Batista Unleashed (3 page)

WARLORD

I watched a bit of pro wrestling as a kid. I think my favorite wrestler was The Warlord. Sometimes I get teased about that. Most people don’t know who The Warlord was. If you ask them who their favorite was when they were a kid, they’ll always say Hulk Hogan or Macho Man, Ric Flair, or maybe Dusty Rhodes.

I say The Warlord and people say, “Who?”

Terry Szopinski was The Warlord. He started in World Championship Wrestling in 1986, where he was managed by Baby Doll and then Paul Jones. This was back before Ted Turner bought the wrestling franchise and created the WCW that was so popular as a rival to World Wrestling Federation in the 1990s. Terry wrestled there for a few years, and then went to World Wrestling Federation.

During his career, he teamed with Barbarian as The Powers of Pain, and some of his most memorable matches involved feuds with The Hart Foundation—Bret Hart and Jim Neidhart—and the Road Warriors. In real life, the Road Warriors—Hawk and the original Animal—were friends and had encouraged Terry to get into wrestling. At points during his career he was known for wearing a reverse Mohawk haircut and face paint; his signature moves included the Warlord Lariat—a clothesline he administered from a dive—and the Warlord Lock, which was a variation on the full nelson. Like most wrestlers, he worked as both a babyface and a heel, though it was probably as a heel that he earned his greatest recognition.

I think I admired him because he was the most massive human being I had ever seen. I always looked up to the big guys. I thought they were just incredible.

A THING FOR HEELS

When you’re a kid, sometimes the wrestlers who make the biggest impact are the heels. You remember them because they’re your mortal enemy. You want to squish ’em like a bug when you grow up.

You know one wrestler I really hated when I was a little kid? Mr. Fuji. I despised Mr. Fuji. I don’t know why. I just despised him. And guys like Rick Rude. I always hated Rick Rude. He was a
great
heel. He was so arrogant; he was just perfect.

Speaking of perfect: I hated Mr. Perfect, too. I hated him. Arrogant prick.

Mr. Fuji is probably another wrestler today’s generation doesn’t know. His real name was Harry Fujiwara, and he began his career as a wrestler, though at some point he became popular as a manager. His peak as a wrestler, a bit before my time, came as a tag team partner in World Wrestling Federation, where his partners included Professor Toru Tanaka and Mr. Saito. He was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2007.

I think Rick Rude is still pretty well known to older fans, especially if you give them the full name, “Ravishing” Rick Rude. He was a big-time heel, so overconfident and arrogant that you couldn’t help but hope he would slip on a banana peel or something on his way to the ring. He was a star in both WCW and World Wrestling Federation in the late eighties and nineties. Tragically, he died in 1999 from heart failure. He was only forty.

Mr. Perfect—well, the name says it all. Curt Hennig, of course, wrestled as Mr. Perfect for a portion of his career when he was with World Wrestling Federation. He was the son of Larry “The Ax” Hennig. He’s a Minneapolis boy who wrestled for a long time with the old AWA before joining WWE. He held the Intercontinental title in 1990 and in 1991, losing it in a memorable match to Bret Hart. Unfortunately for those of us who admired his wrestling style even while hating his heel character, injuries cut short his ring career with WWE in the 1990s. He continued not only as a commentator but occasionally appeared with regional franchises. A hall of famer, he passed away in 2003.

When I think about those guys now and remember how much I hated them, I realize just how good they really were.

We didn’t get a chance to go to many live wrestling events when I was little. Money was tight, and there were other priorities, like food. My mom still talks about taking us to see a cable telecast of one of the
WrestleMania
s in San Francisco when I was little. I believe I saw the Wild Samoans there, and maybe Hulk Hogan, but I don’t remember it all that well.

Which kind of disappoints my mom, since it cost ten dollars to take us—huge money for us at the time.

GOING BAD

School in San Francisco was a lot different than D.C. For one thing, we weren’t the only white kids in class anymore. The school was only a block away from our house and was really new and more modern. It was a nice place, as far as the building went.

But I never really liked school, in D.C. or in San Francisco. The first time I ever skipped school—we called it ditching—I must have been in first or second grade. The older I got, the more I’d ditch.

Not that it was a good thing to do, or that it made any sense. One time, a couple of friends and I ditched school the day the class was going on a field trip to the zoo. So what did we do? We went to the zoo. We followed them around, watching them. They were there, we were there; it wasn’t like we were getting out of schoolwork. So tell me how that made sense. But I guess it seemed like fun at the time.

The schools I was in tried to catch up to me, but usually they didn’t do all that good a job. One time, I think it was sixth grade, the principal called the house looking for my mom. I answered the phone and tried to convince him that I was her. I don’t think it worked, but I did skip just about that entire year.

Cutting class meant we had a lot of extra free time. I can’t say that we spent it all that wisely. We spent a lot of hours riding around, on the bus and the cable cars. When I was a kid, you could ride the bus all day long for a nickel, and get bus transfers to the cable cars. Sometimes if the conductor or bus driver asked for the fare and you didn’t have it, you’d just jump off.

After Fourteenth Street, we moved to a much rougher neighborhood, and I began getting into trouble more. It was about then, sixth grade I think, when I realized that a lot of the kids were hanging out with their own cliques, according to either race or ethnic background. Mexican kids were hanging out with Mexican kids, the blacks were with the blacks, the whites were with the whites. I didn’t fit in anywhere exactly. I was white, but I’d grown up with black and Hispanic kids and they were my closest friends. I started hanging out with all the blacks and Mexicans. I kind of blended in there best.

We were living across the street from some projects, or what is now called government-subsidized housing. They were more than a little bit rough. This was the first time I started realizing anything about gangs. They weren’t doing drive-bys or stuff like that back then, but there was a lot of stealing, a lot of fighting, stuff like that. I started doing it, too. We’d take whatever we could get our hands on. Food, bikes, money, whatever.

I remember once we stole a motorcycle when we were ten or eleven. I snuck out of the house. It must have been about three or four in the morning. We broke into this garage of another house and stole the bike. There were three of us, and because we didn’t want to start it up in the garage, we carried it out. Then my friend Carl took off on the bike and left me and the other kid running behind him.

Most of what we did, though, wasn’t that bad. We’d hang around, or go onto rooftops and try to look into people’s apartments. I remember a couple of times watching people have sex. That was the sort of thing we did to pass the time.

Every once in a while, the other kids would tease me about being Filipino. They’d call me a Flip. So I’d have to come back with, “Fuck you, fucking beaner.” We could spend quite a bit of time teasing one another. It seems funny—goofy—now.

Another thing we’d do for fun was go to the Tenderloin district, where all the hookers were. We’d stay out till three or four in the morning, teasing hookers and watching them take johns back to the alley. We’d try to get the women mad at us, then take off. It was just funny, teasing the hookers. None of us were interested in them in a sexual way. They didn’t show us the facts of life or anything like that. In fact, I was kind of a late bloomer, especially compared to the kids I knew.

Most of the kids I hung out with were a little older than me. I was a little bigger than kids my age, taller, so it didn’t seem strange. We fought with our fists, no weapons, no knives, and nobody ever had a gun. There were some fights, but the worst that ever happened was a black eye here and there.

In those days, especially growing up there, I think everybody got into fights. It was part of being a kid. It wasn’t like it is now. You never worried about someone coming back and blowing your head off. You had a fight and that was it. It was over. At worst, you might have two or three fights with the same guy, but that would usually settle things.

JOURNEY TO THE ’BURBS

By the time I was thirteen, I started getting in a lot more trouble for skipping school. I also got arrested for petty stuff. I’d get detention or juvenile hall, but the punishment wasn’t severe; I never spent more than a day in jail.

I wasn’t stealing or breaking the law to get back at anyone or because I was mad or anything like that. I was stealing because all my friends were doing it. It was no big deal. It just wasn’t out of the norm. It was what you did. Good, bad, angry, sad—nothing like that entered into it.

My mother, of course, hated it. She had to be the disciplinarian, and I think she worried that she would become like her own mother, who was abusive. But I also know that she was worried about what might happen to me. She worried I might end up dead.

There was one time when some kids came to the house looking to beat me up for something stupid—I forget what it was—but she stepped in and kicked them out before anything happened. Something like that has to scare you as a parent.

One night, a bunch of friends and I stole some bikes and rode over the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito. Cops picked us up and they called my mom to come get me. She flipped. She’d finally had enough. She called up my father and told him I was going to end up dead or in prison. So I went to live with him in Arlington, Virginia.

Which was really fucking weird.

I went from being kind of a street thug to living in suburbia. It was culture shock. Actually Arlington is very nice, but at the time I didn’t know how to live there. The town was quiet by nine o’clock. It drove me nuts.

When I moved there, I was in seventh grade and I think I was thirteen at the time. The school was Thomas Jefferson Middle School, and I did so poorly they sent me to a special program at another school. Basically, I did the same thing in school in Arlington that I had done in San Francisco: I ditched class all the time. My grades were terrible. But now I wasn’t riding streetcars or hanging out with wannabe gang members. I discovered girls.

My house became the party house, mostly because my dad was never home. He’d give me like twenty bucks for the weekend and just take off. I’d be on my own. I’d have my friends over and it would be one big party.

I had a best friend named Nelson. We hit it off right away; he was kind of an oddball, like me. He had his ear pierced in seventh grade. Now that’s pretty common, but back then it was considered daring if you were a boy. So of course I got my ear pierced when I saw his. We thought we were so cool. We were seventh-grade players.

The schools tried to get me in line. I was suspended for skipping, but it didn’t have all that much effect. Nothing really did. I continued to hate class, and more times than not I just ditched it.

I remember the first time I got suspended, my dad beat the shit out of me with his weight-lifting belt. He was really pissed at me. My father wasn’t as tall as I am today, but he was still a pretty good size, about six foot and two hundred pounds. He was lifting weights and working out, so when he hit me with the weight belt, it had some heft to it.

But I took it. I always felt like I had to stand up to him. The next time I got in trouble, I knew I was in for it. So before he came home, I went and took the belt out and threw it on his bed and waited. Why? Fuck him, that’s why.

He didn’t really know how to deal with me. But maybe nobody would have. It wasn’t that I was stealing cars or doing dope or anything really, really bad. But I was definitely a thug, and everyone was afraid of where I was headed.

LOVE

I did have some positive things happening for me, some good influences in my life. One was my girlfriend, Susan Nah, whom I started dating in seventh grade. She was a year ahead of me, and by the time I got to Washington-Lee High School, my life just about revolved around her.

She was a very good student, in a lot of ways your typical girl next door. I fell in love with her the moment I saw her. You would, too, if you saw her. She was five feet tall and never grew taller than that, so we were a real odd couple. She wasn’t your typical knockout, but adorably cute. And really smart.

Her dad worked for the government and her mom was a teacher. They tried to be really positive influences in my life. Later on, I had her mother as my teacher in history class. I can’t say whether I ever skipped or not, but I did think she was a very good teacher and I did respect her a lot.

I wasn’t a rebel or anything. I just never felt like I fit in at high school. I always felt like an oddball, different. People would be doing one thing and I would want to do another. Like sports and dancing: when everybody I knew wanted to try out for football or play baseball, I wanted to be a break-dancer.