by Daniel Bryan
Earlier, I mentioned the match with Paul London was the best match I’d had at the time. This was the match that surpassed it. Robbie was hated in Germany, and though the fans had never seen me before, it didn’t take them long to start cheering for me. In the Paul London match, I was the ring general, even though I’d been wrestling for less than four years at that point. In this match, Robby took control, and he was amazing. He told me when and what to do, and everything he instructed me to do was perfect for what the crowd wanted. He was a vicious bad guy and I was a fiery good guy, and when the match ended, even though I lost, the fans cheered me on my way out. When I got to the back, Robbie gave me a big hug, and then the promoter came over to congratulate me on the match. Afterward, he also admitted to Robbie that he had been wrong about me and that I was a great choice for the championship match. When Robbie told me what the promoter had said, he looked so proud. Given how much he helped me, seeing him that satisfied with what we had done was way better even than wrestling in the Tokyo Dome.
I ended up staying in England for a little over six months. Right before I went back to the United States, I wrestled seventeen days in a row, doing twenty-one shows in that time. Sometimes, it would be in front of nearly a thousand people; sometimes, it would be in front of fewer than fifteen. But it was awesome. Truth be told, if Brian Dixon had been able to pay a little bit more, I probably would’ve never left. The lifestyle really appealed to me. I didn’t own a lot because there was no room for it in the suitcase I literally lived out of for half a year. There was no stress, no pressure, just driving up and down the roads with interesting guys and wrestling. We essentially lived like gypsies. It was perfect.
I try to meet up with Frankie every time I go to England when we run shows there with WWE. I love being able to see Brian Dixon and his family when they occasionally come to the shows, and I’ll run into guys like Mikey Whiplash here and there. I love seeing them all. And whenever I go back, I always get this secret longing in my heart for the days gone by when everything was a little more innocent for me. It was the most fun I’d ever had wrestling.
11
EARLY BEARD GETS THE WORM
FRIDAY, APRIL 4, 2014—5:29 A.M.
The streetlights are still bright at this hour when Daniel Bryan gets into a chilled limousine for the earliest scheduled appearance of his week. With little time to eat a formal breakfast, he reminds the car of the fruitfulness of his initial Whole Foods mission.
“This is where a grocery store trip comes in handy,” Bryan states. “I had a protein shake, a banana, and vegetable juice.”
He shares the ride with Sheamus and the Shield’s Roman Reigns and Seth Rollins, all attendees at the morning’s international media event at the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center—the same site where WrestleMania Axxess, WWE’s annual fan festival, is being held. They arrive along with the rest of a larger group that includes Big E, Cesaro, Natalya, and Emma; then the Superstar squad is divided for interview conquering.
Bryan’s very-early-morning interviews include discussions with local news affiliates, satellite radio stations, and more at emptied booths on the Axxess floor, many hours before the doors open for the second night of fan festivities. Interviewers rap with Bryan about everything from his upcoming nuptials and WrestleMania to his indie star days and WWE training grounds.
Daniel Bryan’s on-camera interview is brought to a halt by a second buzz in his pocket, like a record scratch on the meet-and-greet music being made by the media on hand. It’s the “Yes!” Man’s mom. The dual calls are a signal for Bryan’s attention, so he politely pauses the Q&A to connect with his mother, whom he’s expecting to arrive in New Orleans later in the evening.
He ends the call, “Yeah, I love you, too.” Then it’s back to countless conversations for broadcast and beyond. It’s ordinarily difficult to see the expressions beneath Bryan’s beard, but as he exchanges banter with the myriad media personalities, there are plenty of wide smiles visible.
Shortly after I returned from my first trip to England, I did the December tour for New Japan, then drove back down to Santa Monica to resume living in the Inoki Dojo, which had changed while I was gone. Justin McCully must have had some sort of falling-out with them, as he was no longer there. There were now several other guys living in the dojo, having made the same decision I did to move there to train. One of them bought a cot and put it above the office close to mine, which I didn’t mind, but it greatly diminished the amount of privacy I had. Simon and Hiroko Inoki brought in more teachers to help us, including two different yoga teachers, a new jiu-jitsu coach, and a Muay Thai coach. With all the guys there and the different classes, it was a great learning environment. I’ve loved yoga, grappling, and kickboxing ever since.
In 2004, New Japan brought me over for eight different tours, the longest of which was over six weeks. Being there so much allowed me to get more comfortable with the style and get to know the Japanese wrestlers better. In March, I won my first Japanese title, the IWGP Junior Tag Team Championship, along with a masked Christopher Daniels. Chris wrestled as Curry Man, a bizarre dancing character whose mask included a curry bowl on top of his head. The Japanese fans loved him, and I always found it funny that Chris wasn’t actually a very big fan of curry.
In May, I wrestled on another Tokyo Dome show, in which I teamed with Último Dragón and Koji Kanemoto to wrestle Tiger Mask, Heat, and Marufuji—my best experience in the Dome. I ended up getting the pin for my team, demonstrating the faith New Japan had in me. That May was also the first and only time I competed in the annual Best of the Super Juniors tournament, a three-week, sixteen-man round robin tournament that dated back to 1988. It was supercool because so many of my favorite wrestlers had done the tournament, including Owen Hart, Chris Benoit, Eddie Guerrero, Fit Finlay, and, of course, Dean Malenko. It’s a physically intense tournament, and early on, Chris dislocated his shoulder. We were scheduled to defend our tag team titles in the middle of the tour, so Chris taped his shoulder up every night and continued on. We lost the championships to Gedo and Jado, but the match was great because all the fans knew Chris was hurt and got behind him big-time. Afterward, Chris was able to go home.
As far as the tournament went, I made it to the semifinals—much better than I thought I’d do—where I lost to Kanemoto. I felt like Kanemoto and I had had a really good match, but when I watched it, I realized Kanemoto performed light-years better than I did, and I recognized I still had a lot more work to do. That was one of the many wonderful things about working in Japan. On the United States independent scene, I was almost always the more experienced wrestler and had led the matches since 2002, even only three years into my career. Very few of us had experience working with veterans in the industry. It was almost like the blind leading the blind. In Japan, it was different. The first time I wrestled Kanemoto, he’d been wrestling twelve years. Jushin Liger had already been wrestling for eighteen years against some of the best in the world by the time I wrestled him. It was a wonderful place to learn.
Though I only got to wrestle him a couple of times in tag matches, Yuji Nagata was my favorite person to watch perform. He didn’t really do any fancy moves, but everything he did was believable and crisp; plus, he had a great fire, and the fans always got behind his matches. I made sure to watch his matches every night because there was always something I could learn from them.
Midway through 2004, I had an unexpected surprise that improved my quality of life. Simon and Hiroko Inoki had always been very nice to me, and one day, they asked if I wanted to move into the Inoki Sports Management apartment. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. The apartment, which cost nearly $3,000 a month, was a two-bedroom on Sixth Street in Santa Monica, only a handful of blocks from the beach. It was the most expensive place I had ever lived, and I got to live there for free. Being around wrestling 24/7 at the dojo was good for me for a while, but there were times when I needed a break, and the apartment provided that. I had my own room, so I sl
ept better. I had a full kitchen, so I ate better. I had a place to get away to, so I had time to relax. The apartment was only a couple of miles away from the dojo, too, so on nice days I could ride my bike there. And of course, if I had a free day, I could enjoy the beach or walk on the Third Street Promenade.
At times I had a roommate. One, briefly, was former UFC Light Heavyweight Champion Lyoto Machida, because he was under contract with Inoki Sports Management. There have been rumors that he drank his own pee, but I never saw it. I also lived with Shinsuke Nakamura, who was a young New Japan wrestler training for his first MMA fight. Nakamura and I got along really well, and he ended up being a huge star for New Japan.
At this point you may be dying for some sort of crazy party story—like, maybe I took advantage of this prime location to lure strippers into my place and snort cocaine off their fake breasts—but nothing like that happened. The only perverse thing that I experienced there took place as I walked back to the apartment. A man in a black SUV pulled up beside me and asked if I worked out. I said I did. He asked where, and I told him I worked out at the 24 Hour Fitness down the street. He next asked if I liked it and I said it was all right. Then he asked if he could pay me to let him suck my cock. I said, “No thanks,” and that was it. He drove off to find another man to service, and I kept walking back to the apartment.
In between tours, I continued to wrestle on independent shows, mostly for Ring of Honor. Earlier in the year, I won a ROH tournament called Survival of the Fittest, which came down to me and Austin Aries, who’d just started with ROH a couple of months earlier. Gabe Sapolsky, the booker, loved the finals and subsequently booked Aries and me in a two-out-of-three-falls match that August at Testing the Limit. I was talking to Gabe on the way to the airport when he told me he’d advertised that each fall had a one-hour time limit. I thought that was weird, especially since there was no plan for any of the falls to go an hour; it was just going to be like any other two-out-of-three-falls match. But then I started thinking. I envisioned leveraging the significant time limit. We could go to an hour draw in each of the first two falls, then—just when it looked like we were going to a third hour-long draw—somewhere around fifty-five minutes in, Aries would beat me. I called Gabe back and told him my idea. At first he thought I was joking and laughed, but the more I talked to him, the more he realized I was serious. Given the business model of ROH, the most important thing was selling DVDs and tapes. If we did what I had planned, it would be the longest pro wrestling match in modern history, and my justification was that a ton of ROH fans as well as non-ROH fans would buy it, even if they fast-forwarded through most it. Gabe started to come around, and he eventually said I could do it if I wanted to.
When I landed in Philadelphia, I ran the plan past Aries. Gabe had spoken with him earlier, and at first Aries thought he was ribbing him. After he realized it wasn’t a joke, it didn’t take long for Aries to agree to the concept. My only concern was the live fans and keeping them engaged. Nothing kills a match quite like a crowd that’s bored, but I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea. Since we were on last, we would have the ring announcer tell the fans that it could end up being a long match and that neither performer would be offended if an audience member decided to head home. That’s right, my brilliant idea was to encourage people to leave in the middle of my match. I thought it would be easier to wrestle the three hours if we didn’t have to worry about entertaining people live, and I knew the commentary would make it easier for people to watch at home. Unfortunately, people weren’t leaving, but they were getting bored, so we improvised and went to our backup plan, exchanging a few falls in what became a seventy-six-minute bout. It is still the longest match of my career, though I’ve always been disappointed we didn’t go the full three hours.
Around this same time, the Inoki Dojo started running some shows. Simon and Hiroko worked with a few other people who knew the promotions side of wrestling very well, and they also sought some of us who trained there for our advice on booking the shows. We sat in several long meetings coming up with how we should book the first show.
Rocky Romero, Bobby Quance, and TJ Perkins had done a long tour of CMLL (Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre) in Mexico, and Rocky had become friends with Negro Casas, one of the bigger Mexican stars. Since CMLL television programming aired in the Los Angeles area, which has a sizable Hispanic population, we thought bringing in one or two guys like that would be our best bet. From there, we could fill out the rest of the card with those of us who trained at the dojo, along with a couple of fly-ins. Everyone seemed to agree that this would be the best bet and went to work. They booked a Mexican restaurant/nightclub for the show, and it seemed like it would be perfect.
I left for Japan, and when I came back, I found out the idea had changed. Instead of bringing in Mexican wrestlers for the show, they flew in two Japanese wrestlers named Nishimura and Takemura. Nishimura was quite popular in Japan but not very well known in the States, and Takemura was barely known in Japan. The show bombed, drawing about forty-five people and losing around $30,000, I heard. The intentions were good, but it was yet another example of one of the important things in wrestling: You have to know your audience.
Later that year, I continued to try to help Simon and Hiroko by recommending they consider Jamie Noble, a rugged yet immensely talented cruiserweight. I’d wrestled Jamie in early 2003 on WWE’s syndicated show called Velocity—one of several times I worked for WWE as an enhancement talent. Most enhancement talent were given very little offense since we were there to make the contracted WWE stars look as good as possible. Jamie just wanted to have a good match, though, so we went back and forth, with me getting in considerably more offense than a situation like that warranted. Our short TV match went really well, so in late 2004, when Jamie was released from WWE, I immediately went to Simon and Hiroko. I told them he would be perfect for New Japan and his talent could really strengthen the gaijin juniors division.
The connection was made with New Japan, and Jamie was booked for the December tour. He and I teamed on a regular basis, and though I’d met him before, I got to know Jamie in Japan. He has a great sense of humor, which is made even funnier by his thick West Virginia accent. At the time, he’d recently had a baby boy, and the way he talked about him made my heart melt. We had a great tour together that included a fun Juniors Tag Team Championship match against Jado and Gedo. At the end of the tour, Jamie gave me a big hug and thanked me for helping him. (Since then, he’s helped me a thousand times more than I’ve helped him, as I’ll explain later.)
I loved wrestling in New Japan, and when 2004 ended, I envisioned spending the rest of my career there—similar to the way Scott Norton had spent a majority of his—but it wasn’t meant to be. That December tour was the last time I worked for New Japan Pro Wrestling.
The beginning of 2005 looked a lot like my 2004: I wrestled every weekend on independent shows and had a New Japan tour booked for February. However, two weeks before the tour was supposed to start, I still didn’t have my visa. Simon and Hiroko, who were the ones that actually dealt with New Japan, didn’t know why it hadn’t arrived but got back to me about it the next day. They apologized and said I would be on the March tour, which I didn’t mind because my body could use the couple of weeks off.
Prior to the March tour, I continued to inquire about my visa, and Simon and Hiroko continued to reassure me it would be there anytime. Ten days before it was supposed to start, they told me I wouldn’t be on the March tour either. Admittedly, when it happened the second time, I grew frustrated because living in Santa Monica, it’s hard to get independent bookings at the last minute. Independent promotions have limited budgets, so flying an independent wrestler like me—whose experience also earned him a higher pay—from L.A. on short notice wasn’t within their finances, especially since they didn’t have a long time to promote it. I was able to pick up a couple of ROH shows and a Pro Wrestling Guerrilla booking because they were in the L.A. area, but that was
about it.
April was a Young Lions tour for New Japan, so I knew I wouldn’t be on that either, but they claimed they wanted me in May for their Best of the Super Juniors tournament. In mid-April, the same thing happened yet again. I had no idea what was going on. New Japan always seemed happy with my work, and I had a good relationship with Simon and Hiroko; everything about this seemed suspicious. After this third disappointment, I decided to go back to England since, again, independent bookings were more difficult to come by. It wasn’t much money, but I knew I’d be wrestling and having fun, so I drove back to Aberdeen to leave my car there for the trip and prepared for my journey.
In early May, shortly before the Super Juniors tour, I got a call from Simon, who said that New Japan did indeed want me for that month’s tour, but because I was a last-minute addition, they would need to lower my pay by $500 per week. I told him thanks, but no thanks. Even with the pay cut, I would have made more money on the three-week New Japan tour than I would working the entire summer in England. It was one of the few times I made a decision in wrestling because I was angry and felt disrespected. I never found out exactly why all of that happened, though I later learned it had something to do with politics between the Inoki Dojo and New Japan. I was essentially a pawn in a larger struggle. As a result, I never went back to the Inoki Dojo or to New Japan, which is unfortunate because I loved both.