Yes!

by Daniel Bryan

  When Cary decided to replace Gabe, he went with someone he thought would incorporate some of the more old-school ideology he loved. Enter Adam Pearce, an independent wrestler known for his traditional style . He was one of the best bad guys on the independent scene and had wrestled all over the country making people hate him.

  Whereas Gabe would book longer shows in which the participants in almost every match tried to steal the show, Pearce wanted shorter shows with the guys on the undercard working hard, but not busting out every trick in the book. Cary was also trying to make budget cuts, and he thought Pearce would be more willing to use fewer performers on each show. Though I honestly didn’t think a change in bookers would make the company profitable, I understood why Cary made the change.

  Prior to his termination, Gabe was booking me with Claudio Castagnoli (Cesaro) in a feud that was supposed to culminate in December at Final Battle, the biggest ROH show of the year. The match was set up at the Manhattan Center in an incredible moment where Claudio crushed my head beneath a steel chair. When Pearce came on board, he had a different plan. He ended my feud with Claudio right away, which disappointed both of us. Instead, Pearce booked me against Morishima, who hadn’t been in ROH all year, in a match called “A Fight Without Honor,” a rare match in Ring of Honor where absolutely anything goes. Given our past together, it was a smart move, and the fans in New York City were excited to see it.

  My proudest moment as an independent wrestler was ROH’s Final Battle 2008. In WWE, there’s a stigma about independent wrestlers that before we got to WWE, we all just wrestled in front of a hundred people at an armory somewhere. Yes, most of us did that. But we also did things like this show. On December 27, 2008, Ring of Honor drew their record crowd of over 2,500 fans to the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City. We did that without having a television show and without having any big-name wrestling stars from the past. It was us. All of us. We created something that fans wanted to see, and though Ring of Honor may be a niche product, we were able to garner a huge amount of fan support based on the quality of our wrestling and the fans’ belief that what they were seeing was important.

  Ring of Honor moved the show from the Manhattan Center to the Hammerstein Ballroom, a larger room in the same building. In the main event, I wrestled Morishima in our bloodiest and most violent match yet. It was a true grudge match, culminating with me giving Morishima the crucifix elbows to the face—with a chain wrapped around my arm—then putting him in Cattle Mutilation. The crowd erupted when I won, and it was a great finish to a great show.

  With all of my health issues starting to add up, I decided to give WWE one last attempt and gave myself all of 2009 to get signed. If it didn’t work, I was going to cut back on my independent dates and resume going to school, changing the focus of where I put my energy.

  By 2009, I’d really started to enjoy kickboxing and submission grappling, but unfortunately, there weren’t any places to train in Aberdeen. I would drive an hour to Olympia, train kickboxing in one gym, then drive over to another gym to train jiu-jitsu. I tried to do it a few times each week, but when I was exhausted from traveling, the last thing I wanted to do was spend two hours in a car just to go train. If I was going to change my focus at the end of the year, I was going to spend the next year doing what I wanted. With this in mind, that January, I moved to Las Vegas.

  On my days off from wrestling, I wanted to focus on martial arts. I didn’t move there to party. In fact, as a city, I don’t care much for Las Vegas at all. All the tourists, gambling, and flashy lights—none of that is my thing. However, Vegas is also the home of UFC, and with that, there are a ton of great MMA gyms there. After trying out several of the options, I ended up settling on Xtreme Couture, owned by former UFC Heavyweight and Light Heavyweight Champion Randy Couture. I was lucky I did.

  I started training four days per week on days I wasn’t wrestling or traveling. The gym was only ten minutes from my house, and I could train kickboxing at 9 A.M. and then go straight into submission grappling for two hours after that. No long drives and no trying to fill time between classes.

  Neil Melanson was the head grappling coach of Xtreme Couture at the time, and he soon started noticing how often I was coming in. After about six weeks of training, Neil asked me what my deal was and if I was interested in fighting. I wasn’t, I just enjoyed it. Plus, I was interested in using more legitimate martial arts in my wrestling style. When he realized I was a pro wrestler, he thought it was awesome. He loved wrestling during the Attitude Era and had even considered doing it himself. Neil’s a big dude, around six foot five, and thickly muscled. One could easily imagine him being very successful in the wrestling world. Neil also knew a lot about the history of pro wrestling and its transition from a real athletic competition to the entertainment that it is today. From that moment on, Neil showed me cool stuff he thought would be good for pro wrestling.

  I kept training hard and could feel myself getting better. Soon I stayed after class with Neil and helped him, too, with some of the things he was working on. Neil would tell me exactly what he was trying to do, and I would try all sorts of different ways to defend against it. If I did something that really stumped him, he’d have me do it again and again until he figured it out. If he was grappling somebody else and something that opponent did gave him problems, he would have me do that as well. Watching the way he approached learning was inspiring, and all the while, I learned more and more as well.

  One of the things I excelled at was a shoulder lock called the omoplata, the same move I used against Roderick Strong in Ring of Honor. But when I got to Vegas and trained with grapplers who really knew what they were doing, they were able to get out of it. Neil showed me how to stop a guy from rolling out by pulling up on his head while I had the shoulder locked in. He called the move the LeBell Lock after Gene LeBell, under whom Neil had trained. I still use this hold today, although now it’s known as the “Yes!” Lock.

  Another cool thing about training with Neil was that it put me in with this strange lineage of catch wrestling: Strangler Lewis trained Lou Thesz; Lou Thesz trained Gene LeBell; Gene Lebell trained Neil; and Neil trained me. There you go! I am directly linked to Strangler Lewis, the greatest pro wrestler of his era!

  A little while later, Neil introduced me to Gene, a colorful old man who could still rip your head off today. He was in Ronda Rousey’s corner in a fight before she made it big. Neil and I went to the show and afterward briefly met up with Gene and his wife, and it was a pleasure meeting them. I was honored to meet Gene and even more honored that he vaguely knew me. By that point, I was using the LeBell Lock on WWE TV and even had the announcers calling it that, which I think he appreciated.

  Also in January, Ring of Honor struck a TV deal with HDNet, a station owned by the famous billionaire Mark Cuban. HDNet focused heavily on the 18–35 male demographic, showing a lot of MMA, and they hoped the more athletic style of wrestling that ROH featured would appeal to the people who regularly watched the station. For ROH, there was hope that being on TV would expose the product to people who normally wouldn’t see it, and originally we had a great time slot on Saturday night.

  The first TV shows were filmed at the old ECW Arena, and seeing the small building undergo a metamorphosis with the HDNet production crew was incredible. It obviously didn’t look as polished as WWE, but for an independent wrestling show, it looked great. They took me on a tour of the production truck, and we got to work with the folks producing television.

  Ring of Honor also brought in Jim Cornette and a former WWE writer named Dave Lagana to help format the show. Adam Pearce had never written TV before—it was a totally different animal—but they did a good job, and the show was vastly different than either TNA or WWE. For the hour-long program, there would be some short interviews, but the focus was always on the matches. Since the show was only sixty minutes, viewers didn’t always see their favorites every week. I, for example, would typically do a match only once every three episodes, d
oing short interviews or run-ins in between.

  Unfortunately, the TV show didn’t increase business for Ring of Honor, as far as I could tell. Attendance was stagnant, and I’d heard DVD sales were the same. Though the show never really took off, it was a great introduction to wrestling-TV production. Whereas before I could wrestle for however long or short I felt the match needed to be, the times for matches on television shows needed to be concise. If I had twenty minutes to perform, it meant the match, the entrances, and the aftermath all needed to take place in twenty minutes or less. If you didn’t hit your time, they would either have to edit your match or cut something else from the show. Admittedly, I went over time on a couple of my matches. It took me some time to figure out how long things would actually take, but I tried to learn quickly. The first time somebody’s interview got cut because my match went overtime, I felt horrible.

  My ROH contract was up in May of 2009, and until then I hadn’t contacted anyone from WWE. As soon as my contract expired, I called John Laurinaitis to let him know. It was the first time I’d ever called someone in WWE to try to get a job. I left a message but never heard back from him. In June, Brian Kendrick—then known as the Brian Kendrick—was doing a story in WWE in which he was looking for “the Tag Team Partner.” He gave me a call saying he wanted me to be that person. He told me WWE knew I could wrestle but wasn’t convinced I could talk. Brian’s idea was for me to fly out to an event and shoot some interviews with their people, just to show them I could do it. But since this was something just Brian and I wanted to do, and not WWE, I had to fly myself to the show.

  The next week I traveled to Oakland, ironically, to the same building where I had the meeting with Vince the prior year. Brian and Regal picked me up before the show and gave me a brief rundown of what I needed to do. Brian introduced me to Steve Lombardi, a.k.a. the Brooklyn Brawler, who was and still is pretty much in charge of what’s called the Pretapes Room, where most prerecorded interviews took place backstage. (Whenever you see Sheamus wishing you a Merry Christmas or see Kane promoting the next show in Munich, Germany, odds are it was filmed in this room.)

  We worked with Brawler recording several interviews, some with Brian and me together and some by myself. Brawler gave me some good insight into what else WWE would like to see from me promo-wise, and I gave those a shot. We all thought the interviews came out great, and as a result, Brawler put in a good word for me with Laurinaitis, who actually approached me later that night to say he heard everything went really well. When I left Oakland, I was feeling optimistic, but a few weeks went by and I heard nothing. Then, unfortunately, on July 30, Brian was fired from WWE. I felt bad for Brian and also figured that with him gone, WWE would no longer have any interest in me.

  In the summer, the lease on my apartment was about to expire, and I was still unsure of what might be next with WWE. Instead of committing to being in Vegas for another seven months, I started looking for rooms to rent on Craigslist—which in itself is a weird experience—in order to save money and prepare to move back to Washington. When going to check out this one guy’s place, I was wearing sandals—pretty standard fare when I’m relaxing. The renter immediately asked me if I wore sandals all the time, to which I replied that I did, and he then asked to see the bottoms of my feet. I thought it was weird, but I showed him, and when he saw a little bit of dirt, he told me I couldn’t rent the room unless I stopped wearing sandals. He was a neat freak and didn’t want his floors dirty. Eventually I ended up finding a room to rent for only $500 total per month from a nice guy named Nathan; my childhood friend Mike Dove also rented a room there about a month later, which was great. The best part was that I only needed to give Nathan one month’s heads-up if I was going to move out.

  Toward the end of the summer, I’d pretty much thrown in the towel and accepted that WWE wasn’t interested in signing me, when Johnny finally called me in late August. Having just come back from grappling training with Neil, I was a sweaty mess when I answered the phone. He offered me a contract—not a developmental contract, which most new signees get, but a regular talent contract. Earlier in the year when I resolved to get to WWE, I told myself that if they offered me a developmental deal, I’d turn it down, so I was relieved they weren’t going to try to send me to Florida Championship Wrestling (FCW), their developmental system, where people sometimes got stuck for years. Luckily, my contract ensured that I’d pretty much go straight to the main roster … or so I thought. I thanked Laurinaitis as I got off the phone, superexcited.

  I found out shortly thereafter that WWE had offered Nigel McGuinness a contract as well, which was great. We had helped build each other on the independents, and now we’d get that same opportunity in WWE. All we had to do in order for it to be official was go through WWE’s standard medical screening in Pittsburgh.

  When I landed, Nigel picked me up, and with us was another WWE signee who was also there for a health screening. We didn’t know her, but she was a Playboy Playmate of the Year who knew next to nothing about wrestling. I’m not quite sure she had even seen any wrestling before, either, but it didn’t matter. She was nice, and all three of us were pretty happy on our way to meet the doctors.

  I’ve always prided myself on being a fairly honest person; Bri says I’m too honest, sometimes. On this occasion, though, when the doctor asked if I’d ever had any surgeries or major injuries, I just said no. I made no mention of the detached retina, no mention of the shoulder issues, and no mention of the concussions. I told them I was perfectly fine. For some reason, I’ve always found it easier to lie to doctors than to normal people.

  Nigel took a different approach. He was completely honest with the doctor (minus, maybe, the concussions), mostly because he thought he had no need to worry. Earlier in the year he’d torn his bicep, and instead of getting surgery, he took time off to rehab it, just like I did with my shoulder several years earlier. He came back to wrestling when his doctor told him he was ready to go and the bicep was all healed. Nigel disclosed all of this to the doctor at the medical screening, assuming it would be fine. But it wasn’t. Before they would sign him, they wanted him to do more testing on his bicep. I wasn’t exactly fine either. I’ll explain shortly.

  The first person I called after WWE reached out to offer me a contract was Cary Silkin, the owner of Ring of Honor. I let him know what was going on and thanked him for all the opportunities ROH had given me. Shortly thereafter, ROH booked what they called the Final Countdown Tour, a series of six shows that were supposed to be the fans’ last opportunity to see me and Nigel compete in Ring of Honor. This would be the perfect ending to my time with ROH, and I had just one other project I wanted to see to its end before heading to WWE.

  Previously, fellow indie star Colt Cabana and I had discussed doing a documentary on our lives as independent wrestlers, inspired by Robbie Brookside, who filmed a similar documentary that aired on British television in the 1990s.

  We had big plans initially; we wanted to rent an RV and drive all over the country doing shows. But with my Japan tours and long distances between shows (like one weekend in Philadelphia and the next in Los Angeles), we settled on documenting a ten-week tour. When I got contacted by WWE, Cabana had everything set up for the filming, and though he was actually worried I would cancel the shoot, I thought the addition of me signing with Vince McMahon’s organization would make the documentary even more interesting. We were moving forward with what we called The Wrestling Road Diaries.

  Cabana started the trip in Chicago with an Englishman named John, who hopped on for the ride and filmed the whole thing. Together, they drove 750 miles to Philadelphia—the site of the first two Final Countdown Tour shows—to meet up with me and Sal Rinauro, an independent wrestler from Georgia, whom Cabana and I love because he’s hilarious, kindhearted, and always in good spirits.

  Over our ten-day trip, we wrestled on seven shows, from the famed ECW Arena to a garage in Connecticut and even an amusement park in Ohio (where I wrestled almost fiv
e straight minutes with my butt exposed—on purpose), then ended with a big Ring of Honor show in Chicago. Along the way, we did seminars at two wrestling schools, visited my sister while she was pregnant with my first niece, and, in general, just had a great time.

  The only thing that put a mild damper on the whole thing was a call I got from the doctor in Pittsburgh. According to the tests I’d taken, I had really high cholesterol and, far more concerning, severely elevated liver enzymes. The doctor asked me if I drank a lot, and I told him I’d never had a drink in my life. He also asked about steroids, and I’d never used them either. Since blood test results already ruled out hepatitis, a disease of the liver, those two are the most common reasons to have elevated liver enzymes. The third most common reason was cancer. I was scared to death. Plus, WWE couldn’t officially sign me until I’d been medically cleared.

  With that cloud hanging over my head, I nonetheless finished the rest of the trip. At the last show in Chicago, I wrestled Austin Aries in a match I truly enjoyed. Then, after the show was over, I said goodbye to Cabana, Sal, and John. It had been a really fun trip.

  When I got back to Vegas, Nigel and I were both still waiting for our WWE contracts to go into effect, and they had me doing all sorts of tests: MRIs, more blood tests, and even a colonoscopy, which was miserable. I went into my final ROH show not knowing if I would actually be leaving. Before the show at the Manhattan Center, ROH promoted an autograph signing for both me and Nigel as the last time fans would get to see us. As we signed, we joked with each other that there was a good chance we might be back a lot sooner than people thought. We laughed about it, but we were both legitimately nervous.