by Daniel Bryan
At one point during the match, I grabbed Nigel by both arms and pulled him into the ring post headfirst, causing him to bleed. It was Nigel’s idea, but he wasn’t sure if he could get the post to bust him open. I suggested blading, but he wanted to do it the hard way. We decided I would pull him in three times, and if he didn’t bleed, we’d stop. After three attempts, he wasn’t bleeding, but he yelled at me, “One more time!” This time, he slammed his head really hard into the post, and the blood started pouring like crazy. We continued on—the blood adding more and more drama—until finally I did the same thing to him that I did to Roderick. I put him in a crucifix and elbowed him until he was knocked out.
The match was great and sold a ton of DVDs, but looking back, the ends didn’t justify the means. Due to the shot to the ring post, Nigel had an enormous hematoma on his forehead, a huge knot of blood that slowly drained down to his eye. He ended up with serious concussion problems because of things like that, although that ring-post spot may have been the most visual example. We’ve all done a lot of stupid things in wrestling. Some end up being worth it, others not. Even though it was a great match, it wasn’t worth what Nigel ended up paying for it.
In August of 2006, I had three one-hour matches within a two-week period, two of them on back-to-back nights. It used to be that the NWA World Heavyweight Champion toured all over the world and worked with the top star in every territory. Sometimes he would win clean, but oftentimes, because the champion would be moving on and the local star would continue wrestling in the area, they would wrestle to a sixty-minute draw. Lou Thesz did it. Harley Race did it. Ric Flair did it. I looked at it as my chance to do it.
Unfortunately, wrestling fans don’t have the patience they used to, and, just as unfortunately, I am not as good as my predecessors at going sixty minutes. None of the hour-long matches were bad, they just weren’t epic in the way you want it to be. The first one was against Samoa Joe in New Jersey, and I cannot remember a single thing about it. The second hour-long match was against Nigel in St. Paul, Minnesota; it was probably the worst of all the matches Nigel and I had against each other, and he got another concussion, to boot. Everything about it was regrettable. The following night, I wrestled Colt Cabana in his hometown of Chicago—the third and most memorable of the sixty-minute matches, but not necessarily because it was good.
Roughly five minutes into the match, I was pushing Cabana into the ring ropes and, as he came off them, I’d catch him with a headbutt to the stomach. We did it a few times, until he stepped aside on the last attempted headbutt, sending me crashing to the floor. I had previously fallen that exact same way well over a hundred times, and never once do I remember even stubbing my toe. This time, however, I missed posting on the apron with my hand as I fell, and I crashed down, shoulder first.
I knew something was wrong, so I took my sweet-ass time getting back into the ring, hoping I could shake it off. It didn’t help. I was lucky I was in there with Cabana, because he can be entertaining without throwing you all around. Still, everything I did hurt. At one point, I was going to give him a diving headbutt off the top rope, trying to gut through it, though I knew I was just going to make it worse. I could have stepped down, but I knew I would look stupid, so instead, I jumped off the turnbuckle and stomped Cabana right in the chest, way harder than I intended. He let out this guttural sound on impact and had a hard time breathing for the next minute, but we were able to get through the match.
After I flew back to Philadelphia the next morning, I went to the hospital. The doctor told me I had partially torn two tendons and, more distressingly, separated my right shoulder—the same one I separated in 2000 and the same side I’d have problems with later on in my career.
I had bookings over the next two weeks, which, for the first time in my career, I had to cancel due to injury. In three weeks, I was scheduled to wrestle Japanese star KENTA (now Hideo Itami in WWE) for the ROH Championship in New York City. Everyone knew I was hurt, because Ring of Honor had covered my injury on their Web site. Given my reported condition and how KENTA was positioned around that time, most people expected him to beat me.
Bryan faces Japanese star KENTA for the ROH World Title in NYC, 2006 (Photo by George Tahinos)
In American wrestling, if somebody has a legit injury, you try to mostly stay away from it to avoid further injury. For example, with my shoulder hurt, someone might attack my leg. In Japan, if the fans know you have a real injury, the wrestlers almost feel obligated to treat it like a legitimate fight and attack an injured body part to avoid insulting the intelligence of the fans. KENTA and I took the Japanese route: Instead of protecting it, KENTA kicked the shit out of my right arm the entire match. My girlfriend at the time was in the crowd, and she was literally crying in the middle of the match, with one of the other wrestlers trying to settle her by telling her I was OK. But I was more than OK; I felt alive. With the emotion of the crowd, the physical intensity of the match, and the story that was told throughout, it is undoubtedly one of my favorite matches of my career. When I put KENTA in Cattle Mutilation and he tapped out, the crowd erupted. It was one of those times when the pain was worth it.
After the KENTA match, I did my first tour of Japan for Pro Wrestling NOAH, basically, so that KENTA could get his win back in front of the Japanese audience. I did my best, but with my shoulder getting progressively worse, I focused on trying to make it until Ring of Honor’s biggest show of the year, Final Battle. At that event on December 23, 2006, a wildly popular wrestler named Homicide beat me for the Ring of Honor World Championship in front of a sell-out Manhattan Center crowd, our second show in the building. My shoulder was a wreck, but Homicide and I tried to pull out all the stops to make his title win as memorable for the fans as it could be. In the end, Homicide hit me with his Cop Killa, one of the coolest-looking moves in wrestling, then pinned me, as the crowd went nuts. My 462-day title reign was over.
In retrospect, I was proud of the work that I had done as champion in Ring of Honor, and it made me grow as a performer. It was the first time anybody had chosen me to be “the Man”—the only time, really—and I can’t thank Gabe, ROH, and the ROH fans enough for giving me the opportunity to be the guy to carry the promotion.
After losing the ROH World Championship in December, I moved back to Aberdeen from Philadelphia. Ring of Honor and I agreed they needed a new trainer for their wrestling school and I needed to rehab my shoulder. While focused exclusively on getting healthy, I didn’t wrestle again for over three months—the longest time I’d ever taken away from wrestling.
When I was healthy enough to return to the ring, I was thrown right into the fire. Despite not being my best during my first Japan tour with Pro Wrestling NOAH, the promotion brought me back for a four-week tour in April of 2007. With my shoulder healthy and my body feeling rejuvenated, I made a much better showing after shaking off the early ring rust.
On that tour was the first time I met Ted DiBiase Jr., the son of the Million Dollar Man, a WWE Hall of Famer. Teddy had only competed in sixteen matches before he went on the tour, which reminded me of my first tour with FMW. The big difference was that Teddy was way better this early in his career than I was the first time I went to Japan. As far as having a natural instinct for wrestling, Teddy might be the best I’ve ever seen. There were definitely times when he showed his inexperience, but 90 percent of it he did really well, and I was impressed. Not only that, but he was also fun to be around. With his Mississippi accent and his southern hospitality, it was hard not to immediately like the guy. Soon after this tour, Teddy signed to a WWE developmental deal, and I couldn’t have been happier for him.
By May 2007, it had been over five months since I had wrestled for Ring of Honor, and I was excited to come back, especially because they had made some major changes since I’d left. In early May, ROH announced they had signed a deal to produce bimonthly pay-per-view events. Live pay-per-views were beyond ROH’s budget due to the substantial expense of satellite time, so
they taped the shows, edited them, and then put them on pay-per-view a few months later. These events were another way to expand the audience, on the assumption that fans who might not want to buy a DVD might be more willing to order a pay-per-view. In addition to the expansion to pay-per-view, for the first time, ROH started to sign talent to contracts in order to make sure the guys they built the promotion around wouldn’t leave for WWE or TNA. I happily signed a two-year deal.
The inaugural pay-per-view taping, called Respect Is Earned, featured my return to ROH, and it was back at the Manhattan Center on May 12. Everyone in the locker room was amped up for the opportunity to be on pay-per-view, including me. The fans were really excited, too. I wrestled in the main event, teaming with a 350-pound NOAH wrestler named Takeshi Morishima, who’d beaten Homicide for the ROH World Title, to face Nigel and KENTA. After Morishima and I won, he dumped me on my head for being a dick, and then Nigel clotheslined Morishima in the face, thus creating two potential challengers for the ROH Title. I thought the show was an excellent introduction to the promotion for people who had never before seen our wrestling. It established who all the characters were, who the rivals were, and why the fans should care.
The following month, Nigel and I wrestled each other in the main event of the second ROH pay-per-view, Driven 2007. Toward the end of the match, Nigel and I started headbutting each other without putting our hands up for protection, as if we were two rams butting heads to display our dominance. In the middle of the exchange, I was cut wide open at the top of my hairline and blood poured down my face. The fans loved it.
After I won, fellow wrestler Jimmy Rave took me to the emergency room, where they closed up the cut with staples. I finished up at the hospital just in time to catch my flight home, and I felt good knowing that Nigel and I had put on a great match that the pay-per-view audience was going to love. I had no idea what was about to transpire that would shake the wrestling world for some time.
On Monday, June 25, 2007, I was in the car driving home to Aberdeen from Olympia, Washington, after two hours of kickboxing and jiu-jitsu. I was exhausted and content with about fifteen minutes left in my hour-long ride when I got a call from my friends Mike and Kristof. They were watching Monday Night Raw, and WWE had just announced that Chris Benoit, his wife, Nancy, and their seven-year-old son, Daniel, had been found dead in their Atlanta home. I went straight to Mike and Kristof’s apartment, and we watched Raw together in shock. Chris Benoit had been one of my favorites, and someone I’d patterned my career after. He had wrestled all over the world, getting better everywhere he went, and by the time he made it to WWE, he was one of the best wrestlers on the planet. Beyond my professional admiration, the few times I met him, he was very kind to me. I was crushed.
WWE canceled the live show and ran a three-hour tribute to Chris that night. They showed some of the biggest moments of his career, interspersed with video packages and interviews with WWE Superstars who shared their very personal memories of him. It was an emotional program to watch, and I ended up leaving Mike and Kristof’s halfway through.
The next day, horrific details started coming out, and what was eventually discovered was that Chris had killed both his wife and son, then hanged himself. The Benoit double murder/suicide horrified people, and media outlets picked up on it right away. People tried to figure out why it happened, with speculation that it was caused by “roid rage” or because Chris and Nancy’s marriage was falling apart. To this day, there is no definitive reason for why it happened and there probably never will be. But investigations led to the Sports Legacy Institute performing a series of tests on Benoit’s brain, which according to Dr. Julian Bailes “was so severely damaged it resembled the brain of an 85-year-old Alzheimer’s patient.”
The type of brain damage Benoit had is known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which researchers believe is connected to having multiple head injuries. CTE’s most common symptoms include depression, cognitive impairment, dementia, Parkinsonism, and erratic behavior, and many experts believe CTE was a significant contributing factor in the Benoit tragedy. Multiple NFL players who committed suicide were found to have CTE as well, and the condition became a major news story in itself. There was a palpable shift in the nationwide awareness of the dangers of head injuries and concussions.
Chris Benoit popularized a wrestling style that was hard-nosed and aggressive, with lots of explosive suplexes and diving headbutts off the top rope. Looking back on it, you can see how easy it would have been for him to have multiple undiagnosed concussions. It was the same style that influenced me and many wrestlers of the new generation; it was action-packed and exciting, with an element of physical violence that was believable. That kind of wrestling is what made me and many of the other guys in ROH stand out from the pack.
When Nigel and I did the headbutts in June at the Driven pay-per-view, it seemed awesome. Two warriors ramming each other in the head until one of them bled. It made for a great visual, and spots like that showed our love for the business and our willingness to do anything for the fans. But when the match finally aired on pay-per-view on September 21, with all the awareness around the dangers of head injuries, it no longer seemed awesome. It seemed stupid and it seemed reckless, which made people question why they supported something that endangered the long-term health of the performers. In hindsight, Gabe told me, he wished they’d never aired it.
After the Benoit tragedy, the perception of wrestling became so negative that many fans no longer cared to watch—especially a company like Ring of Honor, which heavily featured a style similar to the one Benoit helped to popularize. Initially, ROH pay-per-views garnered around ten thousand buys, which was phenomenal for a company whose only exposure was through word of mouth and the Internet. However, with each passing pay-per-view, buys dropped, and after the six-event deal was up, ROH chose not to renew it.
The paradigm of how we should be wrestling was shifting. Some people accept new paradigms quickly. In this instance, I was not one of them. Despite all the concussion awareness and my own acknowledgment of certain dangers, I refused to tone it down. I stopped the aggressive headbutting, but I kept everything else about my in-ring performance the same. In mid-2007, I ruptured my left eardrum during a wild, open-palmed exchange with KENTA in which one errant shot caught me in my left ear. I never got it fixed, and even now I don’t hear as well on my left side. Later in the year, I detached my retina, in another example of my own stupidity.
Takeshi Morishima was still the ROH World Champion when I was booked against him that August at Manhattan Mayhem. At 350-plus pounds, Morishima was a giant compared to your standard ROH star, and, working in Japan, he was used to wrestling bigger guys (whom he had no problem smashing around). In Ring of Honor, Morishima had some great title matches against stars like Claudio Castagnoli (now known as Cesaro in WWE) and Brent Albright, but he proved to be a gentle giant, of sorts. In title matches with smaller ROH wrestlers, he tended to use a lighter touch, almost as if he were afraid of hurting us.
When Gabe booked Morishima and me in the championship match at the Manhattan Center show, we both agreed I needed to do something to turn the big man into the monster he was when he wrestled larger opponents. If he handled me gingerly, it wasn’t going to work. I decided—because I’m somewhat of an idiot—that the best way to do that was to piss him off.
Prior to our match, I stressed to Morishima to treat me as if I were a heavyweight in NOAH. He smiled gently and nodded his head, but I don’t think he understood. We structured the match so it would be based on me trying to stick and move, not wanting to be crushed by a man that size. My “sticking” comprised kicking his leg; Morishima would attack, and I’d move out of the way and use a Muay Thai kick to the leg. At first I was kicking him normally—hard yet safe—but he wasn’t being very aggressive. So then the leg kicks got harder. With the first really hard one, I could tell he thought it was an accident, but as I kicked him harder in the leg, I could see the expression on his
face change. He was starting to get mad. I kept with it and kept with it, and when he finally caught me in the corner, he was a giant, pissed-off Japanese monster.
He started clubbing me to the side of the head with each hand in rapid succession, a style of punching popularized by another large wrestler named Vader. Usually when he’d do it to the smaller ROH wrestlers, it would look light as a feather and phony as could be. These were different. In the middle of the flurry, one blow caught me directly in the eye and I dropped. My cheek started swelling, and everything in my left eye was blurry. We wrestled another ten minutes after that, and I was still able to do things like the springboard flip dive into the crowd, but my eye was throbbing and it worried me. I had never experienced anything like it. Morishima continued to bring it in a way that made the match exactly what it needed to be. Afterward, Morishima—a truly nice guy—felt horrible and apologized what seemed like a hundred times, despite the fact that he was limping and had one long, giant welt on his leg from the low kicks. I told him it wasn’t his fault and that he did a great job, which he did.
The backstage doctor told me I needed to go to the emergency room right away, and it was at the hospital that I found out I had not only fractured my orbital bone but also detached my retina. Two days later, I underwent laser surgery to have it reattached. I was instructed to take it easy for at least a month, if not longer, to permit my eye to heal. I was told to avoid flying because altitude changes could aggravate it. I had to wear an eye patch to keep the light out and just generally be careful to not put any pressure on it. But other than a little bit of pain from the fracture, I felt fine. So, like an idiot, I demanded to keep my scheduled rematch with Morishima three weeks later. Why? Because I thought it would be a great story.
The rematch with Morishima in Chicago went well, despite the doctor’s recommendation. I wore the eye patch—more for the visual than for actual protection, of which it provided very little. In another one of my dumber ideas, for the finish, Morishima gave me repeated clubbing blows to my damaged eye until I sold being knocked out. The 350-pounder made sure I was safe, and luckily I escaped the match without further damage (though I still have some vision problems in my left eye).