Yes!

by Daniel Bryan

  Still, I continued collecting cards until I was fourteen, and I kept them in the attic in case they’d be worth something someday. They’re not. Unfortunately, sports cards of that time—much like the comic books I also still have—were so mass-produced that there’s no scarcity, and they’re worth less than when I collected them in the ’80s and ’90s. It turns out my sister made the better decision after all. That’s where a functional understanding of economics would have really served me well.

  Just like the wrestling magazines helped out my reading, sports cards served a purpose as well. There are all sorts of statistics on the backs of the cards, and I was hell-bent on figuring out what they all meant. Figuring out things like batting averages and field goal percentages gave me a better understanding of division, percentages, and decimal points, and it made math seem fun rather than a bore. Plus, looking up the value of cards in the pricing magazines helped when it came time to find things in the dictionary or scan reference materials in the library. Education can be fun if framed in the right way.

  Selling sports cards wasn’t the only way I tried to make money as a kid. After my parents’ divorce, we didn’t have much money. My mom didn’t have any sort of college degree and was having a hard time finding a job, so when Billie Sue and I were old enough—around ten or eleven—we each got paper routes. Every day, rain or shine, a big stack of newspapers would get dropped off at our house and we’d hop on our bikes to go deliver them. Like most other things, I turned it into a game and it didn’t really even feel like work, though we also had to go door to door and collect people’s payments at the end of the month, which I was not good at.

  In theory, for each of our paper routes we were supposed to net around $100 a month. We’d give about half of what we collected back to the Daily World and be able to keep the other half. Of that, my mom would let us keep a small portion, and the rest would go into the family budget, our savings, and tithing to the church. Unfortunately, our salary didn’t always work out that way.

  I have always had an irrational fear of asking people for money, possibly because we had so little of it. Even something as simple as going to collect $7.25 a month from people who had signed up for the service somehow terrified me. Around the fifteenth of each month, we were supposed to start collecting, and we had about a week to get it all in. Although I was vigilant in getting people their papers on a daily basis, I was less so when it came time to collect. At first it didn’t seem like a big deal, but then I would encounter customers who seemed bothered or angry when I came to the door asking them for their payment, especially if they owed more than a single month.

  Sometimes when you went collecting, people wouldn’t be home, so if you tried to collect a couple of times in a month and missed them each time, you would just get both months’ payment the following month. There was one house that I had missed for a couple of payments in a row, which wasn’t so unusual because there is a lot of shift work in town. By the time I finally reached them, they owed for four months, around $30. The guy exploded on me when he found out how much he owed, and somehow I felt I was in the wrong. I became even more hesitant to collect after that moment.

  Soon after, if there were people who owed more than two months, I just stopped collecting from them altogether. There were also some houses I was already skipping because their homes would creep me out. It got so bad that one month when it came time to send Daily World their money, we actually owed them more than I had collected. My mom was beside herself and didn’t understand what had happened. We were already struggling, and then what was intended to be a source of income turned into a debt. After that, I started doing a little bit better, but we still never made as much as we should have because I simply hated collecting.

  As soon as my sister turned sixteen, she got a job at McDonald’s, and when I turned fifteen, she was able to help get me a job there, too. At that age, all I was supposed to do was work a couple of hours a week doing the mopping, sweeping, and removal of garbage. One day, they were shorthanded in the kitchen because someone didn’t show up. They showed me how to cook the burgers on these mini trays, and it wasn’t hard; I did it and I became very efficient at it.

  I must’ve done a good job, because shortly thereafter they put me in the kitchen for every shift, even though I wasn’t supposed to be, and I was working more than twenty hours a week (the limit for my age in Washington state at the time). I think they just forgot how old I was. It became my duty to get the meat tray filled, and I never did the mopping and that stuff again.

  Long prior to my years in the workforce, my passion for wrestling deepened when I discovered I could actually watch it on television. We didn’t watch much TV and didn’t have cable, so the thought had previously never occurred to me. Suddenly the characters that I read about in magazines had sprung to life. Seeing the Ultimate Warrior lift a grown man above his head and drop him to the mat for a press slam was even more impressive than it looked in the pictures. A photo of someone standing on the top rope was no match for watching the grace, movement, and destruction of a “Macho Man” Randy Savage elbow drop.

  Since I had no concept of television programming, I’d flip through the channels every time I’d turn on the TV, in hopes of catching some form of wrestling. It took me some time (I can be a slow learner), but I finally realized that it came on every Saturday morning.

  I was the sole wrestling fan in the family, but the only time I remember anybody in the house getting annoyed with my fandom was during the NFL play-offs. It seemed to me that football season was my dad’s favorite time of the year. He loved watching football and the Seattle Seahawks, our hometown team, whom he’d followed since their first season in 1976. Most years they were pretty bad, but in 1988 the Seahawks won their division for the very first time and were play-off bound. The game was on a Saturday against the Cincinnati Bengals, and all week my dad had talked about watching it, but I insisted on watching wrestling.

  I must have been arguing relentlessly to watch my Saturday morning show, because my dad, usually as patient as could be, was finally exasperated. “The play-offs only happen for a couple weeks a year and the Seahawks are playing,” he said. “Wrestling is on every single week!” I eventually gave in but was disappointed because the British Bulldogs were wrestling that day. (I loved Davey Boy Smith and Dynamite Kid—not so much because Dynamite was one of the most revolutionary performers of all time as because I thought their dog, Matilda, was so cute.)

  At first my friend Abe was the only other kid I knew who was really into wrestling. When I would occasionally go over to his house, we’d play with the giant rubber LJN Toys action figures. It seemed like he had all of them—not just the popular wrestlers like Hulk Hogan and Jake “the Snake” Roberts, but even some of the more obscure characters like Special Delivery Jones and Outback Jack. Plus, he had two rings, so we could each make them fight. Before long, though, Abe lost interest in wrestling, and it just became my own little thing for a while.

  It wasn’t until I was in middle school that I found other kids who liked wrestling, too. The biggest development was when I found out that my friends Tony Sajec, Schuyler Parker, and John Manio had created their own wrestling league, which they called Backyard Championship Wrestling (BCW), despite most of the action taking place indoors. Sometimes they’d wrestle each other, but most of the matches involved Big Bad Brown, a giant teddy bear who was also their champion. At some point, they invited me and my friend Evan Aho over, and it became a regular thing. Eventually, Big Bad Brown retired and our wrestling evolved into something else entirely. At first it was at Tony’s house (where Big Bad Brown resided), and we’d just kind of wrestle on the floor. Soon we moved the fun to my house, and by the end of high school, my best friends were the guys who would watch wrestling pay-per-views at my place regularly. It was Mike Dove and his brother Jake, Evan and his younger brother Kristof, Tony, Schuyler, and John. The first WWE show I ordered was the Royal Rumble in 1996. Then we got WrestleMania XII, which ha
d the epic main event Iron Man Match between Bret “Hit Man” Hart and Shawn Michaels.

  Before the shows started, we’d clear everything out of our family room and lay out a mattress on the floor, thus transforming the room into the BCW Arena. The corners of the room were the turnbuckles, the walls were the ropes we’d bounce off of, and the couch was the top rope in case we wanted to do a Macho Man elbow drop or something.

  If you’ve been a wrestling fan for an extended period of time, you’ve probably either seen or heard of Mick Foley’s backyard wrestling adventures, particularly the moment in which he jumped off the top of his house. Our wrestling was different. Sometimes we would actually try to seriously learn the moves we’d seen on TV, but more often we would just be goofing off. My friend Schulyer was Hip Skip, whose character never stopped running for twenty-four hours straight. He would come running from down the street, open the sliding glass door, run in, do a match, then run back out. There was also El Bate, a wrestler in a Batman mask who’d often appear in videos we’d make for our Spanish class (despite el bate actually meaning “baseball bat,” not anything to do with Batman).

  I liked to think that because we weren’t doing the crazier stuff, what we were doing was safe. The truth is, it wasn’t, which is why WWE now does all those videos telling people to not try it at home. And since it was my house and I seriously wanted to be a pro wrestler, I was constantly practicing things I thought I might need to know, like backflips off the couch. We did it all on a mattress, so we never thought of landing on someone as dangerous. We only looked at the jumping, twisting, and backflipping as the dangerous part. Unfortunately, one time, I jumped off my couch for a twisting senton and landed back-first directly on Kristof’s face, breaking his jaw. He had to have his jaw wired shut and was only able to eat through a straw for weeks.

  I didn’t want anything to stop our wrestling, so I never told my mom what happened. We had already been given a warning after cracking the drywall in the corner that we used as a turnbuckle, and I thought something as serious as this injury would end our wrestling for good. My mom didn’t find out until much later when she was talking to Kristof’s mother, Pam, who had been very cool about the incident. When Pam made mention of Kristof’s broken jaw, my mom was like, “Wait—what?!”

  Luckily, despite my injuring him, Kristof remains my friend to this day. He and Evan and Mike were all groomsmen in my wedding, almost two decades later. Kristof still tells me that at some point he’s going to break my jaw in return. Whenever I see him, he always asks, “Is it now?”

  Other than wrestling with my friends and working, I was relatively antisocial and completely content to stay at home. As you can imagine, that made me a real hit with the ladies. I only really dated one girl in school, during a period when I lived with my dad in Castle Rock, Washington, about an hour and a half away from Aberdeen. Her name was Becky; she was a senior and I was a junior. I think she just liked me because I was new and Castle Rock was a small town. We went to movies or out to eat, and even went to her senior prom together. After one of these events, we would end up in her parents’ basement making out on the couch. One night, during a particularly long makeout session, Becky was on top of me, and in the heat of the moment, she whispered into my ear, “Be gentle.” I laughed so hard that I accidentally threw her off the couch. Despite my subsequent calls, we never went out again, and soon she was dating a college guy with a unibrow. So it goes.

  My hometown of Aberdeen, Washington, is a blue-collar town filled with good, hardworking people. It’s built on the timber industry, and there are signs all over that say WORKING FORESTS = WORKING FAMILIES. Unfortunately, when logging is down, a lot of people get laid off. At one point, Aberdeen had the highest tavern-per-person ratio in the state, or at least that was the rumor. It also rains, on average, over eighty inches a year. (The year I graduated, for example, it rained a hundred days in a row.) Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain is probably our most famous resident. I’m not sure if it’s related, but Aberdeen has a relatively high number of suicides every year.

  The rain always comforted me as a kid. Even in the winter, I would leave my window open because I liked the sound of the raindrops as I went to sleep, and I liked the room being really cold, with me really warm underneath my blankets. Looking back, I realize how much I love the rain, and I recognize that without all that water, you can’t have all that green.

  Our house was next to a big sprawl of woods in a suburb of Aberdeen called Central Park. It was basically just our place, the people next door, and a large parcel of wooded area we called Oscar’s Creek, named after one of the neighbor’s Labradors who loved to play in that spot. I remember rope swings over ravines—even with my fear of heights—and essentially growing up around all the trees. Being around living things like trees, plants, and ferns is what I prefer, and being raised in this environment is definitely what made me love nature.

  Sometimes my dad took us fishing, and I hated it. He told me that fish don’t feel any pain, but I didn’t believe it. Catching a fish is a very violent affair. I always put myself in the position of the fish; I envision me spotting a cookie, eating the cookie, then suddenly getting hooked by the mouth, dragged across the street, dumped in some water, and forced to stay under the water until I die—exactly what happens to a fish, but the opposite. Years after our fishing trips, I still have this (awesome) picture of me, my sister, and my dad, holding two fish. He’s smiling. My sister’s smiling. And there I am, looking at the fish, horrified.

  Bryan, his sister, Billie Sue, and father, Buddy, make peanut butter balls

  Writing about my father is the most difficult part of this book. I love my father. All of him. My mom says to this day that in the absence of alcohol, my dad was the best man she’s ever known. She says that still, over twenty years after their divorce. But then there’s the other side. Addiction is a terrible thing, and one with which my family has a long history. My father was the youngest of six children, all of whom either had alcohol or drug problems, or were complete teetotalers. My dad battled with alcohol addiction his entire life.

  I related to my dad better than I did to anybody else. Billie Sue says it’s because we’re exactly the same, minus the alcohol. I always take that as a compliment because he was smart, kind, and funny. He was genuinely sympathetic toward people. And most importantly, he always made sure we knew we were loved.

  My parents were high school sweethearts who married relatively young (my mom was twenty, my dad nineteen). My mom waitressed to help put my dad through school as he got his engineering tech degree, but once he graduated, he went to work in the logging industry as a log scaler, measuring and grading the cut trees. My dad loved the outdoors and loved logging, which, unfortunately, isn’t the most stable job in the world. Shortly after I was born, we moved to Vernal, Utah, where my dad had gotten a different position that was supposedly going to be a little more steady.

  According to my aunt and uncle, my dad always had an issue with alcohol, but my mom first noticed it when we lived in Utah. We were only there for six months before we moved to Albany, Oregon, so my dad could pursue scaling again, and then back to Aberdeen. During all that time, my dad was caught in an addiction cycle. He’d be in and out of alcohol programs, which brought times of sobriety—three weeks, six weeks sometimes—then it would start again. Sometimes he left for days at a time, and my mom would be worried sick. I really didn’t notice any of it, though, because my mom protected my sister and me from seeing him when he was drunk. I remember we’d always be put in the back bedroom of the house to watch Pete’s Dragon or Mary Poppins, and occasionally we would hear yelling over the sounds of the TV.

  My dad’s drinking got substantially worse when his father died of emphysema and then, a year later, his mom died of cancer. After that, my parents were pretty much divorced, although I don’t remember the exact timing of it. My mom and my sister don’t either. It’s strange how there can be such collective forgetfulness.

  All of that sai
d, my dad was still a very loving father. The only reason I bring up his drinking is because it helps explain why I don’t drink and never have. When kids started drinking, I immediately saw it as a negative and not cool at all.

  Though they were separated, we would still go over and see him all the time. My dad played catch with me, came to my sporting events when he wasn’t working, and took us camping. We went to my dad’s house on Christmas Eve, and he played Santa until we got old enough to know it was him. On Christmas morning, we’d wake up, eat cinnamon rolls my mom made on our wood stove, then open presents (including perhaps my favorite Christmas present, a set of thirty RF Media VHS tapes of all the Extreme Championship Wrestling house shows).

  One of the things I especially loved doing with him was going clam-digging. In the Pacific Northwest, we have razor clams, a meaty shellfish that can grow up to six inches long. To find them, you look for little indentions in the sand and pound your shovel next to them. If a hole starts bubbling, it’s a clam hole. Then all you have to do is start digging, and if you’re fast enough and get your arm into the hole, you can grab the clam before he digs away—and they are fast diggers. My dad was great at it since he’d been doing it ever since he was young. He’d dig some, then people-watch some; dig some more, then people-watch some more. It’s kind of the way I’ve always approached life.

  As a kid, I was never very good at clam-digging, but I loved playing in the sand. The older I got, the better I got, yet my dad was always much better than I ever was. I still tend to break the clam’s shell when I’m digging. After getting our limits of fifteen clams per person, we’d go back home, and within a day or two we’d be having fried razor clams for dinner, which has always been one of my favorites.

  Something I always appreciated about each of my parents is that neither ever talked bad about the other. I’m sure after the divorce they each wanted to, but they never did. Eventually my dad married a wonderful woman named Darby, who stood by him through thick and thin. She has a terrific sense of humor and treated Billie Sue and me great whenever we’d come over. We’d play cards or watch Seahawks games, and even if we were doing nothing, we still had a good time.