Batista Unleashed (9 page)

I was out for a few months. Soon after I came back, Afa decided I was ready to move on. He made a phone call to WWE and set up a tryout for me. The next thing I knew I was headed up to WWE headquarters in Connecticut.

AUDITION

I was terrified.

I went up there with a bunch of other guys who were being tested for possible contracts. One had been at WCW for a while. He was very experienced and seeing him try out, doing all these high spots and complicated moves, made me feel like an idiot. I think Tazz was up there, too, working out. He’d just come over from ECW and was in the ring that day, working on some moves. I’ll always remember how good he was to me that day, just a real gentleman to me and my wife.

The tryout was completely different from what I’d gone through at WCW. It was very one-on-one, very personal. I got in the ring with Tom Prichard. He knew I really didn’t know how to wrestle that much. What he wanted to do, I think, was check out my footwork, see if I had good balance, find out if I was agile.

“We’ll just do what you know,” he told me, and away we went. We got in the ring and locked up a little bit. I hit the ropes. He had me show him some body slams and stuff like that, did a little bit of chain wrestling, and then I showed him my footwork. Tom wasn’t looking to bury me or run me into the ground. He just really wanted to know if I was athletic.

Wrestling is not ballet, it’s very physical. But there is a dancelike element to it. You have to have enormous control over your body, how you move. Obviously, the look is important, but if you don’t have the athleticism and technique to back that up, you’re not going to be any good.

You also need judgment and a kind of restraint. No matter what it looks like, we can’t manhandle guys in the ring. A wrestler had to use his strength in a way that not only entertains the crowd, but also protects the guy he’s working with. It takes even more strength sometimes not to hurt a guy than to just go ahead and pummel him. And it takes craft and art to make it look good while doing that.

I was always afraid of hurting guys when I was starting out. I didn’t want to be overly powerful. That became a problem after a while. Because of the way I look, if I take it easy, really supereasy on a guy, it just looks like shit. The crowd is expecting me to be this big killer, which is basically the way I wrestle. If I lie back, that makes whoever I’m wrestling against look like a wimp. I have to go at it for real. They have to look good so I look good, and vice versa.

I can brag about one thing: I have never, ever hurt anyone. To me, that means a lot.

I think Tom saw that I understood that part of wrestling, even though I wasn’t at the stage where I could do it like an experienced pro could. I’m sure he liked that I was a real big guy but wasn’t clumsy on my feet, that I had real good balance and was athletic.

And I also had the look.

Bruce Prichard—Tom’s brother, who was in charge of development—walked by the ring while we were working. (Hard-core wrestling fans probably remember Bruce as “Brother Love,” the preacher man who helped ignite a number of feuds during the late eighties and the nineties. Brother Love managed Undertaker during the first year or so of ’Taker’s career at WWE.) Bruce took one look and kept going. Then he stopped in his tracks, took a hard look up, this time really watching me. I remember that look clearly to this day.

It meant I could make it, if I worked hard enough.

“IF I WERE YOU…”

Bruce Prichard called me the very next day and said, “We want to offer you a contract.”

I told him I’d like some time to think about it.

“Well. This is what it’s going to be,” he told me. “We’re offering you this. You get your foot in the door and if I were you, I’d take it.”

So I took it. There was never any question about it, actually.

I was hoping they’d offer me a lucrative contract, but the truth is they didn’t. It was $650 a week. It was a yearlong contract, a typical developmental deal.

Well, not typical. When I got out to the training facility, I found out I was the lowest-paid guy down there.

I didn’t really care. Like Bruce said, I had my foot in the door. Angie and I packed the car and headed out for Louisville and Ohio Valley Wrestling.

OHIO VALLEY WRESTLING

Ohio Valley Wrestling—or OVW—is one of those regional wrestling franchises that can trace its roots pretty far back in our profession. Most recently, though, it’s been known mostly as a development circuit for WWE. Some of the biggest stars in the business right now have come out of OVW. John Cena, Boogeyman, Ken Kennedy, Randy Orton—I can’t possibly name all the people who worked at OVW and are now wrestling on
Raw
or
SmackDown!
or ECW.

OVW has a regular wrestling school with different levels of training; the students range from kids who are really just getting a small taste of the business to veterans who’ve been injured and need to get back into show shape. Just as important from the fan’s point of view, though, OVW has a full slate of live matches as well as a television show. The television show is shot in the Davis Arena in Louisville. OVW house shows, which of course aren’t televised, are held throughout Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio.

In a way, OVW works like the minor leagues work for baseball. WWE calls up OVW wrestlers for its own live events from time to time. This gives the people at WWE a chance to look at how the new talent is coming along, and gives young wrestlers a taste of the big time. And OVW wrestlers are all working toward the day when WWE calls and gives them a chance to appear as a regular or semiregular with one of the three “brands.”

IN A WAREHOUSE

Angie and I didn’t have much when we moved to the Louisville area. We had a futon and our clothes. At first they told us that they were sending us down to Memphis, so we made our plans for Tennessee, but then just a week before, they called and told us things had changed; we were headed for OVW.

Anyway, we got all our shit together and we packed up a U-Haul trailer, attached it to the Honda, and drove out. I remember the first day we pulled in front of the training center, which was across the bridge from Louisville in Jeffersonville, Indiana. Now, I had thought it was going to be a high-tech facility. You know, “WWE TRAINING CENTER!!” A big-lights, latest-technology, top-of-the-industry, nothing-too-good-for-us kind of place.

It was the biggest shit hole on the face of the earth. It looked like a goddamn abandoned warehouse with the windows all knocked out.

I think my wife started to cry. And they weren’t tears of joy.

BOOT CAMP

It was tough for Angie at first, moving there. It was tough for me, too, but I was pursuing my dream.

The inside of the training facility was just about as desperate-looking as the outside. There was nothing fancy about this place, believe me. When I got there, we had a ring that was such a piece of shit. If you stood in the middle of it, it would sink down about ten inches. They ended up putting in a new ring only because Big Show, who was a WWE star at the time, injured his knee and came down to OVW to rehab.

Training was like boot camp. Drills, drills, and more drills. God, they’d just drill us to death. Then we’d do matches. I had tons of matches. I even had a few with big names. Every once in a while, we’d have big shows in Louisville. I remember a big match with Kane, and one where Kane and Undertaker tagged against me and DDP—Diamond Dallas Page.

The first guy I did a practice match with was Scotty O—Scott Oberholser. I think he wrestled with WCW and us, but I don’t think he ever made it onto TV. The match was god-awful, because I didn’t know how to wrestle. The funny thing is, I ran into him recently at a
WrestleMania
and we were both amazed at how far I’ve come in the last few years. But back then I knew a couple of moves and that was it. And the matches were completely scripted for me, written down on pieces of paper:
get in, lock up, shoot the guy off you, body slam.
I had a lot of matches, but I never really got to work, to really push myself the way a good wrestler has to. All I was taught to do was string a few moves together. They showed me all the moves, but I never felt as if I really got control of them the whole time I was down there. And I think I touched the microphone like once, maybe twice, on the TV shows in two years.

LEVIATHAN

Jim Cornette was a talent developer and part owner at OVW. He created a character for me, Leviathan, which was pretty cool. It was kind of old-school, a little cheesy and hokey, but it was still real cool. I had a lot of fun with it, and a lot of people still remember Leviathan. Every so often, someone even asks me to sign autographs as Leviathan.

I was supposed to be a demon raised from the Ohio River. We actually went down there and shot it on video. It was pitch-black. I got in the water, which of course was freezing. Somebody had told me that there were alligators in the river. Being from the streets, I didn’t know much about rivers or alligators, so I believed them. The whole time I was in the river I was shitting myself, I was so afraid that some alligator was going to come up and snatch me.

Synn, my manager, started doing this incantation, saying all this crap that nobody could understand. And I walked out of the water toward this bonfire they had going on the shore and growled like I was Frankenstein or something. There I was: Leviathan was born. Thank God we got it in one take, because I didn’t want to go back in—I didn’t want to get eaten by alligators.

From then on, I was Leviathan. I was kind of an indestructible monster wrestler, not really human. Week after week, they broke everything imaginable over my head, bricks and chairs, just to show I was invincible. Meanwhile, I’d go home every night with a headache.

But it was really cool. That was my first taste of being on TV, and of course I was wrestling every week. The problem was, the matches I was in were really short. I’d come out and squash whoever I was matched up against. That was the kind of character I was. Who’s going to beat a superhuman monster?

Leviathan. A good character,

The bad part is, I never learned how to work because the matches were over so quick. And the character really didn’t have much to say. I looked great—I had the body of a wrestler. But I really didn’t know how to use it.

To show you how bad I was: I remember this one match I was having with Kane in some casino. It wasn’t for OVW, it was some independent circuit. Kane was wearing a mask at the time, and while we were wrestling, he was laughing under his mask. Really roaring, because I was stinking up the place so bad. There was one point where I was supposed to give a spear. He yelled, “Spear, spear!” So I gave him a half-assed attempt at a spear, but it looked like I just ran up and gave him a big hug. And that’s the way the first half of my career was. I looked like a million bucks, but I didn’t know how to wrestle and I just stunk.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. I didn’t know how to make myself better.

I did cardio, tried to drop some weight, even struggled with my asthma. I got into much better shape. But I didn’t learn a whole lot of wrestling down there. I learned moves, but even when I left there, I wasn’t very good by any means. And I wasn’t ready for the spotlight, not by a long shot.

TALKING

One of the problems I had at OVW had nothing to do with wrestling. I’m kind of a quiet guy by nature. Doing interviews wasn’t very easy at all. As a matter of fact, later on when I would be interviewed on radio or for some news story or something, a lot of times I would bring my wife. The interviewer would ask the question and I’d have maybe a word or two for them, and that would be it. But my wife could give them a lot more.

Some of my family’s friends were kind of surprised when they heard that I was going into wrestling. They wished me well and everything, but they were wondering how I would do when it came to television. They thought I would just be too shy to go on-screen. But I can be the Animal when I’m in character. The Animal may not say much, but he’s not shy about being in the ring, or about himself. That was one of the things that I started to learn at OVW, and later at WWE: how to become the character I was playing on television.

I think on a lot of interviews since I’ve become famous, just because of the questions I’ve been asked, I’ve focused in on a lot of the negatives of Ohio, what I didn’t learn, what I failed to figure out. I never really got to speak out about what I did learn. So let me take the time now to focus on a few other things that I did pick up there, and that I am grateful for having been taught.