Yes!

by Daniel Bryan

  All of that said, I truly enjoyed training people. Teaching forces you to learn your craft better in order to explain it to other people, and at that point in my career, still being so new to wrestling, it helped me a great deal. Plus, I really enjoyed the Bay Area, and despite my doubts about the living situation, it turned out to be fun. Roland, who passed away in 2013, was witty and funny, and he always had something interesting to talk about, mostly wrestling gossip. Doug Anderson was a kind man, who always seemed to be in good spirits.

  Living with Roland’s eighty-eight-year-old uncle was what made the situation truly unique. Uncle Al had a hard time hearing and seeing. When I first moved in, he was able to dress himself, but after a month or so, Roland had to start laying out his clothes for him. He went from wearing his usual nice pants and a buttoned-up shirt to clothes Roland wore, which is why one day Uncle Al came out confused with basketball shorts over his dress pants.

  On Uncle Al’s eighty-ninth birthday, we decided to throw him a surprise party, complete with an ice cream cake and tons of decorations. As Roland and I went through the party supply store Roland grabbed two candles, one that was an 8 and another that was a 9. I stopped him and pointed out how rare it is that people live to be eighty-nine. Roland agreed with my suggestion to celebrate with eighty-nine candles. It was just a matter of regular candles or “magic” candles, the kind that don’t blow out. Without really thinking things through, we chose the latter.

  After training, we invited all the students over to the house for Uncle Al’s big birthday bash. We got everybody party favors, like hats and kazoos, and had even found a bunch of paper Batman masks because we thought they were funny and would confuse Uncle Al. Training ran late, so we all got back to the house around 9 P.M., which was about two hours later than Uncle Al’s usual bedtime. Since he couldn’t hear very well, the noise of us all coming in didn’t wake him up. We quickly set up all the decorations and got to work on the ice cream cake, which we planned on bringing into his bedroom. Not one person—not even Doug, who was a sensible, reasonable adult—brought up that it might be a bad idea to put eighty-nine candles that don’t blow out onto an ice cream cake.

  We organized all the candles on the cake, which required us to put them very close together. We were less than halfway through when the candles all caught on fire and created an inferno, so high that it left black marks on the ceiling. Of course, what do we all do? We start trying to blow them out … which didn’t work because they were magic fucking candles. I grabbed the cake and tried running it to the kitchen sink to put the fire out with water, while Roland went to wake up Uncle Al so he could see the mess we created. The kitchen faucet didn’t work, so as I ran outside, I dropped the cake on the floor. By this point, Uncle Al—dressed only in his boxer shorts and a white tank top—was ever-so-slowly coming out of his room, yelling, “What the hell is going on?!” Sara ran to get a knife and a plate. We cut a piece of the salvaged cake and lit one candle on it, and when Uncle Al emerged, we gave him the cake as we all sang “Happy Birthday.” Unexpectedly, Uncle Al started crying. In nearly nine decades, it was the first birthday party he ever had.

  8

  THE PUNISHER

  THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 2014—12:49 P.M.

  The leader of the “Yes!” Movement rolls up to an unmarked storefront with zero signage, but a glance through the window gives insight to the battleground on the other side of the entry. Youths are sparring on the mats as Bryan heads past an old-school Superdome fight poster toward a training room where the air is thick and sweat beads fast. Gloved competitors halt their ring session and turn their attention to the five-foot-eight former WWE Champion entering their arena. There, Bryan meets Craig Wilson, a boxer/kickboxer at Power Mixed Martial Arts in Terrytown, Louisiana. As he explained yesterday, Bryan seeks movement and conditioning, not intensity or technique, though both are impossible not to absorb within these walls in Wilson’s care.

  “I’m there to get my hips moving,” Bryan says, “get everything fluid and make everything liquid so that by the time we’re at Sunday, I’m not worried about how tight my hip flexors are or anything like that.”

  Before he can get to strikes and form, Bryan follows Wilson’s guidance to do a unique wall stretch as a preamble to the workout that follows. With the WWE warrior’s lethal legs outstretched to form a Y, you’d swear it was a modified “Yes!” pose.

  They’re as uncommon a duo as you’d ever see, with the hulking and deceptively swift Craig Wilson accepting targeted strikes from Daniel Bryan. The fourteen-year kickboxing veteran introduces his Superstar trainee to a few key techniques and combinations—kicks of multiple heights, jab sequences—and pointers on positioning. Bryan pivots around a tall kick bag, delivering a succession of blows from all angles to maximize speed upon each kick reset. It’s a sound strategy and certainly a method he may soon put into practice within the squared circle. By the time he’s done, the “Yes!” Man’s shins and ankles are flushed from the persistent impact, his shirt’s darkened with perspiration, and the skin of his bare feet is torn. Bryan is very satisfied. So is Wilson, who comments on the opportunity to work with the WWE Superstar who’ll clash with the Game at WrestleMania.

  “I know [Daniel’s] background. He’s a very explosive wrestler, and a great wrestler,” Wilson comments. “He’s very good as far as technique goes. He’s very fast, very nimble. He’s going to punish Triple H.”

  For the kicks—not unlike those levied from Jersey to Mexico and refined in Japan a decade ago—to have impact, the “Yes!” Man opts to push forth with further leg training. It’s back to the New Orleans Athletic Club, up the stairs to the massive balcony overlooking the pool for end-to-end lunges, following leg presses and other weight exercises.

  Bryan jots down his progress in his notebook—the latest among a collection of many he’s accumulated over the years. He explains that his earliest workouts were in junior high in his bedroom using his dad’s old weight set. Back then, Bryan’s attempted bench presses and bicep curls were the limits of his training until he took a weightlifting class in high school. These days, he pops into gyms from town to town around the world to be the best wrestler on the planet.

  Shortly after I started training at APW, I got an e-mail from a man named Gabe Sapolsky asking me if I was free on February 23, 2002, for the first show of a new wrestling organization that was starting up. It was called Ring of Honor, and it became the company I was most associated with before I got to WWE.

  The inspiration for Ring of Honor was Roland’s 2001 King of the Indies tournament, which brought in the top independent talent from all over the place. ROH was originally owned by Rob Feinstein, who owned RF Video, a company that sold wrestling tapes. RF Video made most of its money selling VHS tapes of Paul Heyman’s Extreme Championship Wrestling, an extremely popular company among hardcore wrestling fans, but ECW had gone out of business in April 2001. Their idea was to create their own wrestling company using the best independent stars from all over the country, and not just for a one-night thing like King of the Indies or the Super 8, but for a stream of shows that would fill the tape-sales void left by ECW’s closure .

  In their business plan, it was actually acceptable to lose money on the live shows—which was bound to happen with all the flights they paid for and the higher-paid talent they brought in—as long as they could recoup the money with tape sales. ROH was designed to appeal to a hardcore fan base who was tired of mainstream wrestling and in search of something different. The assumption was that tape traders and ECW fans everywhere would want ROH videos.

  The first show was titled Era of Honor Begins, and it was held at the Murphy Rec Center in Philadelphia. That night, ROH officials were very smart in creating a main event that people wanted to see. Eddie Guerrero had been let go by WWE after a drunk driving incident in November 2001, but he was wrestling all over the place after his release to prove he was one of the best in the world. Fans loved Eddie, so he was a great choice for the main event a
gainst a popular Mexican wrestler from ECW named Super Crazy. It was something of a dream match. They used Eddie versus Super Crazy to draw people to the show, but the plan was to get people hooked with the younger, hungrier independent talent and build off of us.

  On that first show, I was in a triple-threat match against Low Ki and Christopher Daniels. Low Ki had established himself as the hottest young independent talent in the Northeast, and he and I had a history of good matches. Daniels was an established independent wrestler known for main-eventing all over the country, from Los Angeles and the Bay Area to Chicago and the Northeast. He’d won the original King of the Indies tournament and the Super 8 in 2000; plus, he wrestled on WCW television for a brief time prior to their closing.

  Even with an event headlined by Eddie Guerrero and featuring a number of highly talented indie wrestling stars, ours was the match that was going to drive main events forward for the next year. We ended up having a great match, mostly due to the creativity of Ki and Daniels, who’d each been in numerous triple-threats. The finish saw me lock Daniels in the Cattle Mutilation, then, with me upside down and bridging on my neck, Low Ki came off the top with a twisting 450° splash onto both of us. It was a spectacular move, and he ended up pinning Daniels for the win. It was exactly what ROH needed to brand itself as the place to see great independent wrestling.

  The first show was terrific, but I honestly didn’t think too much of it because lots of promotions had grand ideas and then would go out of business shortly after. They booked me for a couple of events beyond that night, but I didn’t necessarily count on it as something that was going to be around. Boy, was I wrong.

  A little more than a month later, Ring of Honor had its second show, dubbed Round Robin Challenge. Gabe, who was in charge of booking the matches and stories for ROH up until late 2008, placed the three of us in a round robin tournament, where each of us would have a singles match with the other. The show opened with me losing to Daniels, who then lost to Low Ki in the middle of the show, prior to me facing Low Ki in the main event. If Ki won, he’d win the tournament; if I won, it would essentially be a three-way tie, all of us ending at 1-1.

  Ring of Honor shows were long, and being in the main event was always tough because every match on the card was trying to steal the show. But Gabe was smart, and for the final match, he booked legendary MMA (mixed martial arts) fighter Ken Shamrock to be the special guest referee to give the main event a special aura. Given Shamrock’s past, Ki and I wrestled a match that was a hybrid of martial arts and pro wrestling. We used legitimate armlocks and knee bars, as well as hard kicks to the legs and head, but then we’d mix it in with the more realistic, hard-hitting elements of pro wrestling. Inspired by the match Regal had with Chris Benoit two years earlier, to give it a more realistic element and make it seem like a fight, we avoided things like hitting the ropes. I ended up beating Ki when he passed out while in Cattle Mutilation.

  Bryan defeats Low Ki in ROH with guest referee Ken Shamrock

  (Photo by George Tahinos)

  Out of all the matches we had during that period, to me that one was the best, by far. Overall, this second event—more so than the first—cemented Low Ki, Daniels, and me as top guys in the company. And after this show, ROH became a monthly booking I could count on, which was pretty hard to find in the world of independent wrestling.

  Every Ring of Honor match had cool high spots, unlike other promotions, which had a mixed roster with some veteran guys who’d prefer to focus on traditional moves like grabbing a headlock. Everybody who worked on the show was superhungry and wanted to have the best match of the night. You really had the feeling that everyone was aiming to steal the show and make a name for himself. I didn’t really get that feeling in most other promotions.

  What made Ring of Honor special were its standards, including its Code of Honor. One of the things ROH wanted was to guarantee its fans that every match would have a clean, definitive outcome. This was essentially in response to how prevalent run-ins were in WWE in the early 2000s. They also required that performers had to shake hands before and after matches, though that rule didn’t end up lasting long. Essentially, Ring of Honor stood out from your typical independent wrestling organizations, and it had the talent to show for it.

  9

  BOTTLE ROYAL

  THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 2014—3:48 P.M.

  In between workout sets, the well-maned athlete swigs from the ÖKO water bottle pressed up against his beard. He’s been toting it all week long—and all 2014, actually—because he stopped using plastic bottles in January as his New Year’s resolution. It appears to be catching on, as you can sense from his fellow Superstars, who’re seen carrying their own hard plastic bottles around New Orleans. A water container emblazoned with the WrestleMania logo is even part of the roster’s hotel-arrival gift bags.

  The trend is a small win for a man looking for the biggest victory of his life at WrestleMania.

  “I tend to believe that wrestlers can be a particularly wasteful breed,” he concedes, “but I think it’s the nature of the volume of travel we do. We’ve just gotten used to throwing away so much stuff. We go through so many bottles of water in this company. I don’t know that I’ve influenced my fellow Superstars, though I do think I made a contribution with the ÖKO water bottles.”

  He adds, “People look at global problems and they seem so incredibly vast. The idea behind the water bottle is that it’s a small thing that I can do, that I can change about myself. You can make little changes, and those little changes become habits, and those habits may transfer to other people.”

  In early 2012, Bryan was nominated for and ultimately honored by being named PETA’s Most Animal-Friendly Athlete. He’s had animals around him throughout his entire life—dogs Millie, Mikey, Asparagus, and now Josie, as well as cats Mitten and Chowder—and Bryan sees a vital connection between all animals and the planet, as part of a greater responsibility he acknowledges.

  “Protecting wildlife is important, and so is not making everything so homogenized to the point where wildlife and nature can’t exist,” Bryan asserts. “I feel like, as humans, if we are the keystone species of our planet, we should do our best to keep it alive.”

  These progressive statements are not what you’d expect to hear midworkout from a professional wrestler with the grizzliest facial hair in the entire facility.

  People are always asking me about my beard, so I figure I might as well address it. I never intended to grow a beard; it just kind of happened. Growing up in Aberdeen is like growing up in a sea of beards. A huge percentage of men work outside or in the mills around town, and it’s cold and rainy a good part of the year. Beards help keep your face warm, so most of the men keep at least a short one going.

  My dad almost always had a beard. There were times when I’d see him clean shaven, and it would just look weird, as if he had miraculously gone back to childhood. I tried growing a beard several times in my late teens, but I am not especially gifted in the realm of facial hair, and for the most part, attempts at growing facial hair just made me look silly. Despite the length of my beard today, it’s never been overly thick; beard density is measured in follicles per square inch, and mine are relatively low.

  The first time I started growing a big beard was in 2004. I had just come back from Japan and happened to have left my razor in a hotel room. Since a nice razor was around $10 and I am very frugal, I decided I’d hold off on getting one until I absolutely needed it. I went on the next Japan tour a couple of weeks later, still without shaving. I was about to shave before the first show when Jushin Liger, one of the best lightweight-style wrestlers in history, told me he liked the short beard. He said it made me look older and tougher. I would have been an idiot if I went and cut my beard right after that.

  I tend to go overboard with some things, and not shaving became one of those things. I went six months without using a razor, and my beard became much longer than it had ever been. Shaving my head added to my refreshe
d look as well. In June 2005, while I was in England, I finally decided to shave it. One of the factors was that my sister’s wedding was coming up and I wanted to look presentable for it. Another reason was that in England, I still wore my American Dragon mask, and the beard made the whole thing look pretty ridiculous. The final straw was when we were out at a local bar, where a fifty-plus-year-old, heavyset English woman came up to me and said in a thick accent, “Your beard, it looks like me minge.” “Minge” is an English term for “vagina.” I couldn’t get the image out of my head, and I shaved the next day.

  My current beard grew in much the same way. I started by keeping a little stubble, and then I let it grow a little longer to about an inch in length. Shortly after Kane and I formed Team Hell No, I just stopped trimming entirely, and it grew to be pretty long. At that point, I stopped trimming the hair on my head as well, and nobody even noticed at first because everyone was distracted by how thick my beard was getting. A lot of times when you’re in WWE, you have to ask for permission to change your look. This particular change in my appearance was so gradual that nobody really noticed until, all of a sudden, there I stood with long hair and this big beard.