Batista Unleashed (15 page)

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 starts 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.