as a hell-raiser when he was young, but I don’t know much more than that.

I always heard that he was a real ladies’ man, and that he got into some trouble in San Francisco when he was younger. Supposedly he was running numbers for gangsters and did something for which, for some reason or another, they wanted to kill him. Whatever it was that he did, trouble chased him out of town and he came east.

Those bad days were long gone by the time I came along, and he never told me about them, even though I was his favorite and he wasn’t afraid to show it. On the contrary: he used to brag about it.

According to the family stories, my grandfather would never really hold any of my cousins or me when we were babies. He wasn’t the nurturing type. But then one day my mom had to run to grab something burning or something like that and she just threw me in my grandfather’s arms. His face lit up. By the time she came back to get me, he and I had bonded somehow. From that day, I was his favorite grandchild. I still remember him asking how much I loved him and holding my hands out to say, “This much!”

When he died in 1988, it just broke my heart. He’s buried in Arlington Cemetery, an honor reserved for men and women who have served our country.

My grandfather had a bunch of jobs in the Washington, D.C., area, but I only knew him as a barber. He had his own shop in Oxen Hill, Maryland, an old-fashioned place with four chairs in it. He had to be one of the most popular guys in the neighborhood. Everybody knew him. You’d go into a McDonald’s with him or just walk down the block and everyone would say hello. He was very friendly and very well liked.

He was also a very generous grandfather. When I was around six or seven, we lived real close to the shop, maybe a few blocks away. I’d go into the shop and sit in his chair, just hanging out. He’d give me lollipops all day. My cousin Anthony, who was a little older than me, would stop by, too. Sometimes, my grandfather would give us a few bucks and we’d go to Toys “R” Us. It was right across the street.

It was funny. For a while we had a regular little scam going, me and my cousin. We’d buy the toys and play with them; then, after we got a little tired of them, we’d break them and take them back.

“This toy’s broken,” we’d tell them.

So they’d take them back on exchange and we’d get more toys.

Anthony and I were close while we were growing up, very close. He was my only male relative in my generation, and for a while I lived with him, his sister, and their parents. So that made him the closest thing I had to a brother as a kid. He could be a bully sometimes, like any older brother. Nothing too serious: he would tease me until I cried, things like that. But I still loved him. I always looked up to him and wanted to be like him.

Unfortunately, he died a few years ago in a terrible car accident. It really shook up the family. I still miss him.

LESBIAN AND DEMOCRAT

My mom’s father, Kenneth Mullins, was in the service, too. He was in the Marines during the Korean War and got both the Purple Heart and Silver Star. Both of my grandfathers were men to look up to and feel proud of, because of their service to our country.

I was never very close to the Greek side of my family, mostly because my mother wasn’t. But she still tells the story of how when I was born, all of her Greek relatives came over to visit. They started yelling when they saw me: “He’s Greek! He’s Greek!”

They were all happy and proud, pointing out this and that facial feature that they said was due to Greek genes.

Of course, the Filipino side of the family was there, and they got pretty upset. They claimed I looked more Filipino than Greek.

My mother calls herself the black sheep of her family. She was always a lot more liberal than her parents: Granddad was a conservative, she was a left-wing Democrat. After she and my father separated, she fell in love with a woman. At some point, her father caught her in bed with another woman, which was how he first found out that she was a lesbian. I think she may regret that a little bit, but she and her dad have gotten closer over the years, and I know there’s a lot of love between them now. She still jokes, though, that she did two things that disappointed her father: told him that she was a Democrat, and told him that she was a lesbian.

Photo 9

Me and my granddad Kenneth.

“Of the two, being a Democrat was far, far worse,” she says. “Not even close as far as he was concerned.”

My mother’s sexual orientation was never an issue for me. She made it clear that she loved my sister and me, and there was never any doubt in my mind about that.

THE GONG SHOW

My father was a different story.

He and my mom had been high school sweethearts and got married right out of school. They were both really young. I don’t know exactly what happened, but it seems clear to me that my father wasn’t ready to be a father. They did try, on and off, to get together and get back together. Some of those attempts were halfhearted. But I don’t really remember them sharing affection, hugging or kissing or anything like that.

I remember us all watching
The Gong Show
together. That was about the extent of family togetherness for my mom and dad.

In all the years after my parents split up, basically since I was able to walk, I never felt that my father supported us.

My mother says now, “You can’t get blood from a stone.”

I don’t know about that. It seemed to me he was making a pretty good living at the time, and we just lived in a dump. We had nothing. I always felt something was wrong with that.

We recently talked for the first time in, let me see, over ten years. But it was really awkward. I felt as if I’d been forced into talking to him. Things are still hard between us. I don’t really think he ever wanted to be a father. He told me recently that he never knew how to be a father. That was fuckin’ obvious. But he could have taken a better shot at it.

He said it made him sad that we hadn’t talked in a long while and didn’t have any contact. I told him that it didn’t make me sad. I didn’t miss him. The reason I didn’t miss him was that I never really felt like I had a father. I knew he was there, I knew he was my father, but I grew up without the feeling of having a father around. My mother played the role of mother and father, and she was what I knew and what I was used to. He was just never there. I really didn’t miss him in my life because he was never there.

Knowing what kind of father he was makes me know what kind of father I don’t want to be. My own first marriage didn’t last that long—only long enough to have two kids—and honestly, we only got married because my wife was pregnant. But I never felt like I didn’t want to be a dad. I always wanted to be there for my children. I loved them. And still do. It’s a hard thing to put into words. It’s something you really just have to feel. And I feel it very strongly.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

D.C. was—still is—pretty rough.

I don’t know how much you know about D.C., but basically it’s subdivided into four quadrants—northeast, southeast, southwest, northwest. There are a lot of nice neighborhoods in D.C., and some of the city is being gentrified, but at the time we lived there it was a pretty violent ghetto. We lived in southeast, not that far from the Capitol. The area had a pretty high homicide rate: guns, knives, even fists were used to kill people regularly. The number of violent deaths climbed each year until 1991, when they peaked at 482 across the city. That’s one murder for every 1,250 people—a couple of deaths on each block, each year.

I asked my mother about what it was like back then, and she said that she wouldn’t let us out of the house Friday nights. She used to call them “hooker weekends.” Even during the week we were not supposed to go out of the yard.

But as a kid, I don’t remember ever feeling unsafe. It was ethnically diverse, which was great. There were a lot of different backgrounds there. Black, white, Hispanic—a little bit of everything. My mom says that we may have been the only white people in some of the places we lived, and I’m pretty sure she was right. The funny thing is, I really wasn’t that aware of it. Really wasn’t.

I always had such fun living in D.C. I knew then and know now that there was a lot of bad stuff: I remember people getting shot, and a crowd of people beating up one guy right in front of our house. But I had real good friends. And when you’re a kid, that’s really what’s most important.

We had this neighborhood game, nobody’s ever heard of it probably outside of D.C., but we called it “hot bread and butter.” It was like tag. What we’d do, we’d get a belt, a big belt, and we’d hide it. We’d have a base, just like you have in hide-and-seek. All the kids would look for the belt, and whoever found it would yell “hot bread and butter.” Then he or she got to chase around the other kids and beat them with the belt until they got to the base.

We played regular games, too. A lot of touch football on the street. We’d stay out all night in the summertime, just playing and having fun. There were tons of kids, and I don’t remember there ever being gang problems or stuff like that. The gang problems started a few years later, fortunately, after I’d grown up.

The first fight I ever got into was in D.C. Some kid stole my skateboard. Well, a bunch of my friends caught him with it; one of them ran up to my house, got me, and said, “Come get your skateboard.” I went down there. The kid tried to take my skateboard back and I punched him in the head.

He didn’t bother me again, but I’m sure he stole somebody else’s skateboard the next day.

My mother tells this story about how one time she was taking a shower—she must have been getting ready to go to work—and all of a sudden she heard gunshots. Well, she grabbed a towel and ran to the window to see where we were. We weren’t in the yard, so she started to scream, “DJ! DJ! Baby Donna! Baby Donna!”