Authors: Dave Batista
Break dancing was a 1980s street thing where a dancer would show off his or her moves. You’d touch the ground with your head or hands in a real high-energy dance to rap and hip-hop, which were pretty new at the time. I met a bunch of kids doing it and just got into it. We used to go into D.C. and that’s what we’d do all night. It was cool back then. Big revues and just a bunch of kids hanging out.
Someone recently pointed out that some of the moves I now make in my entrance with WWE can be traced back to break dancing. I’m not conscious of it. They used to have me come out real simple, no personality, you’re-a-killer-just-go-to-the-ring kind of thing. When Vince McMahon had me open up a bit, put more personality into my character, it kind of came in. It was just a part of me.
A lot of the music I remember from back when I was a kid are songs by the Fat Boys and Grandmaster Flash, which is all old-school rap now. As a matter of fact, I still like their music. I’ve always had very eclectic tastes; I can go from listening to heavy metal to hard rap. And I have a real appreciation for opera, especially Pavarotti. I have some of his stuff on my iPod.
My first year in high school I played football, though only because I felt like that was what I was supposed to do. That’s what all the other cool kids were doing. I gave it a try. I was just terrible at it. I played tight end and I was just rotten. I had no idea what I was doing. I played defensive end my junior year and I wasn’t that much better.
GROUP HOME
In my freshman year of high school, I started getting into a lot of fights. One was over my girlfriend, because this kid was hitting on her, but mostly I was just hotheaded. I was charged with assault because of one of these fights. One thing led to another, and in the end I was sent to a group home. It was punishment, I guess, but the idea was supposed to be positive; this place was supposed to straighten kids out.
It wasn’t that bad, actually. Maybe ten or twelve guys lived there, with counselors. They tried to get you to live a structured life. You didn’t have much freedom, and you had to follow the rules. I didn’t necessarily like it, but I didn’t hate it either.
My counselor when I was there was a young man named Arthur MacNeil. We used to call him Mac. He was a really positive influence on my life. He was one of those guys who really made an impact—I still remember him all these years later. He was a very positive person, very helpful. We bonded and I considered him a lot more than just a counselor. He was a friend. Every so often he will pop into my head and I wonder how he’s doing these days. Well, I hope.
By the time I left the group home, I was pretty straightened out. I was on a good path. I didn’t stay on it, but I was moving in the right direction. I went back to living with my dad.
Before I went home for good, I was allowed to go to my father’s for a weekend. It was my sixteenth birthday, I think, so I threw myself a birthday party. It was one of the best parties of my life. I invited maybe twenty people and two hundred showed up. It was one of those crazy nights. I got into a fistfight with one of my best friends, that’s how wasted I was. We had this huge Ping-Pong table and it got trashed. By the end of the weekend the Ping-Pong table was in so many pieces, we just got rid of it. The house was a complete wreck. There were holes in the walls, and mirrors were broken. I spent one whole day with my friends trying to make repairs.
Then I had to go back to the group home.
My father got back to the house sometime after me. When he did, the door was wide open. He had jewelry missing and, of course, the place was still pretty trashed. But what really upset him was the fact that the Ping-Pong table was missing. “Where’s the fucking Ping-Pong table?!” he said.
LEARNING TO WRESTLE
About the time I was going into my junior year at high school, we moved and I was switched to Wakefield High School. That’s where I discovered amateur wrestling. Richard Salas and some other friends of mine were on the wrestling team and they encouraged me to come out because I was pretty big by this time, about six two, 185 pounds. I did okay. I believe I won our junior varsity tournament that year and even finished fifth in the district championships. That wasn’t great, of course, but it wasn’t horrible either, especially considering that I’d never wrestled before in my life.
Wrestling is an individual sport, but for me it was a real team thing. I forged great friendships. Some of my friends from back then are still my friends today. When you’re working out so many hours with guys and just working your asses off together, you just bond. You encourage each other, and it makes you closer.
That’s similar to what we have now in the locker room at
SmackDown!
and WWE. We’re all busting our asses on the road every week. We keep each other going.
ASTHMA
One of the things I had to deal with as a wrestler was my asthma.
I’ve been asthmatic since I was born. I’m not a doctor, obviously, but to give you a little bit of background, asthma attacks your airways by irritating the tubes that carry air in and out of your lungs. When you have an attack, the airways get inflamed and they narrow. That means less oxygen can get into your lungs and you start having trouble breathing. At this point, no one has found a cure for asthma, but there are different ways of controlling it. Asthma attacks vary from person to person. They’re generally caused or made worse by allergies. That’s the cause in my case. I have a bunch of common allergies to animals, pollen, and cigarette smoke, things like that. Most of us who have asthma have learned how to control it.
While I’d had asthma in D.C., when we first moved to San Francisco it was so bad I spent a lot of time in the emergency room—up to two or three times a week. In fact, we were there so much that someone from social services came and checked up on us, just to make sure something bad wasn’t going down. My mother would wash the floors, make sure that we used only foam pillows, all those sorts of things.
Asthma runs in the family. It has hindered me a little bit from time to time, but it never stopped me from wanting to compete, or getting out there and being active. While a lot of times I’ve been given a bad rap for not being in good cardiovascular shape, the truth is I don’t have good wind because I’m asthmatic. It can catch up to me in the ring, but I just have to deal with it as best I can.
To this day, I always have an inhaler close by. I take a drug to help keep it under control. I’ve had episodes where it’s been pretty bad, but I’ve never had an attack where I was in serious jeopardy. It’s something I’m used to. It’s just part of my life.
A MOTIVATOR
Back in high school, we had this great wrestling coach: Coach McIntyre. I don’t remember his first name—it was always “Coach Mac” as far as I was concerned. He wasn’t the kind of guy that would scream or anything, but he could really motivate you. He’d just talk to you, man to man, and you’d want to do your best.
I remember one time, we had a meet and my opponent had forfeited. I went out with my head gear unstrapped and in shorts and a T-shirt. When I got back, he didn’t rip me apart about it. He just took me aside.
“When I was a kid, whether I had a forfeit or not, I went out on the mat and I was prepared,” he told me. “I was ready to wrestle. You should have a little more respect for the team. I’d appreciate it if you’d do that.”
That was really a strong way of teaching. It seems simple, but it really got the point across, and I always made sure I was dressed properly from then on. I respected him. He treated me like someone who deserved respect and should show it in return. It’s a powerful thing, respect.
I think more than anything, what I remember about wrestling in high school was how important the work ethic was. How hard you had to work to be good. It’s a lesson that I took with me, and that I still believe in.
In my senior year, I was really looking forward to wrestling again. But my grades were so bad that I ended up not being academically eligible. That was a real bad year in general.
KICKED OUT
Things at home got real rough when my father decided to remarry around my freshman year. It was a shock to everybody, even my mother. They had never actually gotten divorced. He called her up one day and asked if she would sign some papers. She went along with it; I don’t think she thought she had much choice.
Then just about right away, my father and his new wife were expecting a baby. They decided there wasn’t room for me in the house.
My dad wanted me to go out and live with my mom. She didn’t want me to come out there. I don’t think she could really afford to have me go back out there, and she didn’t have the room for me at the time. She might also have been worried that I would slip back into my old problems. So I ended up moving in with a friend of mine and his family in the Arlington area, boarding with them while still going to Wakefield High. I think my dad gave them a hundred bucks a month or something like that.
My father turned my room at his house into a nursery. It sucked big-time. My dad had never really been there for me, so it wasn’t a complete shocker. But you know, here I was going into my last year of high school, and it was more the idea of the thing, just how low it all seemed.
In the meantime, my girlfriend, who was a year older than me, went off to college. I started fucking up again, even worse than before. I ditched school pretty regularly.
STAY IN SCHOOL
The truth is, I never finished my senior year in high school.
It’s painful and embarrassing as hell for me to admit it, but I never graduated.
I’ve regretted it my whole life since. I wish I had taken my education more seriously. I always felt I could have done well if I applied myself. But I just didn’t care. Education meant absolutely nothing to me. It’s one of the biggest mistakes of my life.
I tell both of my daughters, I make a living with my body because I have to. If I get injured, God forbid, I have nothing to fall back on. I’ll end up as a bouncer in a nightclub again. I will always regret not taking my education seriously. I really believe I could have done something better with myself.
These days, kids always ask, “How can I become a professional wrestler?” I tell them to go to school first. Because the odds that you’re going to make it are very, very slight. And even if you do, it’s a hard-knock life. If you have no education, you’re screwed. Which is the case with a lot of athletes. Often, they’re pushed through or given degrees they haven’t earned, which isn’t much better than not getting a diploma at all.
The worst part about it is, I
could
have finished high school. I was in twelfth grade. When I felt like it, I could get good grades. Teachers let me make up assignments when I missed something. I wasn’t stupid, except when it came to making good decisions about my life. I was just a fuck-up and decided to do whatever I wanted. I didn’t apply myself, and to this day I regret it.
If you’re reading this book and you’re in high school or you know someone in high school, take my advice:
Stay in school. Learn as much as you possibly can.
WORK
Instead of going to school, I hung out. And I went to work—after a fashion.
I started out with a real good friend named Ben. He’d been a friend of mine for six years. I haven’t seen him in a long time, but he’s one of those people who I swear if I ran into we’d talk to each other just as if we had seen each other yesterday. That’s how close we were. He was definitely no angel, but he never let me down. He was, is, a great friend.
I would help him out here and there, making sure he was okay and he was getting paid. In a way, I was like a bodyguard. I was big and people tended not to bother him when I was around.
In January 1989, I was arrested for shooting a firearm into an occupied dwelling. Someone unloaded a shotgun at a house belonging to some kids who had robbed Ben, and naturally I was suspected. The cops came over and arrested me. But they didn’t have any proof, not even the gun. The people in the house hadn’t seen who’d done it. Really, it took balls for them to call the cops in the first place.
I went to jail for about a week before the charges were finally dropped and I was let go.
It didn’t take long for me to figure out jail wasn’t where I wanted to be. I was always a 49ers buff, and I watched the 49ers–Bengals Super Bowl from jail. It just broke my heart. But it wasn’t quite enough to get me straight, not at that point.
DRUG CHARGE
Not too long after that—in fact, I believe I was out on bail—I was with Ben in a car when we were pulled over. There were drugs in the car, and the cops arrested us both. The quantity was just enough to charge us with distribution, which is a pretty serious crime. If they’d gone really hard on me, I could have been looking at a jail sentence of several years.
But I didn’t have a criminal record, and my friend vouched for me, saying the drugs weren’t mine. They put me in a drug program and gave me a year probation, and said if I did okay they would go back to court and reduce the charge to possession of drug paraphernalia. So that’s what I did.
It’s funny now, I guess, but when I was arrested on that drug charge, I made bail right away. But as I was being bailed out, the first bail bondsman revoked his bail. He thought I was too high risk, so he took his bond back. I came down, thinking I was going to be released, only to find out I wasn’t getting out at all. As you can guess, I was pretty upset. Eventually, I did make bail and was let out.