How Dave Bautista Made Himself A Movie Star

The first time Bautista did something uncomfortable that paid off enormously, he was 30 years old. He’d been bouncing at clubs in D.C., where he grew up, ever since he dropped out of high school at 17. The job had its risks, of course—Bautista recalls shots being fired and bottles getting smashed over heads, and he was once arrested after a fistfight with two patrons. But mostly, the gig allowed him to drift into a complacent routine. “I bounced all night, I worked out, I went to sleep,” he says. “That’s what I did for ten-plus years.” 

And then, one fateful Christmas in the late ‘90s, Bautista discovered he couldn’t afford presents for his two daughters. “I had to go to a guy I worked for at a club and ask him if I could borrow money,” he remembers. “I was so ashamed of myself that I said, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I gotta find something.’ I didn’t know what the fuck to do. I had no education. I had nothing to fall back on. And I was fucking desperate.” 

He wound up at an open tryout for World Championship Wrestling, where he figured his years of obsessive weightlifting would help him sail through and earn a contract. He was wrong. “My training partner and I walked in,” Bautista says, “and we’re twice as big as anybody in there. Not only do we look the part, but we’re athletic. And the guy who was running the camp singled us out and literally ran us into the ground. Just could not get rid of us fast enough. We’re puking, my buddy’s nose starts bleeding. He’s just humiliating us. End of the day, he tells me to leave and that I’d never be a professional wrestler.” 

Bautista took the rejection personally. He signed up for classes at Wild Samoan Training Center, a legendary Pennsylvania pro wrestling school. He fell in love with the physical side of the sport immediately, but clamped up the moment anyone put a mic in his hand. When the local news dropped by the school one day to interview its top prospects, Bautista remembers, “they had to stop me and get somebody else to do the interview, because my lip was shaking so bad.” But he had enough potential for WWE to sign him to a developmental contract in 2000.