Batista Unleashed (30 page)

“Well, they’re smoking hot. They’re beautiful.”

So I said go ahead, bring them up.

It turned out he wasn’t lying. They were both absolutely drop-dead gorgeous. And they both apparently were fans and had been looking around to find me.

One of them was pretty hammered. The other, though, was pretty sober and I decided why not get to know her a little bit.

Alone, of course.

I thought it would be pretty funny to send the other girl down to Edge’s room as a joke. So I had someone bring her down to him.

Edge didn’t seem to have his usual sense of humor that night. A few minutes later, just as we were getting comfortable, my new friend got a call on her cell phone.

“The Edge threw me out,” said the drunken girl. “The Edge no like me.”

Turned out, the friend had decided to take her clothes off in Edge’s room, which really annoyed him, so he tossed her clothes in the hall and told her to get the hell out.

THE INTERNET

More and more of our business these days involves the Internet somehow. But I’m one of those guys who has become very anti-Internet, at least as far as the websites and other things concerning wrestlers go. I had my own website for a while but eventually I just stopped participating. There’s too much negativity. There are a lot of people out there who all they want to do is rip you apart. It doesn’t matter what you do or say, they’re going to find some sort of problem with it. And I take that to heart.

You really can’t believe everything you read on the Internet. Some wrestlers make it work for them, but I’m still wary. Things just show up from nowhere.

One time, Chris Jericho thought that my clothesline looked so devastating that he could use it as a knockout, as if he’d really been knocked unconscious. He wanted to use it as a shoot and then see if it would get on the Internet. So I went along with it—it’s hard not to go along with one of Chris’s suggestions. We did the bit and he sold it as a knockout. I went to pick him up as if I thought it was just a work. He was deadweight, as if he was really unconscious. He even had the ref use one of the signs we use when someone’s really hurt to get the medical people over.

Sure enough, the next day it was on the Internet that I had
really
knocked him out.

I will say one thing: it sure got my clothesline over. After that, I used it as a finisher for quite a while.

But overall, I don’t like the negativity you read online. That why I stopped reading any type of dirt sheets, the so-called newspapers that cover the industry. I think they’re all crap. You’re usually being ripped apart by fourteen-year-old kids who think they know everything, or guys who could never make it in the business and so are just putting the hate on everyone. I just don’t want to have anything to do with that. Too negative.

SIGN GUY

That doesn’t mean that true fans can’t dislike you or even hate you. On the contrary. And it’s great when they can have some fun doing it.

One of the best fans around, a guy who belongs in the hall of fame of fans, is Sign Guy. He got the name because he always brings signs to the shows, and he’s a regular at certain big events. He’s really loud and he always sits in the front row. He must spend a lot of money to come to our shows. He’s really a great character and we’ve gone so far as to offer to give him tickets, but he’s never accepted. He buys his own tickets and makes his own way. That’s part of who he is. He’s very passionate about our business.

He is brutal on the heels and cheers for the babyfaces. When I was in Evolution, he would just give me hell.

He’s had some great signs. One said, “Message for Batista.” It had a big hole in the middle of it. I came down the ramp and into the ring and saw it. I didn’t quite understand so I stopped and stared at it, trying to figure out what the hell it was supposed to mean.

As soon as he knew he had my attention, he put his hand through it and gave me the finger.

He had another sign when I was making my big babyface turn. Normally he roots for babyfaces, but in my case he hadn’t quite made up his mind.

The sign said “Do I Like Batista?” It had one big box that said “Yes.” And another big box that said “No.”

When I came out, he looked at me and I looked at him.

I gave him a dirty look, so he took a marker out and v-e-r-y slowly checked the “No” box.

SIGN GUY’S HATS

But my best stories about Sign Guy have to do with his hats.

Sign Guy always wears a red cap. He has like a little uniform going, red baseball cap and an Elvis-style gas station shirt. Anyway, one time we were at Madison Square Garden for a television show. We’d gone off the air but we were still in the arena, doing a few last bits for the fans.

Sign Guy had been on us all night. Hunter and I decided to give him hell. So Hunter went down and snatched his hat off his head. I think at first he threw it on the ground and stepped on it a little bit. Then he rubbed it on his ass.

Then it was my turn. I took it and shoved it down the front of my trunks and ran it down and around up the back. It took a while because my trunks aren’t too roomy.

Hunter took it gingerly with two fingers, holding it out like it was radioactive, and placed it back on Sign Guy’s head.

I think Sign Guy showed up a week or two later with the hat in a plastic bag. It was pinned to a sign that said something like, “growing mold for a science project.”

Sometime after that I was in a match with Shelton Benjamin and we were out on the floor right in front of Sign Guy. Shelton was a babyface and was beating the crap out of me. Shelton reached up and snatched the hat from Sign Guy and shoved it down my trunks. Sign Guy was completely surprised because he didn’t think a babyface would do that to him. I’m pretty sure he enjoyed the hell out of it, though. From that point on, he started bringing half a dozen hats to the shows, just in case.

But my best Sign Guy story as far as I’m concerned didn’t happen in the ring. One time we were in Houston, Texas, and I’d gone out to eat with Vito LaGrasso. We went to an IHOP that turned out to be right next to a Hooters. We saw Sign Guy sitting at Hooters having something to eat.

That was too easy a target. I snuck on into Hooters and grabbed one of the waitresses. I paid her a hundred bucks to go and take his hat off his head, rub it on her ass, and say, “Batista says hello.”

I understand he wasn’t all that thrilled about it.

SHOWDOWN WITH UNDERTAKER

One of the biggest story lines I was involved in during 2007 was with Undertaker, a conflict that took us up to
WrestleMania 23
. He and I began working together a few months, leading up to a confrontation with Cena and Shawn Michaels at
No Way Out
. We had a falling-out beforehand—which contributed to Cena pinning ’Taker at
No Way Out
—and headed into a showdown at
WrestleMania.

Our key confrontation began at a
Raw
show in February 2007, right around the time I started on this book.

On the
Raw
show, we did a thing where John Cena, Bobby Lashley, and myself went out and Undertaker chose from among us for a
WrestleMania
opponent. He chose his opponent by chokeslamming me to the canvas, which is a heck of a way to say let’s rumble. The crowd got into it. I think for one thing, they didn’t expect two guys from
SmackDown!,
both of whom were babyfaces, to fight. And they knew that Undertaker was undefeated, and that I was champion, so it was going to be a great match no matter what happened.

But there were a couple of things that I was disappointed with.

I was really hoping that we would make the announcement on
SmackDown!
I’m a
SmackDown!
guy and Undertaker’s a
SmackDown!
guy, and I was hoping we could make it there.

We’re the same company, but there is some competition between the shows. I think it was a little unfair not just to the wrestlers but to the fans. And it would have been a hell of a show for
SmackDown!

Our viewers deserve the best show possible. There’s definitely an overlap in the audiences, but a lot of the people who tune into
SmackDown!
really only have that one chance a week to watch wrestling, and I felt that they deserved this show. It’s not just me being competitive with
Raw
. I think part of my job is to stick up for the fans and give them a voice.

My character was really developed on
Raw
and I still feel a lot of loyalty to the show and the guys there. But at the same time, I’m at
SmackDown!
now and I have to take responsibility and help lead the way there. I take a lot of pride in that.

But it’s not my decision to make. After I give my opinion—politely—other people get to decide. That’s their job.

QUESTIONS MAKE THE STORY

I also thought the physicality between Undertaker and myself came too soon. It immediately put our
No Way Out
match in a different light and put a damper on the big picture. It also took a little of my credibility away. Going into
WrestleMania
, against Undertaker’s 14–0 record there, I felt I needed all the credibility I could get. The fact that it was going to be a babyface-babyface match made it even more important that I be considered a legitimate contender. I wanted people to believe that I could stand up to him.

The great thing about me and Hunter going into
WrestleMania 21
was that there were so many unanswered questions coming into the show. We’d hardly even touched, let alone had a match. So I think that the fans really wanted to know what the answers were going to be. We left them wanting to see that physicality, wanting to get their questions answered. Here we started out with an answer, really—Undertaker snagging me and chokeslamming me tells you he has the upper hand.

I had no problem with the chokeslam itself; it was where it came in the story. It doesn’t really matter to me whether people are booing me or cheering—I want them to be entertained. I want them to watch the show. It’s about the big picture.

I wasn’t too happy about it, but it was one of those things where Vince had a feeling on it, and we have to go with that. We have to trust him, because obviously the man knows what he’s doing.

WRESTLEMANIA

The
WrestleMania
match was a dream come true for me. I’d been on the road for weeks promoting it—it was the month from hell—and of course I knew what the outcome was going to be, but when we got to Detroit it was just unbelievable. Over eighty thousand people. It was incredible.

I was so psyched up because working with ’Taker was a dream match of mine. It couldn’t’ve worked out any better. Everything we did was just great.

Even though I was dropping the title, it still felt good. The year before, when I had to surrender it because of injuries, that was just fucking brutal that night. If I have to drop the championship belt, I want to drop it right in the middle of the ring. I think every good wrestler wants to do that. That’s the way it should be.

This was our first match ever. Leading up to it we had a house show and a triple threat; during that, we had about five seconds of interaction. But we didn’t want to give away too much. Nobody had ever seen us go.

Even though we’d never worked together, we just had automatic chemistry at
WrestleMania
. It was just a magic night.

When I made my entrance, it took forever to get to the ring. The arena and stage were so damn big. I had to stand in the ring and catch my breath for a minute. Then Undertaker started making his entrance—it was so damn eerie. It didn’t seem real. I turned to Charles Robinson, who was our ref, and said, “This is like a dream.”

A scary one.