Batista Unleashed (29 page)

It all starts from a concept. The thing with me turning on Hunter, for example: it all sparked when we teased that turn. Then the writers went to work. They came up with things to take that concept forward. The story line built as we went.

Usually I’ll get a call from the agents, or the head writer, Sunday or Monday. They’ll let me know what’s going on. We shoot
SmackDown!
on Tuesdays, taping it so it can be aired on Friday. By the time I get to the arena Tuesday, I have a good idea what’s on the table.

Michael Hayes is our head writer. He’s done wonders since he took over as head writer of
SmackDown!

Hayes wrestled as Michael P.S. Hayes—P.S. stood for “Purely Sexy.” His career in the ring ran from the seventies to the nineties. He was with the National Wrestling Alliance—NWA—where at one point he was teamed up with Ric Flair. He also wrestled with WCW before joining our company in the late nineties as a manager and then a commentator. He’s been head writer at
SmackDown!
since October 2006.

I’ll talk to him, say what I like and what I don’t like about the script, and he’ll go back to Vince, who always has the final say-so on what goes on. So it’s one big collaboration, with Vince having the final word.

MELINA

Melina and I have become pretty good friends, close physically since my divorce as well as emotionally. But when she and I first started working together, I didn’t like her very much. I don’t think she liked me very much either.

I think a lot of people don’t realize that by nature I’m a quiet guy. They think that if I don’t start chitchatting with them, I somehow don’t like them. There’s some situations where I’m really just shy, especially with women. That’s just not in some people’s nature—some guys could have a conversation with a lamppost and make it interesting. So they don’t really understand where I’m coming from.

On the other hand, I also have a bit of an attitude toward people new to the business. I think they should be very humble, very respectful to the people who have been in the company awhile.

What I think happened between Melina and me was, because of our separate perspectives, there was a misunderstanding. She’s very friendly and thinks that anyone who doesn’t talk to her somehow doesn’t like her. And one day after she’d started working with MNM, she came up to me and started crying. She said she didn’t know why I didn’t like her. It absolutely broke my heart. The differences in our personalities had gotten in the way.

I think that’s something that happens not just in wrestling. A lot of times people don’t take the time or make the effort to understand where someone else is coming from. The truth is, I hadn’t taken the time to know who Melina was. She comes across as this evil diva vixen on television. That’s her character. But in real life, she’s really just very sweet. She’s very mild-mannered.

Women in wrestling have a hard time being accepted, but many have really worked hard to get where they are. Yes, there are girls who get into wrestling because of contests and are chosen primarily because of their looks. But from what I’ve seen, the ones who really advance and stick around, the real divas, put an incredible amount of work into what they do.

In Melina’s case, she trained with an old-timer named Jesse Hernandez and learned how to work before she joined the company. She really knows the psychology of the business. You can sit down with her and talk for hours about storytelling, and she just gets it.

My wife thought I was sleeping with Melina right off the bat, while we were still married. It wasn’t true, but it did make me feel guilty about being friends with her.

Since then, as I’ve said, Melina and I have gotten closer and our relationship has become physical. That’s caused a bit of controversy, but I don’t give a shit. She’s my friend, and I love her very much.

The crowd at Omaha’s Qwest Arena is really up for the show, and Kennedy and I give them a good match, Ken riling them up until I finally slam the door on him.

It was a great match.

How great?

Stone Cold called up Kennedy later and said, “I loved the shit out of that match.”

You can’t get any higher praise than that.

Meanwhile, Undertaker gets a big pop from the crowd in his segment on the same show. I can tell that’s a sign of things to come. He and I are going to be working our butts off over the next few months, heading toward our showdown at
WrestleMania
. I’m the champ; he’s undefeated at
’Mania
. Something’s got to give.

Life as a wrestler involves a huge amount of time on the road. Partly because of that, and partly because of the image wrestlers have gotten in the media, people think that it’s all one big party.

It’s not. Most times not only am I exhausted after a show, but I have to drive a couple of hours to get to the next city before I go to sleep.

But there are exceptions. And those exceptions make great stories, which of course everyone likes to hear.

I’ll take a shot at telling a few without sending too many people to jail.

RECOGNITION FACTOR

A lot of my really good stories involve Ric Flair, who had a reputation as a serious partier long before I joined the business. He just seems to attract a good time.

And women. All the women love Ric.

First of all, I want to say we didn’t frequent strip clubs a lot. But one time, Ric and I found ourselves in one in South Carolina. I forget exactly what the circumstances were, but the owner met us at the door and took us inside, then showed us back to the VIP section.

There wasn’t any funny business; it was a legal place. But those girls were completely without clothes. And before you knew it, every stripper in the club had left the stage, the poles, their lap dances, and whatever they were doing. They all came back to be with us in that room. We had a blanket of naked women hanging all over me and Ric.

Which I’m sure made the fifty or sixty guys in the rest of the club pretty pissed.

RIC’S PARTY

I know there are all these stories out there about Ric doing outrageous things. I don’t want to say that he’s a changed man since he got married, but maybe being in love with the right woman has altered his behavior a little. His wife, Tiffany, is really something.

Ric got married while I was out injured. I wanted to do something nice for him, give Ric a bachelor party, so I started planning one while we were having a supershow in D.C., which is my hometown. I figured all the boys would be there, and we’d give him a good send-off for his marriage.

Tiffany said no way. She told me he’d had a bachelor party for the last thirty years, and his bachelor party days were over.

So we changed it to an engagement party.

It was a hell of a good time. I rented a club run by guys I used to work for, and they were gracious enough to give me a very good deal. We had every kind of food you can imagine, and a really hot DJ. We were pouring huge bottles of Cristal all night. Every time a new bottle came out, there would be fireworks on the tray so you could see it across the dance floor.

At every party Ric has ever been to, he clears a circle in the middle of the dance floor and makes room for himself to dance. And more times than not, he ends up in that circle with less clothes on than when he started.

Sometimes a
lot
less.

Tiffany hopped right up when he reached for his belt at the party. You could see people getting knocked over as she came through the crowd. She grabbed his hand and shook her finger at him, as if he were a bad dog.

“No. No. No,” she said. And that was that. Ric’s clothes stayed on that night.

She wasn’t mad or anything. She loves Ric for who he is. But now that he’s married, he’s living by higher standards.

RANDY

Another guy that just seems to be a magnet for women is Randy Orton.

I remember one time we were in Albany, Georgia, and I had just left the show. I was looking for something to eat, so I stopped at a Lone Star Steakhouse or a Texas Roadhouse or something along those lines. I went in and saw that Maven and Randy were already there. So I walked over and what did I see but this really smoking hot blonde sitting in Randy’s lap.

I said hello and introduced myself to her. There was a guy standing by the booth and I asked who he was.

“I’m with her,” he told me.

I asked him if that was his sister. And he said, “No, that’s my girlfriend.”

I started yelling at him. I told him to get his girlfriend and leave, or he was never going to see her again. Randy would steal her from him.

It was kind of a big joke, and everybody started laughing. Until the girl began kissing Randy.

The boyfriend got a little upset and walked over toward the bar. I felt so bad for the guy, I went and snatched her out of Randy’s lap.

It was all in fun, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought that girl was pretty cute. So after we sent her back to the boyfriend, I sent my waitress over to get her phone number.

I ended up seeing her myself a few times. She was sweet.

PORTUGAL

There are a number of women who throw themselves at wrestlers. It’s one of those things. Wrestlers get more attention than other athletes. Football players and basketball players don’t have the recognition factor we do. Our show airs worldwide, and it’s every week, so usually when we go places, people immediately know who we are.

Someone was joking around not too long ago, asking me where the best strip clubs were. I’m not much of an expert, so I don’t really know. But from my experience, I can tell you what country has the
worst.

Portugal. By far.

We were on tour one time there and ended up in a strip club, because there was no place else open. Honest to God. We hopped into a cab one night and asked the taxicab driver to take us to a nightclub. And he took us to a strip club, telling us that was the only place open.

But the deal there, which we didn’t know when we went in, was that the strip clubs weren’t just strip clubs but whorehouses. At least the one where we were was.

The women may have been hookers, but they had to be the ugliest women I had ever seen. I don’t think there was one there without a mustache.

We didn’t stay long. It was one of those times when it was pretty easy to decide you’d be better off back at the hotel, renting a movie.

TOKYO

I’d say by far the country I’ve had the most fun in while on tour is Japan. Tokyo, specifically. God, I’ve had so many good times there.

There’s a little section right outside the city called Roppongi where there are just blocks and blocks of nothing but bars. They don’t close until everyone’s done partying. And the Japanese tend to go all night.

One of the women in the company was on tour with us there one time…

Maybe I better withhold the names here to protect the guilty…

She’s just a sweetheart and I love her to death, but she would always try a little too hard to prove that she fit in with the guys. She did this by trying to go drink for drink.

Photo 24

Me and Shane O’Mac at the Hard Rock Café in Tokyo.

Not a good thing when you weigh maybe a hundred pounds. It would take less than an hour for her to pass out at the bar. And she passed out every night.

One night we sat her on a bar stool and kind of carried on without her, dancing, that sort of thing. A whole bunch of us were there. Finally, it came time to go home. We got one of the younger wrestlers to act as her bodyguard, take her back to her hotel and make sure nothing happened to her. As we were sticking her in the cab, it occurred to us that we couldn’t let her off
that
easily. I can’t tell you half of what we might have done to a guy in that situation.

Somebody said, “Let’s shave her eyebrows off.”

I had to step up and draw the line.

Her “bodyguard” got her back to the hotel okay and left her to sleep it off. I don’t even want to guess what her head felt like the next day. I know she couldn’t remember what the hell happened or how she had gotten back to her room or anything from the night.

STILL STANDING

I’ve always admired the guys who could hang at the all-nighters and still put on a show without looking the worse for it. Ric and Hunter were all-stars. Another person who was great at it was The Hurricane, Gregory Helms. He was always closing down the place. And Chris Jericho. I think he closed down every bar he and I ever went to. He’s a true-blue rock star: parties and still gives a five-star match, night after night.

Don’t get me wrong. Chris is human like the rest of us. You’d watch him kind of deteriorate a little bit through the week while we were on tour in Europe. He’d start out looking all neat and clean at the beginning of the week; by the end of the week he’d climb on the bus with his hair greasy and his shirt hanging out, missing a couple of buttons. In fact, I’ve been on tours with him where at the end of the week he stops buttoning his shirt altogether.

But when we’d get to the show, his performance was always right on. He ran on adrenaline. Once it hit, he gave the crowd their money’s worth. That’s amazing.

Another time we were up in Calgary, Canada. I forget exactly the arrangements but we had done a show somewhere and it was a late night. About two in the morning I was checking into a hotel, along with two guys who were rookies at the time. I think it was the Heart Throbs—Antonio Thomas and Romeo Roselli—who were with us in 2005 and had wrestled earlier in OVW as the Heartbreakers. Anyway, I’m walking up to the desk and I get this call on my cell phone. It was Chris. He asked what I was doing.

“I’m checking into the hotel,” I told him.

“No you’re not. I’m at this bar down the street. Get your ass down here.”

I looked over the rooks and said, “What are you guys doing?”

“We’re exhausted,” they told me. “We’re going to go get some sleep.”

“No you’re not. You’re coming down to the bar with me. If I have to be there you have to be there.”

I dragged those poor kids down to the bar. It was kind of an initiation thing. Chris and I thought it would be pretty funny if we fed them some shots to break them in a little bit. They got over with me pretty quick: they not only drank every drink we handed them but still came to work the next day and smiled, never complained or anything.

TWENTY-TWO KAMIKAZES

I guess if I’m really going to give myself up, I ought to confess about the time Shane McMahon and Jonathan Sully were in Thailand doing a promotional tour. Shane, of course, has been on both sides of the ring, and has a pretty important executive position with the company as executive vice president of Global Media. Jonathan works in our British office.

We’d had a long day of seeing people and had had a long day. We decided to go out after dinner and have a few drinks.

We went to what looked like a respectable bar in a hotel. It was packed when we went in. Shane and I concentrated on our drinks. For some reason we started drinking kamikazes. We polished off twenty-two each in an hour, which for me was a record.

Shane’s a competitive guy.

The next day, I had to go out and work. This being Thailand, it was smoldering hot. God, it must’ve been a hundred and ten degrees. And humid. I was hungover and I was sweating and I swear I must have had a mild case of alcohol poisoning.

HELSINKI

One time Hunter, Chris Jericho, Ric Flair, and I were sitting in a bar in Helsinki, Finland. We were smoking big cigars and we noticed people passing by giving us shitty looks. We couldn’t figure out why. We thought maybe because we looked and sounded like Americans, and the people didn’t like Americans.

Then we realized there was this huge sign right over our heads that said “No Smoking.”

I’d like to say it was in Finnish, but it was in English. We just hadn’t noticed it.

Since we’d already started, we figured what the hell and went on smoking.

The next night—really the next morning, since it would have been about three o’clock—I’d gone up to bed so I could grab a short nap before getting up for the airport. I hadn’t even hit the pillow when I got a call from one of our referees.

“I have these two girls here who want to meet you.”

I thought he was joking with me so I gave him hell and hung up. He called me right back.

“No, I’m serious. These two girls have been looking all over town for you.”

I didn’t really trust him but I asked what they looked like.