Add as a preferred source on Google Batista doesn’t plan on joining the long list of wrestlers who have announced their retirement only to return to the ring years later.
In a recent interview with Cale Owen of W.O.L.F. Gyms, the former WWE Champion said he’d take on manual labor — or even face financial hardship again — before he’d go back on his decision to stay retired. Batista is currently part of the ownership group behind the gym chain.
Before getting into his retirement, Batista explained how he ended up in pro wrestling in the first place: he was desperate to support his two kids. Even after making it to WWE, he kept dealing with money problems, taking out $300 loans until he won the World Heavyweight Championship in 2005.
“It’s hard to walk away. Most people don’t walk away. And this is why it’s such a running joke when wrestlers retire, because they never retire. They retire like five times. There’s people, they always thought throughout these years that I would come back, I would come out of retirement, and I told them over and over I won’t. I had a fking storybook ending and I won’t st on it. I’ll go do manual labor before I tarnish that. If I go broke again, I know what it’s like to be poor. I don’t like being poor, but I know what it’s like, and I will go f**king broke and be poor before I ever go back to wrestling.
I will never wrestle again. I went out the way I wanted, the guy I wanted to go out with. It’s never going to be that good again and I just won’t tarnish it.”
That ending came at WrestleMania 35 on April 7, 2019, when Triple H defeated Batista in a No Holds Barred Match, and Batista announced his retirement a few hours later.
The farewell, though, had been in the works for a long time. Back in 2014, Batista said he wanted to face Triple H at WrestleMania in his final match. Five years later, he closed out his career exactly the way he’d chosen.
The new comments reinforce that Batista could still show up in WWE down the road, but he has no plans to ever compete again.