Dave Bautista has been asked about coming back to WWE for years. His answer has not softened, and he put it in blunt financial terms.
Speaking on the Live Fierce podcast with W.O.L.F Gyms co-owner Cale Owen, Bautista said the pull of a comeback has never come close to outweighing what he would be giving up.
“People 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,” Bautista said. “I had a fcking storybook ending, and I won’t sit on it. I will not. I’ll go and do manual labor before I tarnish that.”
He knows exactly what walking away cost him the first time, and says he would accept it again.
“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,” Bautista said. “I will go f*cking broke and be poor before I ever go back to wrestling. I will never wrestle again.”
For Bautista, the appeal is that he got something almost nobody in the business gets: an exit on his own terms.
“I went out the way I wanted with a guy I wanted to go out with. It’s never going to be that good again, and I just won’t tarnish it,” Bautista said. “I feel so good about it. I’m so proud of the way I went out. I won’t s*it on it.”
He also noted that wrestlers walking away and staying away is rare.
“It’s hard to walk away. Most people don’t walk away,” Bautista said. “This is why it’s almost like a running joke when wrestlers retire, because they never retire. They retire like five times.”
Bautista wrestled his final match at WrestleMania 35 in April 2019, losing to Triple H in a no holds barred match that closed out a feud dating back to Evolution. He announced his retirement hours later, calling it his storybook ending. He is a six-time world champion who was named to the Hall of Fame class of 2020, an induction that has been delayed multiple times.
