by Daniel Bryan
My parents’ divorce was very hard on my mother because she’d been a stay-at-home mom. She didn’t have much more than a high school education and had done a lot of waiting tables until my sister and I were born. My mom didn’t know what to do, as there were very few jobs in Aberdeen that would pay a woman with no education and limited job skills, who hadn’t worked in years, enough money to support a family. But my mom wouldn’t give up. She started by volunteering at the Satsop nuclear power plant, giving tours and such. She worked so hard that they hired her, but the power plant was never fully completed, and after a couple of years, my mom was laid off. My sister and I never heard a complaint from her about any of it. Soon she started going to the community college, even though she had to take some classes that didn’t even count for credits toward her degree, just so she could catch up. My mom worked hard while back in school, and on top of that, she worked two jobs, each at a different department store. And she never—to use a wrestling term—“sold” being tired to us. Looking back, I will never know how she did it, because she was always there to pick us up from our various practices, she always came to our games, and she made us every meal. (We never ate out.) I can’t imagine how she had enough hours in the day.
My mom worked her butt off and graduated with her bachelor’s degree in 1999, a few days before I graduated from high school. She went on to get her master’s degree in counseling psychology, and she’s worked in that field, helping people, ever since. My mom also remarried—although well after I started to wrestle. Her husband is a terrific, smart man named Jim, and they live together to this day.
4
TRAINED TO WIN
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2, 2014—11:32 A.M.
Daniel Bryan emerges from his hotel room equipped with his water bottle and classic black-and-white composition notebook—the only tools he needs for a late-morning workout. On foot, Bryan heads a few blocks away to the New Orleans Athletic Club, receiving a drive-by salute from a fan who hollers from her car, “We love you, Daniel!”
Not your standard Planet Fitness, “N.O.A.C.” (as embossed on its front door) has roots dating back to 1872 and interior walls accented by sepia images of athletic gentlemen from yesteryear. It’s a real workmanlike exercise facility, quirky yet appropriate. Transitioning from uniquely patterned tile, hardwood floors creak heavily as Bryan steps in for some conditioning.
The first training phase for the former WWE Champion? Sign up. Daniel sits in a wooden chair in a registration room lined with fading photos of old-school strongmen and athletes. For enrollment purposes, he’s asked for full name, phone number, and other standard info, then gets his picture snapped by an employee with a small webcam. He takes one towel and heads off into the massive, multilevel gym with spiral staircases, ornate banisters, and a swimming pool that looks like one found in a backyard beside a garden … but it’s inside.
His motions are slow during muscle stretches, his focus on strengthening all the smaller muscles in the shoulder. Between Hindu push-ups, Bryan pauses to provide more insight into his regimen.
“I’m focusing mostly on conditioning and technique,” he says. “I’m going ultralight and ultra-conservative with my training because the last thing you need is to set a personal best and tear out your shoulder. I do a lot of movement prep before I start and a lot of stretching when I’m done.”
At WrestleMania, WWE’s “Yes!” Man comes eye-to-villainous-eye with the Game—a nickname Triple H earned over time for both ring dominance and physical prowess. He is an opponent unlike any other Daniel Bryan’s ever faced, but the same can be said of Triple H about Bryan.
The Cerebral Assassin (another of Triple H’s intimidating monikers) is as calculating as he is powerful, and he’s adapted a new conditioning regimen to combat the in-ring style of his opponent. It’s a truth Bryan welcomes and, in fact, lauds.
“The idea of the lumbering big man doesn’t work anymore. There were times when I first started training to be a wrestler that I thought I needed to get bigger because that’s what wrestling demands, so I was doing strength- and size-based workouts,” Bryan explains. “But even if you look at [400-pound WWE giant] Big Show, he’s dropping weight and adding mobility because that’s what it takes to exist in today’s wrestling era.”
He proclaims, “Wrestling is evolving. What worked ten years ago doesn’t work now. The fans demand more because they’ve seen more—not only from guys like me. They’ve seen it from Cesaro … Seth Rollins … Big E.
“All this is changing,” Bryan says, promising a revolution in WWE
When you’re a kid, people constantly ask you what you want to be when you grow up. I don’t recall if it was immediately at first sight that I knew I wanted to be a professional wrestler, but looking back, I don’t remember ever wanting to be anything else. Of course, when you’re young, nobody laughs when you say you want to be a professional wrestler, because a lot of kids want to be something that seems relatively implausible to adults. But as you get older, you’re expected to start thinking more realistically about a career—especially if, like me, you in no way, shape, or form stand out in a crowd. No matter, whenever anyone asked, I always said I wanted to be a pro wrestler. Sometimes people would laugh; sometimes they would say that it sounded fun but I should probably go to college first. The response that gave me the hardest time was this: “How do you get into wrestling?” I had no idea.
In Pro Wrestling Illustrated, they had these advertisements that read, “Learn to be a professional wrestler!” You’d pay $20 to get the book and become a pro wrestler. That simple? I was sold. I bought multiple books like that. I use the term “book” loosely because they were more like a phone book of resources (although reduced to about twenty pages) than actual guidebooks.
They told me that I had to get some wrestling gear and suggested reputable gear places. They said I needed to get some wrestling boots and noted places where they could be ordered. That’s essentially all they did. The most important instruction was that I needed to go to wrestling school and I needed to go to a good one. One of the books highlighted the Malenko School of Wrestling, and I knew exactly where I needed to go. I was a sophomore in high school, and Dean Malenko was my favorite wrestler.
It’s interesting how tastes can change in just about anything. When I was first introduced to wrestling, I loved the colorful characters and adored pretty much anybody who came to the ring as an animal. Jake the Snake, Koko B. Ware, and the British Bulldogs were always at the top of my list, but my absolute favorite was the Ultimate Warrior. Though he wasn’t a great technical wrestler (not that I knew any better at the time), Warrior sprinted to the ring and, with incredible energy, shook the top rope like a maniac. He wore neon tights with matching tassels and had the physique of a superhero. He was everything I loved about wrestling when I was nine years old.
As I got a little bit older, I started liking wrestlers not just because of their persona, their appearance, or their entrance but mostly because of their performance inside the ring. I was drawn to guys like Bret “Hit Man” Hart and Arn Anderson—excellent ring technicians, but still big men.
Although I always wanted to be a wrestler, I had doubts because the guys I saw on TV were so big. Even a guy like the 1-2-3 Kid, who was an underdog because of his size, was over six feet tall. I was only five foot eight. Then, in 1995, World Championship Wrestling created the Cruiserweight Title and brought in some wrestlers who started to give me hope that my size wouldn’t be an issue. All of a sudden on my TV every week were guys like Eddie Guerrero, Chris Benoit, and Dean Malenko, who were my height or shorter and had wrestled in Mexico, Europe, and Japan, learning different styles everywhere they went. Guerrero and Benoit wrestled each other in a match on WCW Saturday Night that was so good it made me start recording wrestling so I could watch the matches again and again.
Dean Malenko was the one who appealed to me the most. A no-nonsense wrestler, he was introduced as “the Man of 1,000 Holds,” and when he first started in
World Championship Wrestling (WCW), they shot vignettes of him stretching guys with various submissions. My favorite was his Texas Cloverleaf, where he figure-foured a man’s legs with his arms and then turned him over onto his stomach, looking like he was bending his opponent in half. I started trying it on all of my friends, and true to form, it hurt.
In 1996, at WCW’s Great American Bash (the first WCW pay-per-view I ever ordered), Dean wrestled a debuting Rey Mysterio Jr. for the Cruiserweight Championship in the match that convinced me there was no excuse for me not to follow my dream. Both men were shorter than me, but between Dean’s aggressive mat wrestling and Rey being the most spectacular high flyer I had ever seen, not a single person watching would have noticed. They transcended the preconceived notion that most people had (myself included) that wrestlers had to be big.
Shortly after I turned sixteen, I called to inquire about the Malenko School of Wrestling, using the number I saw in one of my books. A lady named Phyllis Lee picked up and answered all of my questions, including cost. It was $2,500 to enroll, but you needed to give them a $500 deposit to secure your spot. For whatever reason, I had presumed that there were people lined up all over the world to go to Dean Malenko’s school and that I would need to send in my deposit as quickly as possible to ensure there’d be a place for me.
Working at McDonald’s and filling their meat trays, I saved up enough money for wrestling school that summer. Once I had the deposit, I immediately called the school and I said I wanted to hold my spot, and I sent Phyllis Lee my $500, solidifying what I thought was my postgraduation plan, nearly two years before I even graduated.
By this point, my mom had accepted that I was going to try to be a wrestler, but she wanted me to go to college while I did it. Surprisingly, Dr. Carter, my junior- and senior-year English teacher, was very influential in my decision to wholeheartedly pursue wrestling and not go to college immediately. One day he was talking about his stint in the Peace Corps and how that experience gave him a whole new perspective on the world. It made him realize he wanted to teach. He questioned how students were supposed to go straight from high school to college and know exactly what they wanted to be without much real-world experience. While most of my teachers thought I should have a backup plan before I started wrestling, Dr. Carter encouraged me to try wrestling first, and if it didn’t work out, the colleges would always be there. Even though I was a relatively good student and graduated with honors, the closer I got to graduation, the more I hated school. I enjoyed learning math and science, but the classes were slow. I loved Dr. Carter’s English class, though most of school felt pointless and seemed like an inefficient use of nearly eight hours a day.
I spent as much time as I possibly could mentally and physically preparing for wrestling the best I knew how. I wanted to get in the best shape possible, so I developed my own training regimen, which meant working out on my own time and not during phys ed. I read books on strength training. I worked on bridging to strengthen my neck and worked on backflips because I thought I’d have to be a high flyer. I bought Japanese and Mexican wrestling tapes through a catalog I found on the Internet. I watched as much wrestling as I could and wrote down every move I saw in a binder filled with things I wanted to learn. The issue was that I needed to work so I could pay for wrestling school. At the time, I was working two minimum-wage jobs, one at McDonald’s and one for KB Toys. With all of that, I didn’t think I had time for school, so I lied to get out of it—the biggest lie I ever told.
I’m pretty much the worst liar I know, which is why today I’m surprised that my plan worked so well. I told my teachers I had gotten this job at one of the logging places in town, which would pay way more than my other jobs, but they needed me to work during the day. I asked if I could do all my schoolwork at home and just come in to take my tests. Everyone was cool with it. All I’d need is a letter from my mom saying it was OK and a letter from the boss saying the job was legit.
The job was not legit. It was just an excuse not to go to school. So I forged both letters—one from my mother and the other from my fictional boss—then I just stopped going. It was way easier than it had any right to be. Sometimes I still have nightmares that I never actually graduated from high school. In the dream, I walk up to get my diploma and someone pulls me aside and tells me they caught me and I will have to repeat my senior year. I still feel guilty about this deception.
Everything I was doing in my life was to get ready for wrestling, but I couldn’t prepare for what happened next. Three months before I graduated and was planning to head down to Florida, I got a call from Phyllis Lee to explain that, unfortunately, the Malenko School of Wrestling had closed down. Phyllis apologized, and when I asked for my $500 deposit back, she said, “I’m sorry … we don’t have it anymore.” I couldn’t believe it. When you’re only making $4.90 an hour, $500 is a lot of fucking money. Also, not only did I lose the money, I lost the chance to be trained by my favorite wrestler.
In three months I was graduating, and I had no idea what I was going to do. I wallowed around for a couple of weeks after I got the news. I called other wrestling schools, but none of them made me feel confident I was going to get good training. I didn’t know where to go or who to trust. Finally, what seemed like bad luck ended up being the best thing that could have happened to me. Shortly after I was told Dean’s school was closing, Shawn Michaels announced he was opening up a wrestling school of his own.
While I was watching Monday Night Raw, an ad flashed a 900 number, which I called—for a significant fee—to request more information about the Shawn Michaels Wrestling Academy. I figured a Shawn Michaels wrestling program had to be great, but as soon as I called, I started to worry it was a scam. The phone number cost money, but then all it told you was to mail them another $20 in order to receive the information. Despite being hesitant, I gave it a shot. When the pamphlet for the school came in the mail, I was demoralized again. The school was going to cost $3,900, which was $1,400 more than I had planned and even worse because I had lost the $500. The pamphlet contained another number to call to say if you were interested. Yet again the call cost money, and I almost didn’t do it. I didn’t know what else to do, though, so I called. When I finally talked to somebody, it ended up being Shawn Michaels’s mom, Carol, who was handling a lot of the logistics of the school.
Carol was absolutely wonderful and a godsend. Since I had limited social skills and didn’t even know what questions to ask, my mom talked to Carol more than I did. My mom was, naturally, concerned. As a family, we weren’t exactly well traveled, and Shawn’s school was in San Antonio, Texas. To us, that was so far away, it might as well have been Mars. My mom worried about my safety in such a big city, especially since I wouldn’t know anyone there and wasn’t overly good at making friends. We didn’t have great Internet at the house in 1999 (it was dial-up) so it was really hard to get information. We tried to find an apartment, but we didn’t know anything about the neighborhoods in San Antonio, and it was an expensive city.
My mother had a ton of questions, and Carol answered them all. I’m sure it helped that she had watched her own son embark on the same journey years ago, so she knew the stress a mother would experience. Carol explained to us that they had made an agreement with an apartment complex in San Antonio for the people coming in from out of the area. It wouldn’t be supernice, but it would be in a safe neighborhood. If I wanted a roommate, they’d put me together with someone else coming to the school and we could sign a lease together. Though my mom still had concerns, Carol was able to reassure her enough so that she wasn’t a nervous wreck when I ultimately left.
Fortunately, the Academy accepted month-to-month payments of $1,300 if you didn’t have the full $3,900 tuition up front. I cut all unnecessary spending and saved every penny I could. Even though she had hardly any money, my mom helped me out, too, without which I wouldn’t have made it.
The night I graduated from high school, I went to our class graduation party and said go
od-bye to my friends, who were all superstoked that I was going to wrestle. One of my friends even made me a little championship belt. I left the party around midnight and I went straight home to pack up all my stuff in the car, then started driving to San Antonio. I didn’t sleep because I was too excited.
Bryan and friends Mike Dove (left) and Evan Aho graduate high school, 1999
The drive from Aberdeen, Washington, to San Antonio, Texas, is just a little under 2,500 miles, and there’re really only two major roads. You take I-5 south for over 1,000 miles until you get to Los Angeles, and then you take I-10 east for over 1,000 miles until you get to San Antonio. Pretty easy, actually. This was my first of many long cross-country trips, and not only did I enjoy it, I discovered that I’m a good long-distance driver. The only time I stopped was for gas or to sleep a couple of hours. I probably could have been a relatively good truck driver, though my dad would’ve been furious. He had this funny disdain for truck drivers, having dealt with them for years in the logging industry. The only rule my dad ever really had for my sister about dating was this: Never marry a truck driver.
For the trip, I only packed what fit in my little teal 1992 Geo Storm. I brought some blankets, pillows, and a sleeping bag. I had a bag of clothes, a small TV with a VCR built in, and a box of all my wrestling tapes, which took up the most space, by far. That was it.
I broke down somewhere in Arizona, which slowed me down and cost me several hundred dollars (vital dollars, I might add), but other than that, the trip was enjoyable. My first night in San Antonio? Not so much.