SmackDown vs Raw Preview
IGN has a preview review of the upcoming WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2009 video game. Complete with Batista’s moveset and tons of screencaps, it’s a pretty good read for gamers and fans alike.
Dave Batista has been "The Animal" since childhood, in temper if not in
name. Raised in a rough part of southeast Washington, D.C., he
describes himself as being "a skinny kid with asthma and a bad size
complex" — and a penchant for getting into trouble with authorities. He
spent a few years in San Francisco after his parents separated, until
his mother sent the troubled teen to live with his father in suburban
Virginia. By the time he turned 17, he was estranged from both parents,
living on his own, and still getting into trouble.
For the better part of 10 years, Batista spent his days training
and competing as a bodybuilder, and his nights "bouncing in clubs,
floating from here to there." (He’s still amazed that one club he
worked at is less than two blocks from Washington D.C.’s MCI Center,
where he defended his World Heavyweight Championship against JBL at
SummerSlam in 2005.) His drifting stopped the night he unleashed his
explosive temper on two patrons who had attacked his fellow bouncers.
"By the time I was finished with them," he relates, "they were lying on
the ground with their eyes rolling in the back of their heads. I was
very scared they were going to die." They didn’t, but the incident did
result in Batista’s arrest, a year’s probation, and his decision to
make radical changes in his life.
Enrolling in Wild Samoan Afa’s wrestling school in Allentown, Pa.,
Batista admits that at first he saw sports-entertainment simply as "a
way to make a living"— until he was told at a WCW tryout that he didn’t
have the chops to make it as a wrestler. "That lit a fire under my a**.
Wrestling became an obsession that I fell in love with. I completely
redirected my training and philosophies, redesigned my body and mental
outlook. I just really wanted to be an athlete and an entertainer."
Though his personal perseverance brought him to WWE in May
2002, Batista credits former Evolution colleagues Triple H and Ric
Flair with developing "a muscleheaded goofball" into a World
Heavyweight Champion, one who backs his composed words and demeanor
with an explosive fury befitting his nickname. He considers himself
neither a leader nor a follower in the locker room ("I’m just a loner,
I keep to myself," he insists), but inside the ring, on the covers of
muscle mags like FLEX, and even once against budding Superman Tom
Welling on The CW Network series Smallville, "The Animal" is clearly a
dominant species. A dominant species who, by the way, has collected
more than 50 vintage tin lunchboxes. Our advice: respect this
six-foot-six, 290-pound beast and his 1967 Green Hornet sandwich
container (sporting Bruce Lee’s face on the front), which he cherishes
among his most prized possessions. You’ll live longer.
