Every wrestler wants to be in the main event of the show. If they didn’t want to be, they wouldn’t be in the wrestling business. (Or so the conventional thinking goes.) A lot of them won’t say it publicly, though. Dave Bautista (or just Batista, if you’re a wrestling fan), on the other hand, isn’t afraid to let anyone know he got robbed of a particular main event.
WrestleMania 23 was held on April 1, 2007 at Ford Field in Detroit, Michigan, with the “Battle of the Billionaires” match between Bobby Lashley (with Donald Trump) and Umaga (with Vince McMahon) getting the lion’s share of attention.
However, that spectacle was not considered the main event by any means by diehard wrestling fans. The main event spot was going to go to either Batista defending the World Heavyweight Championship against The Undertaker or John Cena defending the WWE Championship against Shawn Michaels. The Undertaker won the 2007 Royal Rumble while Michaels finished second, but that didn’t matter in terms of who got to go on last.
On a recent edition of the Jim Ross podcast, Batista talked about his wrestling days, and how he felt he should have been in the main event of WrestleMania 23. Batista explained that it was a time in his career where he felt he started to come into his own. Thanks to WrestlingInc for the transcript.
“It was weird because by the time I came in for my first run with Take, going into WrestleMania 23, I believe it was, I was really starting to come into my own. And I think that match we had at WrestleMania was when I actually felt like I had really come into my own and I could really carry my own weight. I didn’t feel like people were carrying me through matches anymore or building me. It was actually that time that I could start to build other guys. That was that time when I felt like the company’s investment in me had paid off, that I was really going to start making some money for them, serious money for them.”
Batista also felt like he should have been in the main event of the show. If you watch WrestleMania 23, Batista’s match with The Undertaker starts 1 hour, 18 minutes into the nearly four-hour show. Hardly the main event.
“I was really upset that we weren’t the main event. I just felt like we should have been. We deserved to be. We set some milestones with that and I know with the exchange of title and everything, it was just more significant of a match. And I also just felt like Take deserved that to be the main event and should’ve gone on last. So I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder. It was [John] Cena/ Shawn [Michaels], I believe. And I just didn’t. I felt like we got robbed of that top spot and we should’ve had it. And I felt like our match speaks for itself. I think we had the match of the night. And I just felt like Taker should have been the last thing that people saw that night, so I had a chip on my shoulder and I was a little bent out of shape that we didn’t.
“It was just a special night. It was the first time [Undertaker] held that particular title. And I still feel like we should’ve [closed the show]. Again, I say our match speaks for itself. I believe personally that we stole the show that night. I’ll just kind of leave it at that.”
It’s easy to see why Batista felt that way. His match with Undertaker was great, and I’d say it was about the same as the Cena/Michaels match in terms of match quality. The difference was, as Batista pointed out, there was a title change in this match with The Undertaker winning, while Cena just retained his title.
Batista did headline two WrestleManias in his career, first when he beat Triple H for his first WWE Championship at WrestleMania 21 in 2005, and at WrestleMania 30 in 2014, when Daniel Bryan won the WWE Championship in a triple threat against Batista and Randy Orton.
