by Daniel Bryan
Still, Bri has also been able to do some really cool things on the show, like highlight certain issues we care about. For example, in one episode, she convinced E! and the producers to go on location to show the differences between factory chicken farms and organic chicken farms. Even though that episode may not have changed the world, it did help raise some awareness among people who’d never been exposed to that information. Generally speaking, the show has definitely allowed Bri and me to do things we would have never been able to do before, which I’ll describe in more detail later. We have had some pretty amazing experiences thanks to Total Divas, and going through it all together—both good and bad—has brought us closer as a couple.
21
THE HEAT IS ON
SUNDAY, APRIL 6, 2014—9:46 A.M.
The temperature feels immoderately warm in Daniel Bryan’s hotel room this morning. With fiancée Brie across the city at Axxess’s early session, Bryan sits in his quarters and describes the first thoughts of the day, WrestleMania Sunday.
“Once Brie left, I was able to go back to sleep, and when I woke up, I had a lot of energy,” says a cool, relaxed Bryan. “And that’s what you want: feeling excited as opposed to nervous. You think you’d be a little more nervous about something like this, but I’m not,” he adds. “I woke up and feel really good.”
Dual knocks at the door bring Bryan to his feet to welcome in this morning’s visitors—two quite tiny. The chilled Superstar warmly greets his mom, plus his older sister, Billie Sue, and his pair of young, excited, and adorable nieces, ages four and two. They discuss logistics for the day and night ahead. During the pass-off of WrestleMania guest wristbands, the brief family banter results in smiles—Bryan and Billie Sue exposing their identical laugh—after cute cut-ins by Billie’s adorable daughters.
“Awww, mannnn,” the adults all say in unison, quoting a character from Dora the Explorer whose adventure unfolds on one girl’s iPad.
Betty hugs and squeezes her son as he stretches on a piece of furniture midconversation. She then leaves him with a maternal kiss on the cheek, and the family heads out for now. The support is palpable.
“My sister has, by far, been to more shows than anybody else in my family, and she regularly comes to WWE shows when we’re near her,” Bryan says, beaming. “When I first started talking about becoming a wrestler, Billie Sue thought it was cool. My father was also thoroughly supportive of me; even when there were times that wrestling wasn’t going well, he never once told me to stop wrestling. And when I made the decision to go to wrestling school instead of college, my mom was also unbelievably supportive.”
He continues, “Overall, my family has always wanted what’s best for me. It’s something that makes me feel very, very fortunate.”
The matches Glenn and I had with the Shield throughout 2013 really helped me gain momentum, even in defeat. We were wrestling them seemingly every week on TV, and every week the matches seemed to be great, getting the fans more and more behind me. After our tag team title loss to Rollins and Reigns, WWE.com wanted to record an interview with Glenn and me for the site, and they essentially wanted us to say something like, “Man, somebody needs to stop the Shield,” which was a weird implication that somebody else needed to do it but we couldn’t. Glenn and I just decided to do our own thing instead, going off the cuff. I got really passionate during the promo, going on this tangent about not being the “weak link” of our team—in fact, I think it ended with me screaming, “I am not the goddamned weak link!” The premise behind my statement was that I was the one who got pinned when we lost the titles and was the one who got pinned pretty much every time we lost. That was the way our team was designed: I was the beatable underdog and Kane was the monster. We needed to keep Kane the monster for our dynamic to work, so I would usually take the pins.
Somebody in charge must have seen my tirade on WWE.com and liked it, because the next night on Raw, we continued down this path of me crazily thinking everyone believed I was the weak link of Team Hell No. My character’s motivation changed and I became obsessed with proving to everyone that I was not the weak one, which led to a short television feud with Randy Orton.
On June 17, 2013, I wrestled Randy on Raw and was supposed to win. It would have been the biggest win in my career at that point and was going to really help me transition from the comedic figure I’d been for the last year and a half to someone who could be taken seriously as a main event performer. It didn’t exactly go as planned. Randy and I had designed a spot where I missed my signature suicide dive through the ropes, and as I did it, my neck and shoulder crashed into the barricade. I felt a quick pain shoot down my right arm, but I didn’t think anything of it. Minutes later, I did a dropkick off the top rope, and when I landed, I lost feeling in both of my arms. The left side came back pretty quickly, but the right side stayed numb for a while. I also couldn’t stand up.
After an extended period, I heard Randy trying to talk to me. He had no idea I was hurt and asked, “Dan, what the fuck is going on?!” When I was finally able to get back to my feet, I still couldn’t move my right arm and it was hanging limp. We kept going through the match, and after his draping DDT, Randy went to throw me over the top rope to the floor, but I held on. I was supposed to pull myself back into the ring, where Randy would boot me right back out, but at first I couldn’t get my arm up to the rope. I finally used momentum to swing it up, and I was able to get partially upside down before Randy booted me to the floor.
While I was on the outside, Dr. Sampson, one of two WWE doctors at the time, came over to check on me. I told him I was fine, but he wouldn’t listen. I insisted I was fine again, and he tried to call off the match, so I sprinted into the ring and started brawling with Randy to keep the match going. I saw this as my big opportunity, and I wasn’t about to let it pass me by.
Randy still had no idea what was going on, so he threw me to the floor and gave me a backbreaker on the barricade. The referee pushed Randy aside, and Dr. Sampson came over once again, but this time he directed the referee to stop it, and the ref waved off the match.
Usually I don’t get superangry, and when I do it’s barely visible. This time, I was furious and I let everyone know it. When I walked through the curtain, I yelled, “What the fuck is that all about?! That’s fucking bullshit!”
“You need to calm down,” responded Triple H, who had been communicating with the doctor over the headset and called for the match to be stopped.
“No, you need to calm the fuck down,” I replied.
We were up in each other’s faces and both ready to fight. I never had a match stopped in my entire career—not when I separated my shoulder five minutes into an hour draw and not when I detached my retina. Certainly not through any of my concussions. I’m sure I shouted all those things to him, but I was blackout mad so I don’t necessarily remember. He was livid, too, and shouted back about stopping the match for my protection, but I wasn’t having any of it. It felt hypocritical for Triple H—of all people—to do that, considering in 2001 Hunter himself tore his quad live on Raw and yet finished his match.
“How the fuck can you say that to me?” I asked. “You went out there and tore your quad and you continued to wrestle!” It was getting so heated that guys stepped in to separate us and I stormed off.
Bri was afraid I was about to start fighting people, so she took me into a room, which helped to calm me down. Soon after, Vince came to talk to me, and all of a sudden I was riled up again, yelling at him. I was a raving lunatic. He told me I needed to calm down, and I responded with something to the effect of “All these dumb motherfuckers are trying to calm me down and I have every right to be angry.” Randy was one of the guys trying to get me to regain my cool. He was actually trying to help and on my side, but my statement pissed him off. He responded, “Don’t call me a dumb motherfucker!”
It was kind of a big thing and the first time anybody in WWE had seen me like that.
Later on, after speaking with Bri an
d Regal, who found me backstage, I started to find my composure. Regal advised me I needed to go apologize to both Vince and Hunter since they were only trying to protect me. I knew he was right. I blew up because I was frustrated that the biggest win in my career was being taken away, something I thought would help legitimize me to the WWE fans. Admittedly, I was also a little scared because I had never experienced anything like the numbness that happened to me.
By the time I went in to talk to Vince and Hunter (especially), I was embarrassed by how I had reacted. I told Hunter I was sorry and explained that I usually don’t lose my cool like that, but I have so much pride in what I do. He apologized as well, and we buried the hatchet right there. We each understood where the other was coming from. He was trying to protect the talent, and I had the mindset of finishing the match—no matter what—which is a mindset he shares when he’s in the ring.
The numbness went away in my right arm, but it became a significant problem going forward. When I got home on Wednesday, I went to go get an MRI, which showed that one of the discs in my neck was bulging into the nerve. Both WWE doctors agreed that I was fine at the moment but it was likely I’d need surgery at some point. I was gaining momentum and didn’t have time for that.
The next week on Raw, I wrestled Randy again in a street fight, and they gave me my win as Randy tapped out to the “Yes!” Lock while I pulled a kendo stick across his face. It worked out well because this victory became much bigger than a win the week before would have been. Randy was the biggest star I’d ever beaten, and I needed that win, especially because several weeks later, John Cena elected to face me for the WWE Championship in the main event of SummerSlam.
Originally I heard I might face John for the title at the Money in the Bank pay-per-view in July, right before SummerSlam. When that didn’t happen, I was a little bothered because I anticipated that WWE couldn’t possibly want me to face Cena at the second-most-important pay-per-view event of the year the following month. John told me he’d pushed for a match between us at Money in the Bank and when Vince asked him why, John said he felt like it was the biggest match WWE had at the time. Vince took a long pause—which he’s notorious for—and then told John we weren’t going to do it at Money in the Bank because if it was the biggest match WWE had, we needed to do it at SummerSlam.
They did a cool setup for our match in which Cena was going to get to select his own opponent and challenger on Raw, live in Brooklyn. When John came out to make his announcement, the audience in the Barclays Center was already fired up with “Yes!” and “Daniel Bryan” chants. John teased that his pick might have been a couple of other people: Chris Jericho … RVD … Sheamus … even Heath Slater. When he finally announced that he chose me, the place came unglued. It was the first time WWE fans actually voiced their opinion that they wanted me in the WWE Championship picture.
John Cena has helped me in a lot of ways. The first was back in 2003, when WWE used me as an extra. Typically, when extras had matches, they were just used as enhancement talent to make the WWE guys look good, and thus they would get very little offense. They booked me against John for their syndicated show Velocity on a night when he was starting a big championship program with Brock Lesnar. To set up his match with Brock, what he should have done was eat me alive in our match. But he didn’t. We had a good 50/50 match that actually helped my independent career, as opposed to the squash matches that would typically hurt your career. When John got to the back, he got an earful. A championship contender should never give an extra that much offense, they told him. But he did anyway.
John also helped me in the buildup to our match ten years later, giving me some really good advice: “Just go out there and be genuine.” It may not sound that complicated, but it is—especially when you have page-long scripts handed to you that don’t sound anything like your voice. To be genuine, but still be the character that people want you to be, is a difficult thing.
We did a few back-and-forth promos heading into SummerSlam, and John encouraged me to hit below the belt a little bit, which we needed to build intrigue for a good-guy-against-good-guy match.
Earlier in the year during an overseas tour, I came to the realization that what we were doing in WWE was no longer pro wrestling. I know WWE uses the term “sports-entertainment” all the time, but it should still be the same thing. Instead, what most of WWE had become was actually a parody of wrestling. Yes, there were times to be a parody and entertain people, but I wanted something more. Cesaro and I were riding together at the time, and we talked about it at length. I didn’t want to be a parody of wrestling anymore. And in my mind, being a wrestling parody was the worst possible thing a wrestler could be.
On the last Raw before SummerSlam, we needed a strong go-home segment between John and me to sell the pay-per-view. So as John stood there, decked out in his merchandise from head to toe, I stood face-to-face with the WWE Champion and called him a “parody of wrestling.” John realized that there were a lot of people who did feel that way about him, but he let me do it anyhow. In fact, he encouraged it because it gave our story a little more bite. He responded as only John Cena can with an awesome promo talking about not being a parody to the kid in the front row, about being proud of who he is, and about how there was a long list of guys who don’t respect him as a wrestler and yet he was still the top dog after more than ten years. When John fires up, he’s the best talker in wrestling. But I wasn’t finished yet. In my response, I made reference to a tradition in Japan in which wrestlers would slap each other in the face to instill fighting spirit. I told John I’d love to slap him in the face right then and there, but he didn’t deserve it—because he wasn’t a wrestler. Between the match’s significance and the intensity of the segment, I thought it was the best promo I’d done yet.
Words aside, the performance with John was one of my favorites. Just having the match—the main event of SummerSlam—meant WWE had a tremendous amount of trust in me. Plus, the match itself wasn’t gimmicky; there were no ladders or table spots. On the contrary, it had a championship feel to it, and we went out and wrestled without it being a parody. I loved it.
On that night in Los Angeles on August 18, I debuted my new move, the flying knee, then pinned John Cena to win my first WWE Championship. Even though I lost the championship moments later when Triple H Pedigreed me and Randy Orton cashed in his Money in the Bank contract, it was still the biggest moment of my career up until then. Very few people beat John Cena clean in the middle of the ring, and I got to do it in the main event of SummerSlam.
Immediately after the big August pay-per-view, Cena needed triceps surgery and was going to be away from WWE for a couple of months, giving me the opportunity to be the lead protagonist driving stories forward. It didn’t go very well, to say the least, at least not businesswise.
The basis for my main event story was that The Authority—Triple H and Stephanie McMahon—didn’t want me as the WWE Champion because the WWE Champion is supposed to be the “Face of WWE,” and I didn’t fit that mold. Historically, the “Face of WWE” has been someone with a very good build, someone who’s on the taller side; your Hogans, your Rocks, your Cenas—all people with these bodybuilder physiques. I don’t fit in with that stereotype of what Vince sees as his top guy. This reality was the basis for a lot of the ideas for what became my rivalry with The Authority. They wanted a champion that could be put on magazine covers and pay-per-view posters, somebody who looked like a star and acted like one. I wasn’t their type of guy. Randy Orton was, and thus Randy and I feuded over the WWE Championship for several months, with The Authority always stacking things in Randy’s favor.
A lot of what played out on TV, I feel, stemmed from legitimate thoughts WWE has about me. They blended a bit of behind-the-scenes reality with on-air storytelling. I don’t have the look WWE likes; nor am I overly charismatic the way Hulk Hogan, The Rock, and John Cena are. I’ll never be on the cover of Muscle & Fitness; nor am I somebody Hollywood producers look at and want
to give a role in a movie. Thus, I’m not the best-suited person to be the “Face of WWE.”
The Authority also started calling me a “B+ player,” recognizing that I was popular, but also that my popularity was among a niche audience and wouldn’t appeal to the masses. I was good to have around because people like me, but I wasn’t going to move numbers. Here, story line met with reality once again. Despite what I thought was good buildup, SummerSlam main-evented by me against John Cena did disappointing numbers, as did the subsequent two months of live events headlined by me and Randy.
Despite recognizing that the entire premise was partially legitimate, I thought it was a good story, especially in today’s world where people are sick of homogenized, shoved-down-their-throat celebrities. It seemed as if the stories we were doing on television were drawing anger from the fans, but in a good way, in a way that made them want to see me stick it up The Authority’s ass. Unfortunately, when it came to delivering, we ultimately failed in that two-month run.
Randy Orton is one of the best guys I’ve been in the ring with, and we’ve had some great matches. Regrettably, none of them were during the three times we main-evented pay-per-views in late 2013. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think great matches are absolutely necessary in successful stories. Satisfying conclusions, however, are. And none of the pay-per-view main events we had gave those. At Night of Champions, I beat Randy, but crooked referee Scott Armstrong counted fast, and the title was taken away from me the next night on Raw. That would seem fine, but because Scott was doing the fast count on my pin, I wasn’t allowed to make any pinfall covers during the match, which killed some of the drama. At the next pay-per-view, WWE Battleground, there was no finish to the match; Big Show came out, knocked out both me and Randy, and walked off. The show went off the air like that—no announcement of who won or lost. All of that would have been fine had it been on a Raw on free TV, but to pay $50 and have a show end like that had a lot of fans giving up.