Batista Unleashed (25 page)

After Eddie died, I started working into a thing with Mark Henry, “the world’s strongest man.” Just a few weeks into that, I was injured at a house show. Mark hurt me when he did a move I had no idea was coming.

Mark’s got a good heart, and he didn’t intentionally try to injure me. But it doesn’t take away the fact that he was careless.

YOUR HANDS, MY LIFE

When you’re in the ring with someone else, you’re responsible for that person’s well-being. You have to protect them.

What that means for a wrestler is that number one, you don’t do anything that will hurt them. You shouldn’t take chances for yourself, but there’s a very sacred tradition that you don’t take chances for someone else. The other guy’s life is literally in your hands. You always let them know what move you’re going to do. And you don’t experiment. If you have a new move that you want to bring into your act, you work on it under controlled conditions, at a workout or practice. While a certain amount of wrestling has to be spontaneous, you don’t want to blindside somebody with something they’re not expecting. The regular moves are dangerous enough.

We communicate in the ring. That’s a huge part of what we do. We have to communicate in there, or someone could get killed.

On January 6, 2006, I was doing a house show with Mark Henry. At some point he set me up for a move I think he calls the Chocolate Moose. Or “mousse,” however the hell that’s supposed to be spelled. I don’t know whether it’s a dessert or a big deer or something you do to your hair. Maybe all three.

Anyway, he did it without telling me. I never saw it coming because I had my back to him. I trusted him. Maybe that was a mistake on my part.

Mark had been out for a while and I’m positive he hadn’t done that move since he’d been back. Which to me means he shouldn’t have done it then. If I’d known he was going to do it, I would have said no way. I wouldn’t have let him experiment on me, certainly not in that situation, in a house show.

He hit me with his full body weight. He slammed me to the canvas and my arm exploded. It took the entire weight of the move, tearing my triceps, the same one that had been injured before.

I was obviously in a lot of pain, but we kept going. Mark hit me with the ring bell and the ref called it a DQ. He left the ring and I was kind of recovering. Then they had him come back down and I picked up everything I could and hit him, just so I’d be leaving with the crowd cheering. I think the first thing I hit him with was the belt. Then I picked up the stairs and hit him with the stairs.

I was running on pure adrenaline. Even though my arm was hanging off my shoulder, I still picked up the stairs. But I was hurting. And mad.

I didn’t hurt him with the stairs or anything else, of course. But I can’t tell you how upset I was. We were getting ready for the
Royal Rumble
and headed into
’Mania.
I was holding the title at the time. I felt he was completely reckless. We try to give our best in all our matches, but he took me out for a long time. He took a lot of money out of my pocket, a lot of money away from my family. And the injury took a lot of money, I believe, out of the company. I still to this day can’t figure out what he was thinking.

Mark’s got a good heart, and like I said, he didn’t intentionally hurt me. But it was still careless.

SURRENDERING THE TITLE

I knew it was torn right away. The company wanted to send me down to Birmingham, Alabama, to see Dr. Andrews, who is one of the best orthopedic surgeons in the world. He does repairs for tons of professional athletes, and a lot of guys in our company.

First, though, I had to go in and surrender the title. I didn’t want to, of course—no one wants to give up anything they’ve worked hard to earn, and the championship belt meant a lot to me. If you have to give up the title, you want to do it in the ring, during a match. But of course, it had to be done; I was going to be out of action for a long while, and there was no way I could wrestle until after I had my surgery.

I turned over the title on
SmackDown!
in a very emotional show. If you find a tape of it, you’ll see I was very choked up. I was in Philadelphia, and I left that city in tears. I really did.

While I was on the flight down to Birmingham, Alabama, to see Dr. Andrews, he had a heart attack. I had no idea when I walked through the door the next morning. His assistant met me in the hallway.

“Did you hear about Dr. Andrews?” she asked. “He had a heart attack.”

“Well, who’s going to fix my triceps?”

It’s funny now, but I guess it wasn’t the most caring thing to say. I did go over and pay him a visit that day in the hospital, just to see if he was okay. The funny thing is, he sat right up in bed and examined me there. He wasn’t going to let a little thing like a heart attack slow him down.

As a matter of fact, he yanked my arm around pretty good. That guy is tough as nails. He’s a great guy.

His partner, Dr. Jeffrey R. Dugas, fixed my arm. He was one of the best doctors I’ve ever had, and not just as a surgeon, stitching me back together. He called me all the time, just to see how I was doing, to check up on me. He was very careful. They were very worried about me getting an infection, because the tear was in the same area that I had injured earlier. I guess when you cut into scar tissue, you can have some serious complications later. I couldn’t even go to a gym—not even to say hello—for at least a month. They didn’t even want me sweating.

They fixed it by taking a piece of my hamstring out of my leg and weaving it into my triceps. The repair I have in there now is so strong it feels better than it has in years.

REHAB

I was out for just over six months. I moved to Birmingham for a while and went through rehab there. I was fortunate to work with Kevin Wilk, who I believe is one of the best physical therapists in the country. We did a lot of simple exercises, stretches, a lot of rotator cuff work, and different things to keep my body from getting stiff. A lot of what I did had more to do with trying to stay in shape than with rebuilding my shoulder.

You wouldn’t believe it, but rehab was actually a lot of fun. There was an all-star cast of athletes working out around me, trying to get back in the game. It was one of those places where you wish they had cameras set up—it could be one of the best reality shows ever. We all went out collectively a few times. Birmingham’s a small town, so you get a bunch of pro athletes walking into a place and it’s like the Red Sea parting for you. They treated us like kings pretty much everywhere we went.

Drew Brees, the NFL quarterback, was in there rehabbing his shoulder. He’d been playing with the San Diego Chargers but I think had just entered free agency, so there were guys down there trying to recruit him. It seemed like every pro team was in there kissing his ass. We gave him a bit of ribbing for that. Drew’s a good dude; I wish him the best. Some of the other football guys I hung with were Freddie Mitchell, who used to play for the Philadelphia Eagles, and Will Demps, who at the time was playing with the Baltimore Ravens and now is with the New York Giants. Both those guys are great guys.

Get a bunch of jocks telling stories, and it makes for an entertaining day. Then guys get to ragging on each other, and man, that’s pretty funny, too. It takes a little of the pain away from the work you have to do to get back in shape.

I met Charles Barkley, the basketball legend, while I was in Birmingham. Barkley used to train at a Gold’s Gym there. I was there working on some of the cardio equipment upstairs. This huge guy on a stationary bike started waving at me, telling me to come on over. So all right, I walked over. I didn’t realize who it was until I was about three feet away. Then I recognized him and I immediately turned into a little kid. I can’t tell you how many times I saw Barkley on TV when he was with the Sixers or later with the Suns. I actually admired him for getting into fights, sticking up for his team.

He started talking to me like he knew me. I mean, I’ve always been a big Barkley fan, but to have it turn out that he was a Batista fan—that’s just very surreal. Very cool.

ALONZO MOURNING

Speaking of Charles Barkley, I met another of my basketball heroes thanks to wrestling, though I can’t say that he was much of a Batista fan. In fact, his idol turned out to be Triple H.

The player was Alonzo Mourning. He’s best known now as a star for the Miami Heat in the NBA, but back at the end of the eighties and early nineties he was starting for the Georgetown Hoyas, then as now one of the country’s top college basketball teams. Seeing as how I was from Washington, D.C., Georgetown University was my local team and I was a big fan of theirs and of Mourning.

Hunter and I did a celebrity pool tournament at the tail end of 2004. The only thing I remember about the tournament was the fact that Alonzo was in the celebrity tournament, too. I, of course, turned into a little kid. I was just about jumping up and down. “Man, it’s great, it’s Alonzo Mourning, yeah!” I was thinking to myself.

Anyway, Alonzo saw us and recognized Hunter. He came over and started talking to him, telling him he’s a big fan, the whole thing. Hunter thanked him and they started talking.

I have to admit, I was kind of jealous. Here’s this guy I absolutely idolized, and he was talking to my friend for a good half hour and pretty much ignoring me. I just kind of stood there, taking it all in.

So, they’re talking and talking. Finally, Hunter says good-bye to him and we all move on. As we’re walking away, Hunter turns to me and says, “Who was that, anyway?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I asked.

“No. Who was it? Really. Who was it?”

MR. POTATO NOSE

That sort of thing happened a lot that night. People would come up to Hunter and he had no idea who they were. He has tunnel vision sometimes. If it doesn’t involve wrestling, he doesn’t know about it.

We were at that pool tournament the day after I’d broken my nose in Seattle. One of the pro pool players there was Jeanette Lee, who is among the best women pool professionals in the country. I had a huge crush on her—still do. Anyway, I got to meet her but I was so embarrassed because my nose looked like I’d been on a weeklong coke binge. It was a real potato. I was absolutely mortified, meeting this girl who was the hottest thing in the world. I was married and wouldn’t have asked for a date anyway, but I still would have liked to at least look, uh, human. Instead of Mr. Potato Nose.

“HE’S STILL HOT”

Hunter has all sorts of fans across the world. As a matter of fact, my mom is a great fan. She calls him a living legend.

Mom also loves Rey Mysterio and she was a big Eddie Guerrero fan before he died. She likes Vito. One time we were doing a shoot or an interview or something down near my house, and she made us all dinner. She was going on about how handsome Vito was; I thought I might have to keep my eye on her. And Kennedy—she was saying just the other day that she felt real bad when people were booing him at one of the shows.

In 2006, she came with us to a party at
WrestleMania
where a lot of old-time wrestlers as well as current stars were. She went up to Mae and Moolah—that’s Mae Young and Lillian Ellison, who is better known as the Fabulous Moolah—and had me pose in a picture with them, because they were among her all-time favorite “girl” wrestlers, as she calls them. And she still talks about meeting Sherri Martel at the Hall of Fame dinner.

“She hasn’t aged a day,” she whispered after she met her.

But probably the most fun for me was introducing her to Ric Flair. She’s been a fan of Ric’s for many years. So when we were all at a party together, I decided to take her on over and introduce her to him.

“Mom, I want you to meet somebody,” I said, and I kind of steered her toward Ric.

Her mouth dropped open. Ric was his very charming self.

“Oh, what an honor!” said my mom. “I’m a big fan.”

“Oh, no, the honor is all mine,” said Ric.

“No, it’s not! You don’t know.”

“No, really, the honor’s all mine.”

“No, really, you don’t understand!”

They went back and forth like that for a while. I had to do my best not to burst out laughing.

“You know, he’s still hot,” said my mom later. “He’s still hot.”