Authors: Dave Batista
She always wore a shirt wrapped around her waist, covering her butt. That drove me crazy—I always wanted to check out her butt but she had a shirt wrapped around it. I was extremely attracted to her but she was a lot younger than me and her friends were younger, so I didn’t introduce myself or anything. Plus I was pretty seriously involved with Marianne.
The woman’s name was Angie. A group of us from the gym were all going to the Arnold Schwarzenegger Classic, the annual fitness and bodybuilding competition. My friend Ray mentioned that she was going to go and also told me that she had this real thing for me. Which really took me by surprise. At that point, I was terrified of talking to women really, but I went up to her and said something like, “I hear you’re going to the Classic with us.”
When she tells that story, she says that she didn’t hear anything I said. She was just so My first date with Angie. shocked that I was talking to her that she just stood there and nodded her head.
The first night we went out, I invited her to go to the club I was working at. It was really just a friendship thing still. We hadn’t messed around or anything. I invited her to go to the club and she agreed to meet me at my apartment. She thought there were going to be a bunch of people there, and when there weren’t, she was very uncomfortable. She barely said two words to me. Then, to make things worse—though I didn’t mean to—I asked her to take off her shoe so I could see her foot.
What had happened was this. I’d told my friend Imani, the guy I bounced with, that I’d met this beautiful girl who was just totally perfect. But Imani had this thing with women’s feet. He wouldn’t date a woman with jacked-up feet. As far as he was concerned, no woman was beautiful if there was something wrong with her toes. Angie had told me that she had been a dancer, and when I mentioned this to Imani he told me to check out her feet. “Make sure she has decent feet,” he said.
So after she got to my place, I asked her to take off her shoe. I realize now it was a pretty odd thing to say, but that’s what I said. She looked at me like she didn’t know what was going on—maybe she thought I was really nutty—but she took off her boot and sock anyway. I was pleased to see she did not have hammertoe or dancer’s feet. She had beautiful feet and a pedicure to go with it, beautiful red nail polish, which to me proved that she was perfect from head to toe.
Imani met us at my apartment a little while later. Imani is Mr. Personality, and as soon as he got there, they struck up a conversation. To tell you the truth, I was a little disappointed, even upset. She’d hardly talked to me, but here she was talking to my friend. I thought she was really into Imani. Which would have made sense, I guess, because at the time he was single and I wasn’t. We went to the club and after she had a few drinks she loosened up a bit and started dancing. If I hadn’t been in love with her already, I would have fallen in love with her then. She was an incredible dancer.
Later that night, she confessed she had a thing for me. We had our first kiss and it was absolutely magical.
Things just took off from there. I went home and called my mother and said, “Mom, I just met the girl I’m going to marry.”
We started talking on the phone a lot. I was so in love with her. Totally in love.
And, being in love, and being a jerk, I broke Marianne’s heart over it in the worst way.
I was living with Marianne and started seeing Angie on the side. I was so smitten with her, so in love with her, that I would tell Marianne that I was going to the store or something, and instead I’d go over to Angie’s mom’s house, where she was living at the time. Late at night, I’d sneak into her yard and throw rocks at her window. I was like a kid again. I was just so in love with her that I wanted to see her.
One day, Marianne came home from work about four hours early. Angie and I were on the couch, messing around. I heard the keys rattle and jumped up, naked. Angie wasn’t quite naked, but she had most of her clothes off.
It really broke Marianne’s heart. If I could change anything, take back anything in my life, I’d take back that moment. I wish I could spare her the heartache. She was a really important part of my life for a long time. We were good friends, very close, and she didn’t deserve to be treated like that. No matter what my feelings were for anyone else, I should have done things differently.
It’s a huge regret. Marianne deserved better.
YOU CAN’T CHOOSE WHO YOU LOVE
After that, Marianne wanted to get away from everything—me especially. So she left the D.C. area. She moved up to Minneapolis, where her father was working as an exec for an airline.
I moved in with Angie for a very short while, but I was heartsick over what had happened. I hated the way things had ended. And I was confused. I’d been with Marianne so long that I didn’t know what to do.
I finally decided to split up with Angie and move up to Minneapolis with Marianne for a while. She took me back, but things were definitely not the same. I think she was really just going through the motions.
And I couldn’t get Angie out of my mind. I was calling her every day I was up there. I think I was trying to fool myself into thinking I was trying to make things right, but I really wasn’t. I couldn’t give up Angie. I was completely obsessed with her. I still am, to this day, even though we’re not together.
I got a job with the Powerhouse Gym. Marianne was going to school, pulling herself together. She was right not to trust me, I guess. Whatever my intentions were, I wasn’t right for her, and however much I wanted to do the right thing or at least make things between us the way they’d been, she sensed it.
Finally, I figured out that I couldn’t live without Angie. So I moved back to Virginia and got back together with her. This was in 1998.
I fell so hard for her, nothing else in the world mattered. You know? It’s one of those things: you can’t choose the one you love.
CHILI DOGS AND ORANGE GATORADE
I got this little studio apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, and started bouncing again.
And seeing Angie. As much as I possibly could, and that wasn’t nearly enough. Twenty-four/seven wouldn’t have been enough.
I didn’t really ask her to marry me. I gave her this half-assed, shitty proposal. I knew I wanted to marry her, spend my whole life with her, but I couldn’t bring myself to get down on my knee and do it right. We were talking one day and I just said, out of the blue, “What do you think about you and me getting married?”
She got really excited and said, “Don’t kid around. Don’t joke.”
I said I wasn’t kidding. I was nervous, you know, and not very good at sharing my emotions about something as important as that. Maybe I was worried she’d say no. I sure wasn’t kidding.
She said yes right away.
I think that might have been a Friday or a Saturday. We went and got married on a Monday. We just went to the courthouse in jeans. Angie bought us a pair of silver wedding rings. They were thin and simple, all we could afford. Mine didn’t even fit. When we got to the part in the ceremony where you put the ring on your spouse’s finger, she had to settle for jamming mine only halfway up.
We left the courtroom and went over to the motor vehicle department to get her license changed so her new name would appear on it. I think they weren’t supposed to do it right away for some reason. But the clerk felt so bad because Angie was so excited, so happy about being married, that she did it for us. That was the only wedding photo we had, Angie’s picture on her license. I still smile, thinking about that.
There was a hot dog stand down near the courthouse. So we got chili dogs and orange Gatorade. That was our wedding feast. On every anniversary, that’s what we would eat, chili dogs and orange Gatorade.
We were broke. We lived in a tiny apartment. We had no furniture to speak of. We had a bed and a TV, but nothing to put the TV on.
But man, were we in love.
WRESTLING
It was during the short time that I was up in Minneapolis that I became interested in pro wrestling in a serious way.
Sometime around then I started watching the shows, which I hadn’t really done since I was a kid. I loved DX, D-Generation X. I was a big fan of Shawn Michaels and the other guys in that stable. And Goldberg. I’ve always been partial to the big wrestlers, large guys who could just dominate an opponent. And then there was The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin. How could you not love those guys, especially Stone Cold? I just loved his fuck-you attitude. Little by little, watching all those guys, I started to think about what I might do if I were a wrestler.
Curt Hennig, whom I’d admired for a long time, and the original Animal, Joseph Laurinaitis, both used to train at the gym I worked out at, which was called The Gym, over in Plymouth, Minnesota. In fact, J. R. Bonus, the owner of the Powerhouse Gym—which was in Roseville, another suburb of Minneapolis—had wrestled for a short time in the American Wrestling Association, or AWA, which used to be based in Minneapolis and was one of the great old wrestling franchises in its day.
I mentioned Curt Hennig and his career earlier. As I said, injuries shortened his time with the company, but he was still working out and in good shape when I met him in the gym around 1997 or 1998.
Like Hennig, Laurinaitis was also originally from Minneapolis. He began wrestling as the Road Warrior in what was then Georgia Championship Wrestling back in 1982, but it wasn’t until the following year when he joined with Hawk—Michael Hegstrand—that he started getting some real heat in the profession as a member of the Road Warriors. At that point, Laurinaitis became known as Animal. He and Hawk wrestled in Japan and for the old NWA before coming over to World Wrestling Federation, as WWE was called at the time.
They would come into the gym and work out and were very encouraging to me. They thought I had a good look and suggested that I might be interested in wrestling.
This was at the height of the competition between World Championship Wrestling and World Wrestling Federation, the so-called Monday Night Wars which pitted WWE’s
Raw
against WCW’s
Nitro.
Wrestling boomed incredibly in the 1980s and 1990s. The first
WrestleMania
s were cultural phenomena, bigger than anything the sport had ever seen. They were as big as the Super Bowl and twice as fancy. The competition from WCW in the late nineties made pro wrestling even bigger. The two companies went head to head for a while, and it seemed like everyone in the country was into wrestling. These were the days of D-Generation X, the New World Order, Hulk Hogan’s monster turn to “cool” bad-ass heel. Wrestling wasn’t just big, it was titanic.
A lot of bodybuilders looked at it as something they wanted to do. Most of them, I have to say, thought it would be easy.
For some reason, WCW decided to hold open tryouts around that time. They were advertised on TV. It kind of sparked my interest, and when I got back to Virginia, I decided to take a shot.
I still really didn’t know what the hell I was going to do with myself. I thought I looked the part, people had told me I could do it, and so I said, “Hey, I can be a professional wrestler.” I really had no fucking clue what I was in for.
I’M A DYING COCKROACH
The tryouts were held at the Power Plant, which was WCW’s training facility at the time in Atlanta. I went down with a buddy of mine, Lance Treadway. Lance was just about the same size as me; I was about 340, Lance was about 320. We completely dwarfed every other guy trying out in the class. I thought we had pro wrestler written all over us.
But the lead trainer didn’t.
They called him Sarge. He’d wrestled in the mid 1990s as Buddy Lee Parker and I believe his real name was Dwayne Bruce. I think he was five six. Maybe. He was a little midget. He really was. He looked like a little fire hydrant, a jacked-up fire hydrant with stubby legs.
We got out there and he jumped right in our faces and started running us into the ground. He started with free squats, which are your very basic squats with no weights. He was relentless. He put a bucket under our ass, and he made sure our butts touched the bucket every time we squatted.
Now, you have to understand, we’re big guys, and after a while, those squats were literally killing us. We couldn’t breathe and our legs were water. The guys behind us, they were 170 pounds, 180 pounds, and they were doing half squats and laughing at us.
Sarge worked us to the point where my buddy’s nose just exploded. He started bleeding all over the place.
Me, I began puking on the floor. But I did keep going.
Sarge just kept running us into the fucking ground, with these squats and other calisthenics. I was doing them right in my puke. Then he told us to lie on our backs.
Except that wasn’t good enough.
“Scream ‘I’m a dying cockroach,’” he told me. “Scream ‘I’m a dying cockroach.’”
Doing that—yelling anything—takes what little breath you have away. But I did it.
We were starting to get really pissed now. Lance was really mad. I think he bumped some guy who got a little too close to him. It wasn’t a gentle bump, either.
Sarge kept dumping on us. I think he had the biggest Napoleon complex of all time. He was determined to run us into the ground and prove that he was better.