Batista Unleashed (23 page)

“Are you telling me there’s not guys on
Raw
like that?” he asked.

“Yes, there are. But we weren’t talking about the guys on
Raw
. We were talking about
SmackDown!
I was just thinking being competitive.”

“Dissing us and being competitive are two different things. You were dissing the company, not
SmackDown!
”

I don’t have his exact words here—it happened too long ago—but his meaning was pretty clear. Even though we’re on different shows and we’re competitive, we’re still part of the same company. Everyone in WWE has the same goal. Putting someone down in the media pulls the company down.

“If you have something to say, or you want to light some fire under our asses, you go to the guy and tell him. Directly,” said Undertaker. “That’s what being a leader is. Bring this shit up in the locker room. Don’t go to the goddamn press and put it out there. We got all these guys who are very talented and working their asses off and who think you’re dogging them, for no reason. You’re just setting yourself up to be a target.”

It was good advice. The whole incident was part of a learning experience about how to deal with the media. I didn’t understand how the press might twist your words around just a little bit, or not add in a question, or take part of your answer and put it in the interview. It’s hard to be careful about the little parts when you’re focused on the whole. I think I’m a little better with it now, but of course, the damage had been done.

GIVING SHIT

That conflict was definitely playing in the background when I went over to
SmackDown!
Another thing that didn’t help was my relationship with Hunter. There are a lot of guys in the company who don’t go for him, and if you’re his friend, they take it out on you. He’d warned me and Randy about that before we starting riding with him.

I don’t want to name anybody personally, but at the time we had a few of the old veterans who believed highly in hazing and giving rookies shit. I wasn’t a rookie anymore, but they didn’t think that the guy who’s only been in the business a few years should be champion, and they made that pretty clear. It was very hard for me to start over there.

I think things have changed somewhat since then. I think I’ve earned some guys’ respect. Vince once said to me, “You’re going to get a lot less problems from guys if you’re putting asses in seats.” Which is true, though even then there can still be an undertone of resentment. But I think for the most part, people know that I’m not an ass. I have the same goal as they do: I want our show to be number one.

I’m very prideful about
SmackDown!
I hate to hear that
Raw
has higher ratings than us. It’s a matter of pride.

OIL AND WATER

People have asked me why I think Vince decided to make the change in the shows. I think there were a number of reasons, but I don’t think the controversy about my comments had anything to do with it. I don’t think he thought there would be more heat because of them or anything. I do think he thought I would do good things for the show, and that John Cena, who came over to
Raw
from
SmackDown!,
would be good for
Raw.

I also think that the move was intended to get me a whole new range of opponents. You know, really, I had started with Hunter, basically at the top. There wasn’t that much else for me to do but work my way down. I don’t mean that as a knock on the guys who were there; I’m looking at it from the viewers’ perspective. I think from their perspective, I would have had no place to go but down. That would have diminished the character I’d worked so hard, and everyone around me had worked so hard, to create.

Not only can he drink, the man can talk.

Put me on
SmackDown!
though, and it’s like starting from scratch. I got a whole new bunch of guys to work with, and it doesn’t seem to the fans that I’m going backward.

My first feud was with Bradshaw—JBL.

There’s a whole generation who are going to know him as a commentator and even a financial advisor, but John “Bradshaw” Layfield has had a great career in the ring. Back in the late nineties, he teamed with Faarooq to form the Acolytes, who were a pretty popular tag team. After that, Bradshaw was part of Undertaker’s Ministry of Darkness and in 2002 held the WWE Hardcore Championship belt, which he named the Texas Hardcore Championship, in keeping with his character. He was a big, big arrogant Texan, good at riling up the crowd.

You would think, two big guys like us, the matches ought to be great. But for some reason we didn’t have very good chemistry. We were like oil and water. We struggled, and I could never quite figure out why. I almost think that sometimes you get a much better match when you have a mismatch between the wrestlers: you know, a bigger guy and a smaller guy. Or contradicting wrestling styles.

I have more of a brawling style and so does JBL, so maybe that was the reason we didn’t quite click. We tried, but it just didn’t take off.

Not to say we didn’t have tons of fun. I’ll tell you, he’s a funny son of a bitch to work with. You get him on a mike, and he’s very entertaining.

He’s funny even when he’s not trying to be. One time he’d been on vacation somewhere for a week or something. I swear while he was gone, he put on twenty pounds. He came back and we were doing our match. I went to lift him up for a suplex—a move where you pick up your opponent and drive him into the ground with your own body. I started straining right in the middle of it. Twenty pounds can make a hell of a difference.

“You’re heavy,” I told him.

“I’ve been on vacation.”

Anyway, we went through the move and I got him upside down and we’re starting to fall and he just started yelling at me, “I’ve been on vacation! Take it easy! I’ve been on vacation!”

I hit the mat and started laughing.

JOHNSON CITY, TENNESSEE

I’ve had a lot of fun with JBL outside the ring.

There was the time when we were in Johnson City, Tennessee. I can’t remember now, but I think we might have had a match with each other that night. There was only one place in town to go after the show. It was kind of a redneck bar. I happen to have some good buddies there; one of them is a deputy sheriff, Anthony Nelson. So we were in this place—it was pretty big, and crowded; I think everybody in town was there that night. I was sitting over on the restaurant side and eating with my buddies. JBL and Orlando Jordan were over at the bar drinking. At some point, they started sending drinks over to the table.

“Fuck,” I told my friends. “This is JBL, calling me out.”

So we finished eating and walked over. I started ordering shots for JBL and Orlando, like twenty at a time.

JBL is pretty good at beer—he can sit and drink beer all night. But once he starts on hard liquor, it’s downhill pretty quick. I was ordering Grand Marnier, Jäger shots, and Goldschläger. That’s the stuff that really gets you.

Bradshaw is funny in general, but he’s a really funny drunk. He was making fun and just got us all laughing. But after a while, I started seeing him dry heaving.

As soon as I started seeing him dry heaving, I ordered thirty shots, forty shots. I swear to God. We got the whole bar wasted. Those Tennessee boys can really drink.

Orlando was smart enough to sneak off. He went over and started singing karaoke and hanging out. We tried to keep calling him back, but he was just too smart.

The next thing you know, Bradshaw—who by this time was sitting on the bar—started puking. As he was puking, I was handing him shots. He kept drinking them. He’s puking and drinking, puking and drinking. He never said enough is enough. He’s a fish with no cutoff mechanism.

The place was such a redneck bar that when he started puking on his stool, people looked over, said no big deal, and looked away. They went right on drinking.

That was a Sunday night. JBL and I had a dark match on
Raw
the next night, so we had to catch a flight out the next morning. He showed up at the airport green. I was still so drunk I could barely get dressed.

I called my wife that morning at six, trying to explain why I hadn’t called her that night.

“Baby, I was out with Bradshaw.”

Oh, that went over big-time. I don’t think she spoke to me for a week.

We flew into Pittsburgh. We were supposed to be at
Raw
at one in the afternoon. Orlando—he’s the guy who wasn’t drinking that much, remember—felt so bad he had to call for a car to get him to the arena. I don’t know what time John showed up—it was earlier than I did—but I got there about ten o’clock.

As soon as I got there, I walked into Vince’s office and told him, “I’m the drinking world champion of the world.”

I told him the story. Now, some girl had told me—I never confirmed it—that JBL was so drunk he peed in his pants. I told Vince that. I said I didn’t see it, I didn’t witness it, just that some girl had told me that. And I told him, Now don’t tell John I told you this, it’s all between you and me.

Well, we had to take the corporate jet that night. I forget where we had to go but Vince was there and I was and JBL was as well. So we get on the jet and it’s real quiet, and all of a sudden Vince goes, “So what’s this I hear about someone getting so drunk they pissed their pants?”

He threw me right under the bus.

One of the best nights of my life.

EDDIE

From Bradshaw, I started to move into a thing with Eddie Guerrero.

It started in the fall of 2005, with a bit where Palmer Cannon named Eddie the number one contender. I did a tag team thing with Eddie and we slowly built up some heat between us. Then we had a title fight at
No Mercy
, the Pay-Per-View that October. That was the show where I led the crowd singing “Happy Birthday” to Eddie after we went dark, which was kind of a nice moment, because all of the fans gave him a really warm ovation.

I’d actually met Eddie years before when I was at OVW. We had gone up for a match in Cincinnati and he was there. I don’t know exactly what he was doing, whether he was coming back from an injury or just helping guys out. But I met him up there for the first time, and he was very gracious, very helpful, and that was my first introduction to him.

Soon after I came over from
Raw
, Eddie and I were doing a show in Columbus, Ohio. We both happened to be backstage when I got a call that my daughter had just given birth to my grandson, Jacob. The doctors said there was something wrong. My daughter’s blood pressure had shot up dangerously high, and there was a problem with the baby as well.

I broke down right there, in front of Eddie.

He asked me what was up and I explained.

“I can’t believe that you never mentioned anything,” he said, or something like that.

I didn’t want to mention it. I was afraid what people were going to think. My sixteen-year-old daughter was having a baby. What kind of dad was I, that my daughter was having a baby that young? It was really something that I hid. I didn’t bring my personal problems to work.

But Eddie, without hesitation, went to his bag and grabbed his Bible. He opened it up and had me read this passage that he had memorized.

It was about people judging people. It was beautiful. I can’t remember which passage it was, but it basically said that no one has the right to judge you, and that you can’t live your life according to other people’s judgment. Only God can judge you.

It fit that moment just perfectly. It made me feel a lot better.

“GO TO YOUR DAUGHTER”

“Right now, you need to go be with your daughter,” Eddie told me.

I was afraid to ask for time off. I’d also been having problems with my daughter, and I wasn’t sure exactly what to do about them. I didn’t know if showing up would be the right thing.

Eddie insisted.