by Daniel Bryan
MapQuest had just kind of become a thing, so I had the printouts and an actual map to help me figure out how to get to the apartments. I arrived in San Antonio around 11 P.M. on June 25, 1999. When I got there, everyone on the freeway was honking their horns and screaming. I mistakenly thought they were honking their horns at me, and I got very nervous. I pulled off at an exit, but the same thing happened. Finally I tried going to the apartment complex, but by the time I found it, it was unreasonably late and the office was closed. There was a grocery store down the street, so I parked there to try to get some sleep because I didn’t know what else to do. People were still driving around with their hands on their horns and making noise, so not only was it impossible to sleep, but I still had no idea what was going on.
This was the end of June in Texas and it was hot as hell, and even hotter in my car. I didn’t want to keep it running because that would burn gas, but it was so hot—especially for a kid who grew up in Aberdeen—that I kept having to turn it on for quick doses of air-conditioning. Occasionally I’d roll the windows down, but then I got scared because of all the insane honking and yelling.
Eventually a man from the grocery store came up to me and asked me what I was doing. “Oh, I was kind of just sleeping here,” I replied. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.” He didn’t care. He told me there was no loitering and that I’d have to move on. Before he left, I asked him if all the honking and yelling was normal around the area. He looked at me like I was an idiot and said, “No, they’re doing it because the Spurs just won the NBA Championship.” That explained it. I felt dumb as a brick as I relocated to a big strip-mall parking lot, where nobody bothered me for the rest of the night. I didn’t get any sleep, of course.
Even though I arrived before my official move-in date, I was able to get into my apartment early the next day thanks to the nice ladies who worked there. You could tell some were mothers by the way they sympathized with my naïveté.
The apartment was a small one-bedroom. I shared it with another trainee named AJ from Florida, who slept in the bedroom (mostly because he owned a bed) while I slept in my sleeping bag on the living room floor. He was around thirty, which felt so much older than me at the time, and he had long, black hair, wore leather jackets, and had a cool car. He looked like a wrestler and, in fact, he did have wrestling experience. AJ came to train with Shawn hoping not only to improve but, like several other guys who came to the school, to get an “in” with WWE.
AJ also had life experience, which really helped out because I didn’t know how to do anything when it came to living on my own. For example, I didn’t realize there is a difference between regular dish soap and soap you put in a dishwasher. My family never had one. I put regular soap in the dishwasher, turned it on, and left the apartment. When I came back, there were suds all over the floor. AJ knew right away that I had put the wrong kind of soap in and explained the difference. Then he called up the nice ladies at the office.
“Your dishwasher’s broken and it flooded our kitchen!” he told them. When the repairman came to inspect, he asked if we used the wrong dish soap, and AJ responded, “Of course not. Do you think I’m an idiot?!”
I suspect he went through the whole charade because he didn’t want to clean up the suds and figured I couldn’t do it properly. I was that oblivious to just about everything.
By winter, AJ had left San Antonio, and it started getting cold. The apartment was freezing and no matter how high I turned up the thermostat, the heat would never come on. I spent over a month bundled up in my warmest clothes before I finally called the office. The repairman came by, looked at the thermostat for less than three seconds, and pushed a switch that read COOL to the position that read HEAT. I felt like an idiot for missing something so obvious.
The Shawn Michaels Wrestling Academy was in a grubby part of San Antonio on top of a Mexican restaurant called Doña Juanita’s. It wasn’t quite what I expected. I thought it would be more like the WWE Performance Center is today, but inside, there was just a ring with a few weightlifting machines, and it was really, really hot. The guys who lived next door would sit outside on top of their cars and drink beer all day. I was constantly terrified that my car would get broken into or stolen. I later found out that someone was giving them cases of beer to watch our cars. I don’t think anyone’s car was ever broken into.
On the first day of training, we all got to the Academy early. I get nervous doing just about anything for the first time, whether it’s going to a new yoga studio or taking a class at the botanical garden. Needless to say, walking up those stairs and finally reaching the moment of my first wrestling class had the butterflies in my stomach going crazy. AJ had told me a rule in wrestling was to introduce yourself and shake hands with everyone in the locker room, so I greeted all my fellow trainees. Some of the guys were already laughing and joking, and the comfort they projected put me a little more at ease. But then the room went quiet as Shawn Michaels walked in.
Shawn Michaels, in my opinion, is the best American wrestler of his generation. Being the best in wrestling is subjective, of course, so not everyone will agree, but he was a true Superstar in my eyes and the first wrestler I ever met. When I was seven, I watched him as part of The Rockers when he first came to the WWE. My friend Schuyler impersonated him all the time when we were in middle school. This was the guy who won the Royal Rumble the first time I ever ordered pay-per-view in 1996, and he was in the main event of the first WrestleMania I ordered, in which he competed in a sixty-minute Iron Man Match with Bret Hart to win the WWE Championship for the first time. If Shawn Michaels had a big match on pay-per-view, I ordered it because I knew I’d be getting my money’s worth. He had retired a year earlier because his back had gotten really bad, and the general feeling was that he would never wrestle again. When he walked in the door that first day, I was in awe.
Once 9 A.M. hit, Shawn gathered us around and introduced himself and the other trainers, and soon after that we started training. My first day of training was a real eye-opener. I had tried to come to the school in the best shape possible, and I was confident in my conditioning, but we were on the second floor of a building with no air-conditioning. We started with conditioning, doing some running, some body-weight exercises like squats and push-ups, and some circuit training. I looked around and could see the heat taking its toll on the other trainees. A few of them started throwing up during this portion of the training, which lasted more than an hour. Next, we did some gymnastic-type rolls inside the ring. Between the heat, the exhaustion, and the dizziness created by the tumbling, guys were throwing up left and right. Some made it to the bathroom, some only made it to the window to puke onto the sidewalk below, and some didn’t make it to either. They just vomited on the floor. I did my best to resist the urge, and out of all the guys, Lance Cade and I were the only ones who didn’t throw up. We finished off the day running sprints, and at the end, Shawn gave us a pep talk. I was so exhausted I don’t even remember what he said. For me, beginnings are always the hardest, and I felt great knowing that I’d completed my first day of wrestling training.
Though Shawn had started a part-time class earlier in the year, we were his first full-time class, and as a class, we were very successful. In many wrestling schools, a majority of the guys who start training never even have a match. Out of the twenty guys who started in that first class, more than half ended up being able to wrestle at least a couple matches, and three of us—Lance Cade, Brian Kendrick, and myself—ended up holding championships in WWE.
Lance caught Shawn’s eye from the very beginning. He was a big guy from Nebraska—tall (six foot five), muscular, and athletic. He was good-looking, too, with his long blond hair, and only eighteen at the time. That first day of training, among all the calisthenics and rolls, we also did something involving jumping. Lance could jump to the moon, and when Shawn saw him jump so high, he immediately said—in front of everyone—“I smell money.” It was clear that Lance was one of Shawn’s early
favorites.
It took me and Brian Kendrick a little longer to catch Shawn’s attention. We were both smaller—me at five foot eight and Brian at five foot six—but we would work our hardest at every drill, no matter how mundane. In fact, because of our shared work ethic, it didn’t take long for Brian and me to become friends.
Brian is great, both as a wrestler and as a person, and I was lucky we attended class at the same time. He had grown up in Lacey, Washington, only about an hour from Aberdeen, and he loved wrestling every bit as much as I did. He had his own collection of wrestling tapes, and sometimes he’d come over and we’d watch the tapes together, talking about things we’d like to learn. Brian was probably twenty when we got down there, but he had a much better understanding of how the world worked than I did. He was also free-spirited and didn’t care what people thought about him. A couple of years earlier, Brian had gone to a wrestling school in Austin, Texas, and even though he had a couple of matches, he felt like that school was a scam, so he quit and saved his money. When Shawn’s school opened up, Brian jumped at the chance. In an effort to save on rent, he stayed at his aunt’s house in Austin and drove the ninety minutes to class every day, then back home to work his pizza job at night. He worked harder than anybody else in our class.
Even though it was Shawn’s school and he was there for almost every class, Rudy Boy Gonzalez was our primary trainer. Rudy was a character. Though only five foot eight, he had an enormous stomach that was hard as a rock, plus the biggest head I had ever seen. But he was really agile and hilarious, to boot. He’d been wrestling for years, and he was an excellent trainer and one of the main reasons for my early success.
Mandatory class days were Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 9 A.M. until noon, but Brian and I were training way more than that. Rudy stayed late working with us, and he’d open the gym any day we wanted to come in and train. At first he would just help us with the basics we learned in class, though soon he was teaching us anything we wanted to learn, like Space Flying Tiger Drops or moonsaults to the floor. If Brian or I saw something on a tape and wanted to learn it, Rudy would try to teach it to us. There are some things we just weren’t physically capable of doing, but you don’t find that out until you try. Every time we fouled something up, Rudy gave us some advice or shared his perspective on how we could have done it better. Just being there for us and so liberally sharing his knowledge, Rudy inspired us to work harder. His passion for teaching really stood out.
Shawn’s passion for wrestling was apparent as well, and seeing it humanized him for me. Gradually, he turned from being a Superstar I was in awe of to a coach I respected (admittedly, with a little bit of awe). Shawn was so passionate that occasionally he would get in the ring and actually take the moves, even though he wasn’t supposed to because of his back. One time we were learning back body drops, one of the higher bumps in wrestling, and none of us were taking them very well. We might have landed fine, but we weren’t getting the height to make the move look spectacular.
Shawn was a masterful bump taker. He excelled at making his opponents look great by taking an ordinary move like a back body drop and getting so high that it looked as if his opponent had just thrown him fifteen feet in the air. Given we were getting nowhere near that high, Shawn would stop us, tell us how to get more height on our bump, then have us try again. He kept explaining and explaining, but try as we might, none of us seemed to be getting any higher. Finally he got so fired up that he got in there and took a back body drop himself to show us, catching so much air that his foot hit one of the beams on the ceiling.
All of a sudden from one of the doors I heard a woman scream out, “Michael Shawn Hickenbottom! What are you doing?!” It was Carol, Shawn’s mom, and she gave him an earful in front of all of us for going against doctors’ orders. Instantly he stopped being the Superstar wrestler Shawn Michaels and turned into a son being scolded by his mother.
Another thing that took Shawn off the pedestal I had put him on was his painkiller issue, which he talks about in his book. Most of the time he was great, but occasionally he would show up with his sunglasses on, watch class for a little while, then fall asleep in his chair. Since I was naïve enough not to know what painkillers were, I thought maybe he was drunk. Either way, I realized that no matter how successful he was, Shawn Michaels was just another dude with his own struggles, who also happened to be great at wrestling. And actually what put him back on the pedestal was not his wrestling—which, when he made a comeback several years later, may have been better than ever before—but his ability to kick the painkillers. Addiction is a son of bitch, and he beat it.
For a long time I focused on wrestling to the exclusion of everything else. Even though I didn’t have very much money, I worked as little as possible. I would get whatever crappy minimum-wage job I could find that would work with my schedule, and as soon as I saved up enough money to pay my bills for a month or two, I would quit. One time, I thought I’d hit the jackpot with a job as a stock boy for Victoria’s Secret. My first day was supposed to be on a Friday, but last minute, I was asked to do ring crew for a show. I called in and asked if I could start on a different day, and the manager told me she’d call me back with my new start date. She never called me back. Instead of working with bras and panties, I ended up getting a pretty good job at a Christian bookstore where we shipped Bibles to churches. I had it for a month, then quit. Luckily, my half of the rent was only $200 and I knew how to live on very little money. That meant I would have to eat peanut butter and jelly tortillas (which were cheaper than bread) all the time. If you don’t require very much money to live, it gives you a certain amount of freedom, and that freedom allowed me to commit a hundred percent of myself to wrestling.
Wrestling training is difficult, mostly because the contact is so unique. There’s a lot of contact in sports like football, but not the same kind. If I’m a wide receiver trying to jump for a pass in the middle of the field, there’s a good chance I’m going to get leveled, but the receiver tries to not get leveled, and the quarterback attempts to throw the ball in the best possible position for the receiver to make the catch and do so without his head getting taken off. Wrestling is different. When my opponent gives me a shoulder tackle, I try to “attack the mat,” taking a bump as hard and as fast as possible, plus try to do it safely. Trying to unlearn years of attempting to not fall down is hard, and hard on the body.
As training went on, guys started dropping out. Some people walked away because of injuries, some because they had personal issues, and some because wrestling turned out to be tougher than they thought. My roommate AJ ended up leaving halfway through the class because he had some issues to address back in Florida. Fortunately, he paid his half of the rent for the rest of the term of our lease, for which I was grateful. It opened up space in the apartment for Kendrick to come stay so he wouldn’t have to drive to Austin every night. Not only did I enjoy his company, but it gave him more time and energy to train, which made us both better.
Slowly but surely, we learned enough to have matches, starting with basic matches in training after about seven weeks. At first Shawn and Rudy would just tell us exactly what to do. While we were in the ring, Rudy would say something like, “Bryan, grab a headlock.” I would grab the headlock. Then he would say, “Now take him down.” I would take the guy down. He would tell my opponent to head-scissors me, which he would, and we would continue until Rudy would end the match by calling for a move like a small package and telling the pinned person not to kick out.
Soon we were coming up with our own matches at the Academy. Boy, were they rotten. If you have never seen someone’s first attempt at having a match, it’s comical, and mine were no different. But as we kept training, the matches got better.
I was sitting at home on a Sunday afternoon when Rudy called me and told me I was having my first professional wrestling match in two days. I was so excited I could barely talk. When I finally could, I mumbled a thank-you and then asked, “What s
hould I wear for gear?”
Rudy said not to worry; he knew a guy and was coming over to pick me up in about an hour.
A few weeks prior to this call, Shawn was talking with us after class. He said if we hadn’t already, we should start thinking about our wrestling names. I didn’t have any good ideas other than using my real name, so I asked Shawn what he thought. He tucked his chin, thought it over for a second, then responded with, “How about ‘the American Dragon’?”
I didn’t really like it, but was too afraid to tell him. “Why?” I asked.
“Because you wrestle like a Japanese guy,” he responded. I took that as a compliment. Thus, the American Dragon was born.
The gear guy lived four hours away in Matamoros, just across the Mexican border, so I was ready with two peanut butter and jelly tortillas for the trip when Rudy picked me up. He didn’t know exactly where the guy’s house was, though, so we had to pick up another wrestler who lived on the U.S. side of the border to show us where to go. As we were crossing the border, I found out they didn’t even have the gear guy’s telephone number, so we were just going to stop by and see if he was home. It felt really poorly planned.
As we got closer to the gear guy’s house, I distinctly recall seeing all these dogs tied up on the roofs of houses. I asked why the dogs were on people’s roofs, and Rudy’s friend said, “Oh, so people don’t eat them.” I was terrified.
When we finally arrived at the gear maker’s house, luckily, he was home. Rudy described what he wanted my gear to look like: long red and blue tights with dragons on the sides, along with a similarly colored mask that looked like a dragon to cover up the blank stare I had when I wrestled. We would supplement whatever he created with amateur wrestling shoes and white kick pads we’d gotten from a martial arts store. The gear guy said he could get it done that night, but it would take him about four hours. He didn’t even measure me, which made me question whether the whole escapade was a good idea.