by Daniel Bryan
To kill time, we ate at a nearby Mexican restaurant. Despite all the free tortilla chips, that only took about forty-five minutes. In trying to figure out what we were going to do, the guys decided they would take me somewhere I’d never been: a strip club. My vote to not go wasn’t counted.
One would think that seeing your first live naked woman would be exciting for an eighteen-year-old, but it wasn’t. I was horrified. In this particular case, seeing my first live naked woman coincided with seeing my first live naked C-section scar. Rudy and his friend watched and laughed as I shrank away from a woman who came up, licked my ear, and said something to me in Spanish. I had no idea what she said, but all I wanted was to get out of that club. It looked like the dirtiest place I had ever been inside of, and I was scared to death the entire two hours we were there.
We finally went back to the gear guy’s house around 3 A.M. The gear was done, and, remarkably, everything fit great. The mask was a little tight in the nose, but for not having measured me he did an amazing job. Despite being horrified an hour earlier, when I looked in the mirror, I was thrilled. That’s when my first match finally felt like a real thing.
5
THE REAL KICKER
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2, 2014—12:55 P.M.
After more than an hour of training, Bryan takes a pause in one of the many rooms of the New Orleans Athletic Club, this one overlooking the indoor swimming pool on the lower level. With several substantial sips and gulps, he finishes off a French vanilla protein shake with a raspberry-flavored electrolyte mix-in. The pounding of speed bags in the background is a prelude to Bryan’s next round of exercise. He targets a stuffed punching bag but spares it fisticuffs in favor of swift, daunting kicks. Bryan throws his leg forward and connects with precision, leaving sweat gleams and indents. Again. And again. The blows are unsettlingly potent, but it’s the change in his eyes that is most unnerving. Not to mention the likely thoughts and visions behind them.
After a solid workout, Daniel Bryan walks through the French Quarter back toward his hotel. A brief encounter with some excited WWE fans outside the entrance keeps his energy high as he heads back up to his room. The drapes are drawn, spilling light onto half-unpacked suitcases, the Whole Foods bounty, and various itineraries. Bryan’s first order of business is a quick call and catch-up with Brie, whose voice is only a light buzz between his questions in the otherwise quiet room.
Bryan pushes the vitamins and WrestleMania swag around on his desktop to find the room service menu and discuss grub options with his wife-to-be. The choice falls between chicken fingers and a far more likely organic, farm-raised chicken breast with varieties of greens, from bib lettuce to arugula. The two plan for the afternoon and evening ahead, plus the opportunity to spend ever-dwindling time together.
Shawn started his promotion, the Texas Wrestling Alliance (TWA), shortly before I moved to San Antonio. It was designed to give his trainees a place to put their instruction into practice, a place for us to be able to keep learning once we graduated and actually had to go out into the wrestling world. Along with the students, it was filled with experienced independent wrestlers from all over Texas.
Originally I was supposed to wrestle Lance in my first match, but due to an injury, they pulled Lance out the day before and put Brian in his place, which made me feel a little more comfortable since he and I had trained so much together. Brian had decided long before that he was going to wrestle under the name Spanky, which was in part a reference to masturbation, and with the gimmick he didn’t need to drive down to Mexico to get gear. He went to Goodwill, got some sort of flowery pajama bottoms, put on his amateur wrestling shoes, and—voilà!—he had gear that was a great fit for the character.
While Brian had a good grasp of the character he wanted to portray, I didn’t. In fact, I wasn’t even thinking about it. I didn’t think about music or what I wanted to do during my entrance. I hadn’t really thought about anything other than the technical aspect of what I’d like to do wrestling-wise. Shawn took care of the music thing. He suggested Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” which is not the worst entrance music of all time, but it’s pretty close. I was too nervous to second-guess the decision.
On October 4, 1999, Brian and I wrestled our first match in San Antonio at a country-western bar called Far West Rodeo. Brian came out dancing in his Goodwill pj’s to Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a Bottle,” and I came out in my dragon mask and spandex tights with my lame music. In general, first matches are rotten, and ours was no different, though there’s no denying we worked hard. We were trying to do a lot of stuff that you probably shouldn’t be trying in your first match, like German suplexes and moonsaults. Though I had been nervous, after I got in the ring and started wrestling, I went into a weird state where I was just having fun. I’m not sure the two hundred fans in attendance knew what to make of us, but they were very generous, cheering loudly after we wrestled to a ten-minute draw, maybe because we were wrestling a more action-packed style than they were used to seeing.
We walked to the back afterward, and a bunch of the wrestlers congratulated us on our first match. Shawn, in particular, was thrilled with our performance. When I went to sleep that night I couldn’t believe I had done it: I had wrestled my first match, it went well, and I didn’t fall on my face.
TWA was running a couple of shows a week by the time of my first match, and soon I was wrestling several times a week, mostly against either Brian or Rudy. Not only that, but TWA had gotten a local television deal, so our matches aired on Saturday night around midnight. The shows were only thirty minutes, but it gave us the experience of doing short TV interviews, which I was horrible at for a long time. But, hey, practice makes perfect.
In November of that year, Shawn arranged for Lance and me to wrestle in Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling (FMW), a Japanese company, in exchange for his going over to referee a big match of theirs. Getting an opportunity to go to Japan so early in my career had me over-the-moon happy.
We did a press conference with Shawn once we got to Japan, and then we went to FMW’s big show to watch while Shawn refereed. I had seen a ton of Japanese wrestling, most of which was very technical and athletic, and I loved the style. FMW was a little different, though. It had some awesome technical wrestling and aerial moves, but it also had a lot of brawling and hardcore wrestling. This was not exactly typical in Japan, but with so many different wrestling companies, this happened to be FMW’s niche. Their biggest star was a high-flying character named Hayabusa, who was wrestling Mr. Gannosuke in the match Shawn officiated. As we watched the promotional package, I couldn’t believe it. To build up the match, Mr. Gannosuke had exploded a bottle rocket in Hayabusa’s butt! That’s right, he shoved the bottle rocket in Hayabusa’s butt and lit it, and it exploded. Shawn’s eyes were priceless when he first saw it. His brain seemed to explode. They assured Lance and me that there would be no fireworks put in our butts.
After that show, Shawn flew back to San Antonio, while we stayed. We did a week’s worth of training at the FMW dojo with Masato Tanaka, a great wrestler we’d seen before in Extreme Championship Wrestling. Tanaka is a thick, muscular, and notoriously tough Japanese guy. Yet in my mind, I mostly remember this image of him as he left the dojo, hopping onto his little moped bike and saying, “Bye-bye!” in an unexpectedly high-pitched voice.
After our training, we commenced a ten-day tour, for which we were paid $1,000. Given how poor I was, it seemed like an incredible amount of money. I thought I’d never have to work again.
There were a lot of things that confused me on my first trip to Japan. Our first night in a hotel room on the tour, Lance pounded on my door and asked me if I’d been in the bathroom yet. I told him I hadn’t, so he barged in and led me straight to the tiny bathroom. The toilet had lights and buttons on it, one of which he pressed, then told me to stand back. This little rod came from under the toilet seat and sprayed water right where a person’s butt would be. It squirted so hard that the w
ater went all the way out the bathroom door. I learned it was a mechanical bidet. Before the trip I didn’t even know bidets existed.
A lot of the small Japanese towns we went to didn’t have Western-style toilets. They had what we called Japanese toilets, which were essentially porcelain holes in the ground. Nobody told us how to use them, not that we shouldn’t have been able to figure it out. I had to take my pants off completely and sometimes even my shirt if I had to poop, just to make sure I wouldn’t get anything on myself.
Years later when I worked for New Japan Pro Wrestling, veteran wrestler Scott Norton told me a horrifying story of how he was already dressed for a big match but then had to go to the bathroom. They only had the Japanese-style toilets, so he pulled his singlet down and gave it a go, but somehow he got poop on himself. His match was up next and he didn’t have time to change gear, so he went in and showered with his gear on. Given that Scott experienced this even after all the times he’d been to Japan, I don’t feel so bad now.
One night, some of the guys took Lance and me out to this bar-type place where all the servers were women who walked around in bikinis. All of a sudden this DJ yelled, “It’s party time!” in English, with his Japanese accent. The girls took their tops off and ran to sit on customers’ laps, where they bounced up and down to the music. The song would end and they’d just get up, put their tops back on, say, “Bye-byyyye!!” then go back to serving drinks again. Lance and I were both still eighteen, and it was the craziest thing I’d ever seen. The Japanese wrestlers laughed at how uncomfortable we were.
I also had a hard time with the food. Back then, I didn’t like experimenting much with what I ate. I liked the basics, like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, fruit, salads, and sometimes, when I was feeling adventurous, ramen noodles. In Japan, the guys would occasionally take us for sushi, and I struggled to stomach the raw fish. Today, I love Japanese food—and all sorts of food, really—and my mom, who would see me turn away all but the most basic, is amazed.
Despite all my cultural confusion during my first trip to Japan, I had a great time. We wrestled seven matches in ten days, and Lance and I teamed up every show to wrestle two of the FMW guys. I learned something new every night from the Japanese wrestlers.
The final two shows of the tour took place in Korakuen Hall, a small but legendary building in Tokyo where anybody who’s anybody has wrestled. Wrestling in there was an amazing experience, and the crowds were awesome. They weren’t necessarily excited to see either me or Lance, two young, green wrestlers that they barely knew, but they applauded when we did something good and were very forgiving when we weren’t so good. The last match was my favorite of the tour. We faced off with two of the younger wrestlers, and for the first time, I did a springboard front somersault dive into the crowd—a move that would turn into a staple for me years later.
At the end of the tour, they thanked us, gave us our money in cash, and told us they would love to have us back. Really they only wanted Lance back, because even though neither of us was very good, Lance was big and had a cowboy gimmick that appealed to the Japanese audience. When he went back to FMW for a second tour without me, I realized the deal. At my size, if I wanted to be successful I would need to get a whole lot better.
The trip to Japan was a great learning experience, both from a wrestling perspective and in opening my eyes to different cultures. The only negative aspect was midway through the tour when I got knocked out for the first time. During a tag team match, I tried a moonsault from the second rope to the floor, but my toes slipped and I hit the concrete floor headfirst. When I came to, I was in the ring and had no idea what was going on. I knew I needed to tag Lance, so I grabbed my opponent in a full nelson and suplexed him right on his head. Why I did that, and not just a basic move like a snap mare or a headlock to stop him, I have no idea. To make it worse, he was being really gentle with me, knowing I was hurt, yet I just dumped him with a dragon suplex. And then I tagged out. I don’t think I got in the rest of the match, which is a good thing. Though it was the first time I got knocked out, it wouldn’t be the last. As far as injuries go, concussions have been the number one thing to plague me throughout my career.
In February 2000, a couple of months after the Japan tour, Shawn got us an untelevised (or “dark”) tryout match with WWE at SmackDown in Austin.
It was me and Shooter Schultz, another of Shawn’s students, against Lance Cade and Brian Kendrick. Originally we were told by a WWE producer that we’d have twelve minutes to wrestle, so naturally, we planned out a twelve-minute match. Then, shortly before the show was about to start, we were told we only had six minutes. None of us knew what to do because that had never happened to us before, whereas now I realize that’s a common occurrence in WWE. We told Shawn, and that’s where it was good to have Shawn Michaels as an advocate. He was expecting WWE agents to take a thorough look at us, and so he went off, yelling about “his guys” and demanding more time for us. We got ten minutes.
The four of us went out there and threw everything we could at the match—to a mild reaction from the Austin crowd. We did a lot of things I now know we shouldn’t have done. Lance performed a chokeslam, a move several people on the roster used, which would typically make that move off-limits for anyone else to use. We also did several dives out of the ring, one of which gave me my first documented concussion. We weren’t used to the ramp being there, and Lance took a misstep when he tried to catch me off my springboard somersault dive. I landed on my head on the ramp, which knocked me loopy. Afterward, the WWE doctor told me I had a concussion, all right, but not much was known about concussions at the time, so he just advised the guys to make sure I didn’t go to sleep after it.
When we got back through the curtain, Shawn was there waiting, and he was all pumped up for us. “Yes! That was awesome,” he said. He started telling anyone who would listen that they should sign us. Shawn is a great guy to have in your corner. Immediately following our tryout, he started putting pressure on WWE to sign us. Our tryout was on a Tuesday, and by Thursday Shawn still hadn’t heard anything, so he called and threatened to take us to WWE’s rival wrestling promotion, WCW, since he was friends with Kevin Nash, who had a lot of influence there. That Friday, WWE offered all four of us—me, Brian, Lance, and Shooter—developmental contracts. Like I said, Shawn is a great guy to have in your corner.
Our developmental contracts were for $500 per week, which made me feel like the richest guy in the world. I had recently gotten a job at Great American Cookies inside the mall nearby, and though I usually gave at least two weeks’ notice whenever I quit a job, this time, I just stopped showing up. I didn’t even go in to get my check for the time I worked there, which is unlike me.
The timing of the deal worked in my favor as well. The following week, I was doing my first ladder match, where Brian and I wrestled against a team called the Board of Education for the TWA Tag Team Title. It was the first time we were in the main event of a TWA show, so we wanted to pull out all the stops. At one point I set up a twelve-foot ladder in the ring and jumped off the second rung from the top, somersaulting over the top rope onto my opponent, Ruben Cruz, on the floor. The ladder moved as I jumped off, which didn’t allow me to get enough distance to hit him. Ruben nearly sprinted forward to try to catch me, but it wasn’t enough, and I landed hard on the floor, separating my right shoulder. We continued wrestling for another ten minutes, which included me foolishly executing an elbow drop off the top of the ladder, which I’m sure didn’t help matters. Brian and I lost the match but brawled with the Board of Education afterward, getting the upper hand and setting the two of them up on a table on the floor. Brian and I dove off the top turnbuckle onto our opponents and crashed through the table. This was my first time through a table, and it was bad enough given the state of my shoulder, but as I went through, my head hit the leg of the metal guardrail, knocking me out for more than a full minute. I wasn’t able to wrestle for the next six weeks, so I felt very lucky to have that
guaranteed $500 a week. If it had happened a week sooner, my entire career would have been much different.
That match changed my perspective on how I should wrestle. Due to my size, I thought I needed to wrestle a more daredevil style, but it wasn’t practical because no matter how exciting the style might have been, if I kept getting hurt, I would have a pretty short career. I resolved to switch to a more mat-based wrestling style since all of my injuries had occurred during big dives to the floor. I figured if I was going to have any longevity, I needed to be more grounded and technical, like Dean Malenko. That’s why it was a godsend when WWE called and sent us to their developmental system in Memphis, Tennessee, where I first met William Regal.
The follow-up to the ladder match with the Board of Education was a steel cage match that ultimately further reinforced my need to take fewer risks and make smarter decisions inside the ring. To make the cage match feel like the final, definitive blow-off brawl between our teams, we decided that all four of us in the tag match would blade—in other words, purposely cut ourselves to draw blood. It was my first time, and I admit it was a terrifying prospect.
Shawn showed us how to make a blade: You get a straightedge razor and cut it to get one really sharp tip. You then affix that to your wrist tape so you can access it during the match. There are two methods for actually drawing blood: You can either stick it into your forehead and twist, or you can stick it into your forehead and slice. The smart way is to stick and twist; that’s the way that leaves the least amount of scars. (I’ve never been confident that that method would get me enough blood, so I’ve always been a slicer. I have a couple of scars on my forehead today, so now I realize I probably should’ve learned the twist method instead.) The most nerve-wracking part to me, though, was that I didn’t know what to do with this incredibly sharp blade in my fingers once I was done. Shawn told me he’d usually stick it down his pants or—to my utter shock—sometimes he’d stick it in his mouth. Neither of those sounded like good a place for this razor-sharp object.