Yes!

by Daniel Bryan

  Admittedly, sometimes having a substantial beard can present unique challenges. This one time, I was traveling out of Canada, and as I went through security, the TSA agent asked me to lift my chin up. He then combed his fingers through my beard, as if he was checking for something inside of it, which I thought was really odd. I get a lot of protein shake caught in the beard, and when I’m grappling or doing jiu-jitsu, my beard hair gets all over the mat. Still, I just let it grow. I shampoo and condition it. Those are pretty much “Daniel Bryan’s secrets to having a good beard.”

  10

  “CARPET” DIEM

  THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 2014—8:19 P.M.

  WrestleMania week amps up on the “purple carpet” at the New Orleans Museum of Art for the Superstars for Kids charity auction, one of WWE’s many community outreach events during this annual stretch of days leading into ’Mania. Among the guests of honor are a snazzied Daniel Bryan and his stunning fiancée, Brie Bella, who exit their private car into a wall of flashing bulbs and elbow-to-elbow press jockeying for sound bites and struck poses. Like George Romero’s undead on a fresh body, an enclave of media and microphones surrounds “Braniel” for rapid-fire responses to questions they’ve already answered twice over, three reporters back. Still, the couple’s enthusiasm is purely infectious. At the edge of the violet walkway stands a six-foot “Twitter Mirror” provided specifically for this major ’Mania event. The two lovers turn toward each other and suck face for social media, the pic capturing their pucker for the WWE Universe to retweet.

  Hobnobbing is not what Daniel Bryan does best. This is why Brie is leading the charge on most conversations among the mixed crowd of ring masters (Hulk Hogan), celebrities (Marlon Wayans), and New Orleans officials like Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who specifically approaches the couple. Landrieu welcomes them, expresses his elation at WrestleMania’s emergence in the Big Easy, and invites “Braniel” back to the museum on Monday for a private tour, pre-Raw.

  Though coarse and fierce inside the squared circle, Bryan couldn’t be softer in his nearly unnoticeable touch-turned-caress on Brie’s neck during conversation. If you’ve seen his in-ring strikes it’s like watching a feral animal resting its paw. It’s a subtle sign of adoration and demonstrates the simplest form of affection in a soft touch. Before Bryan can say “eco-friendly provisions,” the mayor bids them adieu, then moves on to prepare for his party-wide address and the festivities ahead.

  The setting of the Superstars for Kids party is up the proverbial alley of the “People’s Couple,” you could say. The museum location is meaningful not just in the rare art on display, but also in that it calls to the mind’s eye visuals from their relationship at its very beginning. Their first social hangout together was a few years ago at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. She invited him.

  “It wasn’t a date at the time, but looking back, that was our first date,” Bryan says with a laugh. “We started talking after a storyline we shared together. Before then, we didn’t really speak much. I’ve never been someone who talks to the Divas a lot or anything like that.”

  Two years later, the pair passes through the halls of the NOLA Museum of Art as an engaged man and woman planning a wedding in their not-so-distant, brilliant future together.

  “We had so many similar interests,” he says. “We had the same sensibility, and we’re both kinda hippies.”

  Try enjoying your night when the guy whose head you plan on kicking in at WrestleMania is within one hundred feet of you. Arriving later than Bryan and Brie, “The Authority” (Triple H and Stephanie McMahon) is done making their rounds on the purple ’Mania-colored carpet and various meet-and-greet scenarios. Now they’re mingling with the guests in the distance. “Braniel” focuses on the art and good conversation with the cast of Total Divas, including Brie’s twin sister, Nikki, plus their mom and brother. There’s no escaping the voice of Steph McMahon, WWE chief brand officer, as it’s projected throughout the scene during her event-wide speech. Tonight, she and the Game concentrate on their corporate responsibilities. Things remain more civil than the lashings, verbal and physical, that have been exchanged on WWE programming in recent weeks, even months.

  “You don’t know what people’s personal relationships are like, but the appearance is that Triple H and Stephanie’s relationship is predicated on power,” says Bryan, frankly describing his perception of the corporate couple. “We’re just all so different,” he adds. “For us, happiness and doing things that are meaningful is more important. They’re obsessed with being a powerful couple. Brie and I are the opposite.”

  Bryan and Brie keep an eye on the clock. The “Yes!” Man’s early-morning international media event compels the duo to call it a night. They exit the marble museum corridors and escape down the staircase to where a black SUV awaits to take them back “home” for the night.

  After I was fired by WWE in 2001, my main goal was to go back to Japan and become a regular competitor there. That was actually my ideal situation when I started wrestling, thinking that American wrestlers who could make a living wrestling in Japan had it the best. In my mind, they could go there, do what they love, and then, when they came back to the States, they could walk around unmolested, without having to deal with the hassles of being mildly famous.

  The head of WWE talent relations at the time was John Laurinaitis, who had a long history of working with All Japan Pro Wrestling, and shortly after my developmental contract was terminated, he told me he’d try to get me in there. Regal also gave me the number of Brad Rheingans, an older Minnesota wrestler who had the ability to get guys into the other top promotion of the Far East, New Japan Pro Wrestling. Unfortunately, neither of them was able to get me in, and both eventually stopped returning my phone calls.

  That all said, I jumped at the opportunity when I was invited to a New Japan tryout in Santa Monica in March of 2002.

  The day before the tryout, Roland had flown several of the APW talent, including me, to Las Vegas to attend the Cauliflower Alley Club (CAC), an annual reunion dinner for retired and active wrestlers. We arrived the day before so Roland could network and several of the APW wrestlers could appear on the CAC’s future legends show, the assumption being that it could get some influential eyes on us.

  I only remember one thing from that Cauliflower Alley show. I was wrestling Brian Kendrick on the show, and beforehand, we were talking backstage. Brian turned and saw a skinny young wrestler doing a stretch on his back while kicking his legs over his head and leaving them there. Brian walked up to the kid, whom we’d never met before, and casually said, “Hey, you know that’s the best way to suck your own cock, right?” The kid was terrified as he watched Brian get down on the ground next to him and demonstrate the motions. With that, Nick Bockwinkel—a wrestling legend and the man responsible for my winning the King of the Indies tournament—entered the room, dressed to perfection. Brian didn’t see him come in, so Bockwinkel saw the entire demonstration as Brian told the kid to just “let gravity do all the work.” Brian looked up just in time to see an appalled Bockwinkel shake his head in disgust and walk out of the room. I nearly fell over laughing.

  After the CAC event, we drove from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, staying with Brian’s friend Jordan (who had a Foreman Grill with ants that he refused to kill treading all over it). Brian and I had to be at the tryout at 10 A.M., so we woke up early the next morning and headed to Santa Monica.

  The Inoki Dojo was in a large warehouse, and it was the nicest wrestling training center I had ever seen at that point. It was huge. They had amateur wrestling mats on the floor, kickboxing bags, nice lifting equipment, and the coolest thing: an official New Japan Pro Wrestling ring. There were TV cameras and film crews on hand with the intent of airing some of the footage on Japanese television. Seeing the whole production was exciting, even more so because Antonio Inoki himself, a WWE Hall of Famer and the founder of New Japan, was there to watch and evaluate us. Or so we thought. There were around fifteen mostly local inde
pendent guys there for the tryout, and we all ran through a series of calisthenics to warm up, followed by a match. Brian and I wrestled each other in the first match, doing our best to impress and busting out our coolest stuff. In the middle of the match, Brian muttered to me, “That motherfucker’s not even watching! Look at him!” I managed to look over only to see Inoki holding on to this giant stick, doing what is apparently one of his signature exercises while watching MMA fighter Don Frye on one of the mats. Inoki literally had his back to us to watch Don Frye stretch.

  When Brian and I finished our match, all the other wrestlers on the outside clapped. We then took our turn at ringside to see the other exhibition matches and noticed that Inoki didn’t watch a single one of them. It turns out they weren’t truly interested in scouting or assessing talent at all. They really just wanted the dojo to look full in front of the Japanese cameras. I was bothered we’d wasted our time, but Brian was especially irate. After the “tryout,” Christopher Daniels and I were sitting on a couch in the dojo while Brian stood talking to us. Inoki was fooling around over on the cable crossover machine, which actually wasn’t fully assembled. It just looked like it was. When Inoki jumped up on the beam to do a pull-up, the whole thing came crashing down on him, weights and all. Everybody rushed over to help him, except for the three of us. Daniels and I remained seated on the couch, and as more people scurried over, Brian loudly said, “Serves that motherfucker right.”

  Despite my disappointing first experience there, every time the Inoki Dojo told me there was an opportunity for a tryout, I made the trip down. It was a six-hour drive from Fremont to Santa Monica, and the tryouts were always in the morning. I’d drive down at night after I finished training at APW, then find some place to park and sleep in my car until the call time. None of the subsequent trips down there were as bad as the first, possibly because I made sure not to expect much. Even if there was just a minute chance it would lead to an opportunity in Japan, I had to take the chance.

  My whole perspective on how I approached the dojo changed when I went there in August 2002 and met a New Japan wrestler named Shinya “Togi” Makabe, who was running the workout. I performed pretty well that day, and at the end of the session, he spoke with every athlete there, through an interpreter.

  “You can’t come down for just one day and expect to go to New Japan,” he said, before pointing at Rocky Romero, TJ Perkins, and Ricky Reyes. “These guys are here every single day. They show their determination, they work hard. And if you want to be successful, you need to work just as hard.”

  Those words really resonated with me. I was working hard up in Fremont, but nobody was seeing that hard work. At that point, I knew what I needed to do.

  When I got back to Fremont, I told Roland we needed to talk. I explained that, although I was thankful for the opportunity he gave me, for my career to move forward I thought I needed to move down to Santa Monica and train at the Inoki Dojo full-time. I expected Roland to be angry or at least disappointed, but he wasn’t. I think “thrilled” would be too strong a word, but he was definitely relieved. I hadn’t been able to bring in many new students to the school, and even though Roland wasn’t paying me tons of money, it was enough that it was putting stress on his finances. He thought it was a great idea for both of us. So in early September I packed my stuff back in my car and moved down to Santa Monica.

  I found that all of the guys who trained at the Inoki Dojo lived locally. And by “locally,” I mean the Los Angeles version of locally. Sometimes it would take TJ Perkins two hours to get to the dojo just because of traffic. Before I moved down, I spoke with Hiroko Inoki (Antonio Inoki’s daughter) and her husband, Simon, who ran the place together. They said they’d love to have me come down, but there was an issue as to where I would live. Los Angeles is expensive, and though I had been able to save some money working for Roland, a rent of $1,000 per month will bring your savings down in a hurry. That’s when I asked if I could live at the dojo. The couple considered it, made some calls, and then told me they thought that arrangement could work. They barely knew me, but I had a reputation for being honest and responsible. Looking back, it’s shocking to me they agreed to it, because I was essentially a stranger that they let live in their very nice and expensive facility. From their perspective, I suppose it was nice to know that someone was there all the time to watch over the place.

  Initially I slept in my sleeping bag on the wrestling mats, but after several months, I got myself a cot from the army surplus store and put it above the office area. It was just a bunch of plywood up there, but it gave me a little privacy in case I needed to lie down while the dojo was occupied.

  Training there was awesome. At first Shinya Makabe—whose advice persuaded me to make the move—was our trainer, and he taught us the New Japan way of doing things. Once he left, an MMA fighter named Justin McCully guided us through practices, mixing up pro wrestling stuff with jiu-jitsu and kickboxing. It was a fun place to be, and we worked hard.

  Much to my surprise, I was offered a three-week tour with New Japan in October, only a month after I started training there full-time, joining Ricky Reyes and Rocky Romero, who teamed together as the Havana Pitbulls. I was thrilled. The tour was incredible. New Japan was the biggest wrestling company in Japan at the time, and we wrestled in front of at least a thousand people every night. The highlight, however, was my first time wrestling in the Tokyo Dome.

  The Tokyo Dome is huge. At its capacity, it can hold over sixty thousand people for a wrestling show. When I first walked inside I was amazed. The dome-shaped roof is an air-supported structure held up by pressurizing the inside of the building. When we came in, we walked into a vaultlike room. They closed the door we came through—at which point I could feel the pressure change—then they opened another large door to enter the stadium. All of that was done to stabilize the pressure and keep the roof what I called “inflated.” To me, the building was a feat of modern engineering.

  In a show called the Spiral on October 14, I teamed with the Pitbulls against Masahito Kakihara, Tiger Mask, and one of my all-time favorite wrestlers, Jushin “Thunder” Liger. Around the time when I was in high school, Liger had come to the United States and wrestled for WCW multiple times, including one high-profile match with Brian Pillman that was incredible for its time.

  Shortly before our match, referee Masao Tayama, who spoke great English and was always there to help us out, jokingly gave us some advice: “Don’t look at the crowd when you walk down the ramp.” I could understand why. The ramp down to the ring at the Tokyo Dome was long, maybe a hundred yards, and it was intimidating for three guys who’d never wrestled in front of a crowd anywhere close to its size.

  They had a golf cart take us to the staging area where we would make our entrance. All three of us were giddy as schoolgirls—not to mention a little nervous—yet when we walked out, I couldn’t help but look out to the crowd. There were over thirty thousand people in attendance, and though probably less than 10 percent of the audience had even heard of the three of us, it didn’t matter. I was mesmerized and lucky I made it down to the ring without tripping over my feet. I remember nothing from the match, only that I had a hard time keeping a smile off my face throughout it. A short time later, I ended up living in the dojo and would make several more trips to Japan.

  Though I’d previously been completely focused on wrestling, living at the Inoki Dojo forced me to be surrounded by wrestling all the time. There was no escape. Sometimes it was suffocating, but it was undoubtedly good for my development. The Inoki ideal of infusing pro wrestling with legitimate martial arts opened up my eyes to all that was possible with the form, and as a result I was performing better than ever.

  In April 2003 in ROH, I wrestled in what—up to that point in time—was the best match of my career. It was against Paul London, who, though relatively new to ROH, was loved by fans because of his charisma, his ability to sell being hurt, and his daredevil style of wrestling. Paul had trained with Rudy Boy Go
nzalez down in San Antonio, and we’d discovered we had instant chemistry the first time we wrestled a number of months before. That initial match we had was relatively short, under fifteen minutes, but the fans enjoyed it, and Gabe booked the rematch to be a two-out-of-three-falls match.

  Both Shawn Michaels and William Regal tried to instill in me the idea that more so than moves, storytelling was the most important thing in a match. Though I tried to learn as many techniques as I could over the years, I also always focused on different ways of telling stories. Our rematch went over forty minutes, and it was not only the longest match I’d ever had, but also the first time I really felt like I nailed telling a story in a match. I didn’t wrestle another match in ROH for seven months, and that was the perfect way to leave.

  Unlike Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling a few years earlier, when New Japan told me they were interested in bringing me back over, they actually did it. I joined them for two more tours in the beginning of 2003. The initial series of shows in March was relatively uneventful, though while on tour, I met TJ Wilson (now Tyson Kidd) for the first time, and I rejoined Scott Norton, who had been on my inaugural tour of New Japan in 2002. Scott, an enormous world champion arm wrestler, was a great guy to be around. Given he’d been a New Japan regular since 1990, he taught us a lot of tricks about surviving in Japan. He showed us how to get to gyms independently, showed us some great restaurants near our regular hotels, and informed us about New Japan’s inner workings, politically speaking.

  Scott joked that if I had come to New Japan four or five years earlier, he and the other guys would have forced me to drink. Fortunately, there was far less pressure for a teetotaler like me because Scott was the veteran “gaijin” (which the Japanese called all of us foreigners) wrestler, and he had stopped drinking entirely himself. He said to me, “Kid, I can’t make you drink, but I can make you drink this!” With that, he bought me my first cup of coffee. I was wired for hours.