Daniel Bryan’s chat with Chris Jericho on Talk is Jericho, recorded in Saudi Arabia before Greatest Royal Rumble, is a fascinating chat between a couple of sharp wrestling minds who’ve seen a little bit of everything. It’s well worth a listen - you can do so here.
Of particular interest, especially if you’re like me and are both thrilled Bryan is wrestling again and worried about Bryan wrestling again, are the items they discuss around his retirement and return to the ring. Those topics also lead to their covering other topics like what DB was doing while he wasn’t cleared, and what he would have done if WWE hadn’t cleared him.
After covering some well-trod ground regarding the circumstances which resulted in Vince McMahon telling him he needed to retire and the “mental breakdown” that helped trigger while filming the first season of Total Bellas, his role as SmackDown General Manager came up. Unlike his commentary stint on the Cruiserweight Classic, which Bryan says Triple H asked him if he wanted to do, the GM role was something he was told he had to do. And it was not something he enjoyed, but it did start him on the road back to the ring:
“...but still I’d accepted the decision [that I couldn’t wrestle any more], until they brought me back as GM. And then I just have to be around it every week. And then because I’m still doing a decent amount of travelling with that, and then I’m having to sit like at ringside for matches, and it’s just like... it hurt, and it was also just like ‘what am I doing?’
This is the part of me that’s very like, ‘What a sissy I am!’ Lots of people go to their jobs that they don’t like and make way less money than me being the GM of SmackDown. But I could not get out of this mental space of being like, ‘Gosh, do I hate coming here’.
I literally disliked going to work every week, and any time - like there would be times where I’d fly in, and I’d get the script for the show, and if I just had like a backstage I’d try to like - and you know how hard it is to try and get stuff filmed before the show - I would push as many people as I could to be like ‘hey, let’s get this’ and just leave that night. Just so I could get out of there. And that’s when I started to be like, ‘Okay, I’m not gonna accept this any more. I’m gonna come back.’”
We’ve heard many of the details of how the head of WWE’s medical team, Dr. Joseph Maroon, ended up giving Bryan the go ahead to return after he was cleared by the top neurologists and concussion experts in the world. The former WWE Champ gives Dr. Maroon a lot of credit for being willing to adjust his stance. Before that happened though, Vince asked Bryan a number of questions about how a possible return would go. It was DB himself who pitched getting evaluated after every match:
“This is my proposal: after every match, I have to go to the trainer’s room, they do all the checks and all that kind of stuff, and if I don’t do it, maybe there’s a fine or something like that. So you know, after every match, I get checked, which they’ve actually instituted. That’s what’s happening now, I get checked after every - like, not even thanking your opponents or anything like that. WrestleMania, I walked straight through gorilla, no thank yous to anybody, straight to the doctors, and then I get checked.”
What does that testing entail?
“So they do just basic neurological stuff... we’re revising that as we go because it’s new for them too.”
What about other elements of the proposal, like how much he’d work?
“Turns out we haven’t really talked about the schedule that much and they’ve just thrown me in to live events, so now I’m on that full European tour, so back to the full-time stuff.”
He talks a little bit about changing up his style to work safer, which was a piece of advice he got from Steve Austin even before his retirement. Researching other styles got him watching 1980s lucha libre videos online, and made Mexico a key part of his plan for the future should WWE not clear him. And leaving WWE was “100%” the move if that had been Maroon’s decision.
What would he have done? Turns out he was actually pretty open about this stuff on social media. But this still may actually cause some pangs of regret for some fans:
“I wanted to go to New Japan, Ring of Honor and CMLL. I’ve done a little bit in Mexico, but I always wanted to do - even though there’s no money there, like in comparison, I wanted to do like mask and hair matches and all that kind of stuff.
... so Bullet Club is very hot, but they need somebody to go against... something that would draw money and interest and bring independent wrestling to another level, I thought - that’s it. And then you [Jericho] came in and just did it [both laugh]... so that’s what I was thinking, a long-term thing. We could do that for a couple years.”
Ahhh... c’est la vie.
Jericho doesn’t ask him what his plans are after his current WWE deal expires on Sept. 1, 2018, but the answer he gives about his future goals doesn’t rule out working for other federations:
“Doing the wrestling that I like doing, not just doing stuff just because, or because I’m trying to get cheered, or I’m trying to get this position, or whatever, but just enjoying it while I can because now that it’s been taken away from me I know what it’s like to lose it.”
No matter where he finishes his career, that’s a good - very Daniel Bryan - answer.
Like I said at the top, it’s a great conversation between two of the best, and most interesting, to ever lace up the boots. These are what struck me as the hot topics, but all of their hour long session is interesting.
Give it a listen here.