Yes!

by Daniel Bryan

  In May, I went abroad for another short tour of only two or three shows, one of which was at the Tokyo Dome again. This time, instead of being on the main show, we were on a show the day before that had only three matches and was also in the middle of a pachinko tournament, which was a form of Japanese gambling I never quite understood. The setup for our show was memorably weird. Outside the ring there were a few hundred chairs, but there were also a ton of pachinko machines, which took up roughly the space the size of a high school gym—all right in the center of the gigantic Tokyo Dome.

  That night, TJ Perkins wrestled first, and then Rocky Romero and I teamed up against Masahito Kakihara and Akira, and I’ll admit that wrestling in a stadium that large with so few people felt strange. I almost would have preferred wrestling in the Walmart parking lot from the Memphis days. The match didn’t light the world on fire, but it was good considering Kakihara and Akira put forth so little effort. Our opponents didn’t seem to even want to be there, like it was a demotion for them to be wrestling on this show the day before the “real” big show. Now, having experienced so much more in my own career, I completely sympathize with them.

  When we got back to the hotel, Justin McCully had us meet him in his room. The three of us (me, Rocky, and TJ) stood there as Justin told us how disappointed Antonio Inoki was in the match. Then he slapped us. Each of us. If that happened to me today, I would instantly punch him in the face—which would surely have ended with me getting my ass kicked, since even at that time Justin had already fought at UFC (the Ultimate Fighting Championship) and was a heavyweight.

  I was confused and wasn’t quite sure what I had done that was so wrong that I deserved to be slapped. Justin explained that the slap was from Inoki because he thought we should have done more of the “shoot” fighting style we practiced at the dojo. According to him, Inoki understood that it was difficult because our opponents were the veterans—and in wrestling, you’re taught to listen to the people that have more experience than you—but the slaps were to inspire us to challenge the system. The intent was to transfer his fighting spirit to us, a common custom in his dojo (people lined up to be slapped by Inoki) and the Japanese culture. Truthfully, he could have just said it instead of slapping us, and it would have been every bit as effective.

  After the debacle at the Tokyo Dome, instead of flying back to Los Angeles with the rest of the guys, I flew to London for an opportunity to work for longtime English promoter Brian Dixon. For a while, Regal had been pushing Dixon to bring me over, but Brian preferred using bigger Americans because they made such great villains. Plus, with English wrestlers typically being on the smaller side, it would automatically put them in an underdog role that the fans could get behind. I was obviously not very big, and though I’d developed a reputation as a good wrestler, I wasn’t a great character that would appeal to Dixon’s fan base. Finally Dixon agreed to give me a chance to perform for his company, All Star Wrestling.

  For most Americans coming over, Dixon wouldn’t pay for their flights. I was no exception. Fortunately, New Japan didn’t mind flying me to London, and I figured I’d just stay until I could get another Japan tour or until an American company was willing to fly me back, which I didn’t foresee being too big of a deal. Dixon wouldn’t get most talent work permits either, and again, I was no exception. When I spoke with him on the phone, he didn’t think it would be a concern, and he instructed me to tell anyone who asked that I was just visiting friends.

  After landing in England, I had to go through immigration before I could get my bags. The immigration officer asked me what I was doing there, and, as instructed by Dixon, I said, “Oh, just visiting friends.”

  “What friends?” he asked.

  Immediately I started getting nervous because I wasn’t a very good liar. I gave him Brian Dixon’s name. After he requested his contact information, I supplied his phone number, too.

  “How long are you staying?” he asked.

  “A couple months.”

  “Do you have a return ticket?”

  “Not yet. I was going to get one.”

  “How much money do you have on you?”

  “About four hundred dollars.” (This caught his attention right away.)

  “So, what are you going to do for money for the couple months you are here?”

  Clearly $400 would not be enough. Had I been a better liar, I could have easily made up something, like I would have money transferred over when I was running low. Instead I struggled to come up with an answer, and by this point I was sweating. The immigration officer could tell.

  He brought another officer over, and they questioned me further. During the interrogation, they got my bag from baggage claim, and as they looked through it, they found my wrestling gear. They asked what I was doing in Japan, and I told them.

  “And you’re sure you’re not here to wrestle?” they inquired.

  “Nope,” I said, “just here to visit.” Even though I could tell things weren’t going well, I was going to stick to my story.

  They must’ve done some research on Dixon and figured out that he was a wrestling promoter. They called Dixon to ask if he knew me. At first he kept with the story that I was just in England to visit, but at some point he changed his tune and stooged me off. When the officer came back, he said, “Just so you know, we’re going to deport you. Your friend told us you were going to work as a personal trainer.”

  They stuck me in a room with a bunch of other people getting deported, and I was the only American. They were all looking at me, thinking I must’ve done something really bad if I was an American getting deported. That wasn’t really the case. I was just a twenty-one-year-old without much of a game plan. To make matters a little more stressful, I learned that when they deport you, they don’t deport you back to your home country—they deport you back to the country from which you came. They were going to deport me back to Japan! I would have to buy my own ticket back to the States if that’s where I wanted to go.

  They let me call my mom, and after I told her the situation, she and my sister started researching all the flight options on the Internet. Everything they could find would cost thousands of dollars to get me back to the United States within the time I had, and I wasn’t allowed to leave the airport. Flying back to Japan and then getting to the States from there wasn’t any cheaper and was a really long way to travel. I was starting to get desperate when I spoke with an agent for British Airways. The whole time we had been looking for a one-way ticket. She decided to search for a round-trip ticket and found one that wasn’t available online, direct from Heathrow to LAX for only $500. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was.

  Shortly after I got back to the States, I got in touch with Brian Dixon. He told me if I still wanted to come wrestle in England I could, and this time he would get me a work permit. I could tell he felt bad about the whole thing, especially because he knew I had a close relationship with Regal. I had purchased a round-trip ticket, so I still had the return flight and since I didn’t have any shows booked because I had planned on being in England this whole time anyhow, I told him I would come. I drove my car back to Aberdeen from Santa Monica (I didn’t know how long I would stay in England, let alone anticipate a full six-month stay), then flew back across the Atlantic that May.

  It surprised me that I didn’t have any problems getting into England the second time. When I arrived, the immigration officer took a look at my passport and asked if I’d ever been deported. I told him a brief version of the story, which didn’t include me trying to lie to get into the country, and showed him my work permit. Fortunately, I was able to enter, and ever since, I’ve never had a problem coming in and out of England.

  My first day in England was interesting. I had flown into Heathrow Airport and had a show that same night. Brian told me the name of the building and the address, but I was left to my own devices to actually get there. The show was at Fairfield Halls in Croydon, which is near London. I had no idea how to get there and ha
d no clue how to use the English transportation system. I’d never lived in a place where the public transportation infrastructure was good enough to be useful. If not for the kindness of the random strangers I was asking for directions, I might still be lurking around London today.

  When I finally got to Fairfield Halls around 4:30 P.M., I found out Brian had told them I’d be there early and they had a quiet room with a small bed upstairs for me to take a nap. I fell fast asleep and didn’t wake up until I heard a knock on the door around 7 P.M. It was Dixon’s daughter Laetitia, whom we all just called “Tish,” and she very politely told me the show started in a half hour. As I walked down to the locker room, someone informed me that I was part of a tournament to crown a new middleweight champion and that I was going to have three matches, all against guys I’d never met before and knew nothing about.

  With very little time before showtime, I got a little flustered. In a rush, I got downstairs and walked around introducing myself. I was saying hellos and shaking hands when I noticed three guys sort of huddled together. Guy #1 was holding Guy #2 while Guy #3 was slapping him. It looked to me like they were just fooling around, so I kept shaking hands, laughed at the scene, and then walked out into the next room.

  That night, I went on to win the tournament and the middleweight championship. The coolest part was being presented the title by Mark Rocco, who was famous for being the original Black Tiger in Japan. Rocco was also part of a small group of guys who revolutionized wrestling in the late ’70s and early ’80s by creating a hybrid of Mexican, Japanese, and English ring styles. If you go back and watch Rocco’s matches from that time period, they’re still exciting today.

  What was unusual about the night, however, was that during the entire show, people kept apologizing to me. I had no idea why; I thought it was because I had to do three matches right after taking that long flight.

  “Sorry, Bryan. This sort of thing never happens here,” someone would say.

  “No worries. This happens all the time in the United States,” I’d respond, and go on my merry way.

  I later found out they weren’t talking about the three matches. After the show, I rode with a referee named Mal to the next town, and he apologized to me again. I explained to him that wrestling multiple matches was no big deal to me since tournaments like this were very popular in the United States and I usually ended up competing in a tournament almost every month somewhere. He stared at me confusedly. Then he realized I didn’t know what had happened. He explained that the three huddled guys I thought were fooling around earlier in the locker room weren’t. It turns out that Guy #1 and Guy #3 (relatives of a current WWE Diva) were really beating up Guy #2. My understanding is they threatened to throw him out the window of the locker room, which was four stories up. Fortunately, they didn’t.

  My response was simple: “Holy shit! How did I miss that?!”

  Thus ended my first day in England.

  Summer is the busiest time of year for Dixon and All-Star Wrestling, which is why I went out when I did. My first show was what they refer to as a “town show,” a normal show in front of wrestling fans, but during summer months, most of Dixon’s events take place at Butlins. Butlins, which is what the English call a “holiday camp,” is a chain of inexpensive seaside resorts with beaches for families who pay an all-inclusive fee for lodging and entertainment (food is extra). These resorts have music acts, magic shows, and all sorts of entertainment, including wrestling. As a result, most of the people who watched the shows aren’t actually wrestling fans; they just happen to be there, and wrestling is a fun novelty.

  We’d wrestle at the three Butlins locations—Bognor Regis, Skegness, and my favorite, Minehead—twice each, every week. We’d typically do Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, hitting a different Butlins location each day, then we’d go back on Saturday and Sunday, sometimes doing a double shot on Saturday, performing at two different locations in the same day. Every week, I wrestled a minimum of five shows, oftentimes MORE because there would be town shows and other holiday camp shows thrown in along the way.

  When Regal talked to me about this type of show, he said it was important to understand the audience at Butlins: kids. Adults would come, too, but they weren’t wrestling fans; they came because their kids dragged them there. Regal has expressed to me that his longevity in wrestling—working through injuries and all—is due to what he learned at Butlins. He learned to entertain and to do so without putting his body in too much danger night after night, given the kids didn’t care about big falls or hard-hitting moves. Being entertaining was one of the bigger weaknesses in my game, so I worked on it almost to a fault while at Butlins.

  Dixon wanted me wearing my mask again, which was great because it instantly made me more of a character. Though I was originally a good guy at town shows, the theme for the Butlins shows was England versus the United States, with the Americans being the villains. Being the American Dragon, it was clear which side I fell on. I’d carry the U.S. flag to the ring, and at first I just did typical bad guy stuff from ’80s wrestling. I soon started to really enjoy myself and get creative. My voice has never been good, but I made it even worse for the act by coming to the ring and singing the American national anthem. I even intentionally forgot words to further rile up the crowd and eventually added to the mix cutting promos on the microphone prior to singing, which helped me get a little more comfortable on one of my other biggest weaknesses. In the ring, I alternated between trying to be a ruthless villain and trying to make people laugh, often in the same match. I’d regularly try to find as many unique ways to get hit in the crotch as possible. My all-time high was getting hit in the balls twelve times against Mason Ryan in Bognor Regis.

  English wrestlers, who had years of experience wrestling at places like Butlins, had some really fun comedy spots that I’d never seen before. My favorite was called “The Head, the Hand, and the Bollocks.” The villain would toss the fan favorite out of the ring. When the good guy would try to get back in the ring, the bad guy would stomp his hand, so then he would find a lady in the front row to kiss his hand to make it better. He’d try to get in again, and then the villain would stomp his head, which the same lady would kiss as well. Then the two opponents would basically flip roles; the villain would try to get back in the ring, and the crowd favorite would kick the middle rope, which would hit him in the balls. The villain would then go back to the same lady, gesture toward his crotch, and ask for a kiss. Naturally, the lady would refuse every time, leading to plenty of laughter among the crowd. I kept thinking that one day they’d find the wrong lady who would actually do it, and then it would turn into a completely different kind of show.

  Being in that environment added another dimension to wrestling for me; it changed my perception of what wrestling could be and what people want from it, especially in the context of it being more of a “variety show.”

  The drives between Butlins camps were pretty long, and it didn’t make it easy that our home base was in a small town near Liverpool called Birkenhead. Pretty much every drive was over three hours, mostly on small, winding roads that contained lots of roundabouts. I hadn’t ever been prone to car sickness, but it would happen to me quite a bit on those drives.

  The rides were part of the fun, though, and the guys I met along the way became some of my favorite people I’ve ever traveled with, like Frankie Sloan (a cousin of Robbie Brookside), who became a good friend of mine and is probably the funniest man I’ve ever met. If you weren’t driving (and I never drove), you might sleep, but even though we all had portable CD players, we would usually laugh and joke most of the trip. We did the drives together, we’d set up and take down the rings together, and if we had a night free at Butlins, we’d go out together. I’ve rarely gone to bars during my career, but in England it was different. I loved going out, mostly because the guys were so much fun to be with. I obviously wouldn’t drink, but I’d find contentment in karaoke, and we’d all go make fools of ourselves on the dance
floor.

  The English wrestlers also had this awesome system where if you made a mistake or committed a “crime” (common crimes were cockblocking, making a huge blunder in a match that was an embarrassment to the job, or avoiding setting up the ring), you’d have your case judged by the senior wrestler of the group. If found guilty, you’d be punished by having to run miles. In the middle of a trip, the van would drop off the guilty party on the side of the road and he’d have to get to the van in ten minutes or be forced to run another mile.

  All that time together developed camaraderie, and, of course, with all that time came disagreements, too. Yet it was the closest I’ve ever seen a wrestling locker room come to being like a real family.

  In the middle of my trip, I also ended up doing my first show in Germany, thanks to Robbie Brookside. Robbie, whom I originally met when I lived in Memphis, was a good friend of Regal’s, and the pair teamed together when they were young.

  On Dixon’s shows, I occasionally got to wrestle Robbie, though he was mostly matched up against the bigger Americans in the main events because he was a world-traveling wrestler and the biggest star on the show. Still, he was constantly looking out for me, and while I was out there, I always asked his advice before anyone else’s. Robbie was another influential mentor for me, not just in wrestling, but in life. Though I recall Regal saying it to me, too, at some point, it was Robbie who first said the following: “Wrestling doesn’t owe you a living. If you’re not having fun, you can always go do something else. We are lucky to be able to make a living doing what we do.” I’ve tried to always remember that.

  Robbie was the champion for an older promoter in Germany who had been running wrestling events for years. They were doing two and a half straight weeks of shows in the same venue, a tent put up in the middle of a carnival, which was a longtime German wrestling tradition. The promoter was hesitant to use me when Robbie brought it up. He, like Dixon, liked using larger Americans or ones who had established names. To him, I was a small, unknown wrestler, and he didn’t know if the fans would like me. Robbie was persistent, however, and eventually got me booked on one show, where he and I wrestled a two-out-of-three-falls match for his title. What made it unique for me was that they used the rounds system for championship matches. Ours took place over twelve three-minute rounds.