These days, Dave Bautista is more likely to be seen brooding on the silver screen in one of his many box office hits.
But long before the Hollywood paychecks and the red carpets, the man known to WWE fans as Batista was just another rookie pitching up at the company’s training facilities with little more than a dream.
WWE fans best remember Dave Bautista as The Animal BatistaWWELong before he was The Animal, a multi-time world champion or even a member of Evolution, he was a student learning his trade like countless other would be wrestlers.
Indeed, his road to superstardom didn’t begin with fireworks or fanfare — just a phone call, a lowball offer, and a warehouse so dilapidated it made even the most hardened dream-chasers question their life choices.
Having made a strong first impression on WWE bosses, he was signed to a deal, but it was far from champagne and title belts from there.
“Bruce Prichard called me [and] said: ‘We want to offer you a contract,’” Bautista recalled in his autobiography.
“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.”
Bautista, a former club bouncer with dreams of greater things, took a punt on himself and accepted the deal, but the surprises only began from there.
He ventured to WWE’s training facility, long before the company’s stars were treated to the luxuries of the state-of-the-art Performance Center in Orlando, as they are today.
What he found, parked outside WWE’s then-developmental facility in Jeffersonville, Indiana, was less ‘PC’, more post-apocalyptic storage unit.
“I remember the first day we pulled in front of the training center,” he wrote. “I had thought it was going to be a high-tech facility… A big-lights, latest-technology, top-of-the-industry, nothing-too-good-for-us kind of place.
“It was the biggest s***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.”
After surviving some questionable early characters, Batista came into his own in EvolutionWWEUndeterred, the bulging strongman got to work among the other hopefuls – only aware after that he was also starting at the bottom of the pay ladder, too, as the lowest-paid wrestler there.
“I was hoping they’d offer me a lucrative contract, but the truth is they didn’t,” Bautista admitted. “It was $650 a week. It was a year-long 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.”
Hardly a Hollywood origin story, but he didn’t let it stop him. “I didn’t really care,” he added. “Like Bruce said, I had my foot in the door.”
That foot, over time, would be booting heads as the muscle of Evolution alongside Ric Flair, Triple H and Randy Orton, holding up World Heavyweight titles at WrestleMania, and serving as the lynchpin of the SmackDown brand.
But it all started with $650, a shattered building, and a wife holding back tears.
The awesome athlete dominated the ring before conquering HollywoodWWE WWE/Facebook: cHRIS VAN VLIETDave Bautista’s career and fortunes have transformed incredibly[/caption]Now, of course, his earnings have risen just a touch. The Guardians of the Galaxy star has a reported net worth of $16 million in 2025, a far cry from those uncertain days a quarter of a century ago.
As well as being a Hollywood smash, he can count six singles world championship reigns and two Royal Rumble wins among his career accolades, though he’s admitted he’ll never return to the ring.
But if anyone still believes he walked into WWE with a blockbuster deal and a five-star locker room, they might want to read that contract again.
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