Wrestling fans are, generally speaking, a thirsty people. The way some of y’all talk about this great sport, this legitimate athletic endeavor where it generally behooves a competitor to be smooth, oily, and muscular, is enough to make a girl blush. While it’s tempting to claim that we’re in the horniest era of professional wrestling, I’m pretty certain that it’s always been this way. Ric Flair wasn’t joking about the lines around Space Mountain, whole storylines revolved around busting up the faces of pretty boys like Ricky Steamboat so the girls would have something to cry about, and there are just, you know, dudes like “Ravishing” Rick Rude in the ether. If Twitter was a thing in the 1900s, I bet there’d be dozens of posts a week about how George Hackenschmidt, wrestling’s first world champion, was also wrestling’s first himbo.

Before Twitter bent all of our minds and YouTube made it known that old jobber squash matches are, for some, a fetish, all of this was a hush-hush, discrete business, the thing of rumor, speculation, and shame. Except for one dude who took it upon himself to submit the same inquiry to every wrestler he could, usually via the forum of Kayfabe Commentaries’ line of YouShoot videos where wrestlers answer fan-submitted questions. That question:

“How big is Batista’s dick?”

So simple, so to the point, and so often asked of wrestlers who’ve never shared a locker room with the Animal, Sinbad from the F4W Online message board really wanted to know, and Sean Oliver, the host of those shoot videos, was always willing to ask. From there, it became a common question in r/SquaredCircle’s wrestler AMAs, and later a bit on Bruce Pritchard’s “Something to Wrestle With” podcast, which is certainly one way of knowing how dead the horse we’re still kicking is. Beyond a confused AJ Styles blurting “The gay community?!” on an episode of Wrestling Observer Live, “How big is Batista’s dick” is the most persistent wrestling meme from the early part of the decade. With that decade coming to an end, I’ve decided to dive into the subject. Maybe, at long last, this horse can be laid to rest.

More Pro Wrestling:

Before digging in, a note on my methodology: In transcribing clips from YouShoot videos, I went with what was available on YouTube. For quotes from r/squaredcircle AMAs, I looked through all of them, ctrl+f-ing for “Batista,” “Batista’s,” “Bautista,” and “Bautista’s.” This is not a complete list of responses, as I controlled for instances of discomfort on the part of the respondent, racist, sexist, or ableist ways of framing the question or response, and responses like “I don’t know.” One exception to this control was Ric Flair, who we’ll get back to at the end of this investigation.

YouShoot Responses

“It’s like, fuckin’, this fuckin’ big.” [Holds hands out roughly the distance of three foot-long Subway subs.] “I mean, it’s fucking huge. I don’t know, why the fuck would I know? Actually, I probably would know. It must not be huge, because there’s no stories about it. It’s not like Virgil sucking his own cock, or Lanny Poffo.” – Sean “X-Pac” Waltman

“10 inch.” – The Iron Sheik

“What?” [Laughs uproariously.] “Don’t have a clue!” – Tony Atlas

“I’ve never seen it. He’s a big dude, though, but that doesn’t mean his cock is big.” – Rob Van Dam

After watching a guy saunter through a basement full of pinball machines doing a bad Razor Ramon impersonation for a minute and a half that ended with the question, Scott Hall said, “All this build-up, and this guy’s worried about cock, right? I was never in the territory with Batista, so I never got to cock-watch him in the shower. Sorry, buddy.”

“So, it’s not so much his dick that’s amazing. It’s his balls are fucking just gigantic. It looks like a bulldog with a fucking carrot nose. He had giant balls. Giant testicles. It looks like he’s sitting on a fucking pogo ball. You ever see that picture of the guy with elephantiasis of the balls? It’s like that.” – Mr. Anderson, knowing full goddamn well that carrots come in different sizes.

r/squaredcircle Responses

Shifting from shoot videos over to Reddit, “how big is Batista’s dick” is way easier to ignore than some weirdo’s cringe-inducing impersonation of your public persona. Most wrestlers, like Steve Austin, Chris Jericho, and the Rock, simply ignore it. Some kings, like Tajiri, weren’t asked to comment. As for the rest? Well, here’s a sampling of estimates:

“I hear it’s smaller than a twig from a sapling.” – Grizzly Redwood

“Never seen it…I’m sure he’s a beast though.” – Colt Cabana

“I can only imagine it’s pretty impressive.” – Kevin Owens

“A friend of mine said four inches. I don’t believe that either.” – Steve Corino

“Big enough to boost sales for Guardians of the Galaxy out here.” – Kenny Omega

“I don’t think as big as my son’s.” – Matt Jackson

“Comparing me to Batista is like comparing King Kong to Mickey Mouse.” – Virgil

“I know Batista but I don’t go looking where he olive tree is.” Also Virgil, in the same AMA.

“I don’t know. Probably giant and throbbing.” – “Filthy” Tom Lawlor

“ASK YOUR MAMA” – Jim Ross

“How big is who? How big is WHAT?” Ric Flair, 16 time World Heavyweight Champion

Digging around Reddit for the answer to this decade’s “was the Montreal Screwjob a work or a shoot” leads you down some strange paths, my friends. I know now that Exotic Adrian Street likes green peppers. Jim Cornette’s “perfect wrestler,” a man with Batista’s body, his brain, Ric Flair’s dick, Jerry Lawler’s coordination, and Nick Bockwinkle’s ability to wrestle in his 50s, will haunt my dreams. One Redditor unleashed a nine exhibit investigation of the subject upon the world, wherein the Animal’s unit is described as “turgid” and “long, thick, girthy … with a pulsing crevice along the middle.”

That thread also has an anecdote from the wredditor who facilitated Flair’s AMA and others on r/squaredcircle, about how he had to ask Flair four times and how he was “pretty upset by the question,” which I would be, too, if I were one of the greatest and most influential wrestlers of all time and one of the literal hundreds of questions chosen by a moderator for me to answer was about the size of a friend and co-worker’s dick. Flair’s reaction takes us full circle to the question’s origin on YouShoot, where Maria Kanellis was the first person on its receiving end. I didn’t transcribe it for this piece because her discomfort with it seemed to be the desired outcome.

I didn’t expect to have to get into the underbelly of a question like “how big is Batista’s dick,” but here I am. Until I came across the anecdote about Flair, I didn’t really know how AMAs on r/squaredcircle functioned. It was fun to imagine him saying “How big is who? How big is WHAT?” like he’s coming unglued on an episode of WCW Monday Nitro, but learning that the AMA was transcribed, the emphasis placed there by a moderator who chose to ask the question and repeat it several times, is a small example of the entitlement a lot of wrestling fans have towards a performer’s time and well-being, emboldened by the relative anonymity of a forum username. Maybe one asks about Batista’s dick not expecting the question to make it to Maria or Ric Flair or Hornswoggle or X-Pac, but why risk it in the first place when you’ve only got so much time on the line or on camera with someone? I know that it’s a joke, or at least the set-up for one, but when the best punchline of the lot is Iron Sheik’s deadpan “10 inch,” it’s probably time to recognize that the bit is almost guaranteed to bomb.

So, how big is Batista’s dick?

Asking a wrestler “How big is Batista’s dick?” is like asking an historian how long a cubit is, or like asking an NFL referee how close the nose of the football is to the first down marker. Ask your grandpa how big the biggest fish he ever caught was, and that’s how big Batista’s dick is. Look at a man spreading his legs on the subway and estimate the distance between his two knees: that’s how big Batista’s dick is.

The vast majority of persons alive or dead hailing from this planet, and likely every alien being alive or dead on planets yet unknown to us, are forever stumbling in the dark on the subject, and not in the way where you might find out how big someone’s dick is. So let’s say this for Batista’s dick: It exists everywhere and nowhere, infinitely large and infinitely small simultaneously. It’s an object beyond measurement, one happy mystery in a world otherwise given to grim uncertainty. I know nothing of his encumbrance. I live happily in this ignorance, and will until the day I die, when size, at last, is irrelevant.

An Oral History of Dave "The Animal" Batista's Dick

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