FRIDAY, APRIL 4, 2014—11:04 A.M.
Across the spectrum of media personalities he’s encountered, Daniel Bryan’s been asked nearly every question imaginable asked in countless languages. He’s also been asked to recite lines from the “#SELFIE” song, rapidly rattle off excessively colorful DJ names for shout-outs, and, of course, strike a “Yes!” or three. The tally is fifty-four total uses of the word “yes” in chant by the time he’s through—culminating with a nine-time succession along with a gaggle of the morning’s media correspondents. It’s clear that in any dialect, Bryan’s signature word (and its Movement) have strength.
“The ‘Yes!’ chant gives fans a way to vocalize their feelings about me not getting what, in their minds, I deserve. They want to see me succeed,” Bryan details. “In my career, the most important thing I’ve ever said ‘yes’ to is following my own dreams, as opposed to the dreams of other people. I said ‘yes’ to pursuing my dreams of becoming a wrestler, which is mildly impractical for someone who’s five foot eight and from Aberdeen, Washington. You’ve heard it a thousand times before—‘follow your dreams’—and it’s the only reason I’m here right now.”
Yards away, the exhibits are unmanned within the sprawl of WrestleMania Axxess, giving Bryan free rein to explore. In a wide display lined with mannequins posed in vintage gear like the Heartbreak Kid’s signature chaps, Bryan rediscovers a memory from his past. He relives the first pay-per-view he ever watched back on March 31, 1996. WrestleMania XII was an event in which a lingerie-swathed Goldust clashed with “Rowdy” Roddy Piper in a Backlot Brawl and “Big Daddy Cool” Diesel fell to the Deadman. But more importantly, it housed the clash that countless current Superstars claim is their favorite ’Mania bout of all time: Bret Hart versus Shawn Michaels in a sixty-minute WWE Iron Man Match. A former pupil of HBK, the “Yes!” Man has studied this and other classics over the course of his career, which he hopes to redefine at WrestleMania 30. Bryan continues along the display to find images from WrestleMania X and others, recalling instances like the Hit Man’s WWE Championship–winning double-duty in 1994. These all serve as inspiration for the contender who may end up in two all-important battles on the Grandest Stage of Them All.
At the end of his explorations, Bryan can’t deny the heavy eyes glaring at him from overhead on a series of immense banners featuring WrestleMania 30’s top gladiators. Positioned across from one another just as they will be days later on Sunday, a massive Triple H and Daniel Bryan linger atop a long Axxess hall passageway. The only thing bigger will be the actual clash itself.
From where he stands, just forty-eight hours lie between Daniel Bryan and the Game—the “Yes!” Movement and The Authority. He marches out from under the symbolic shrouds and toward the exit.
“I’m very confident in my ability to compete in two matches in one night,” he asserts, describing the many single-night tournaments he’s experienced in the past. “That kind of accomplishment will make me worthy of all these cheers and the adulation.”
On June 7, 2008, I got the first of the two phone calls I ever had from Vince McMahon. I was in my hotel room in Hartford, Connecticut, where we’d just done a show for ROH. At first, when he introduced himself, I laughed because I thought someone was ribbing me. Vince McMahon has a very distinct voice, one that many people are good at imitating. What initially made me suspect it might actually be him was that he said he had been speaking with Shawn Michaels.
Two weeks earlier, Shawn had called me, and it was the first time we had talked in several years. He asked how I was but quickly got to the point. He was in the middle of a feud with Chris Jericho, and they were getting Lance Cade involved in the story because Shawn had trained him. They thought getting me involved, too, would be an interesting twist; I could potentially come in beside Shawn, then turn on my onetime teacher to form an alliance with Chris and Lance. Shawn didn’t try to pressure me at all, but he explained it would be a great spot for me to come into, if I wanted to go to WWE—something I hadn’t even thought of since 2005. He said that he knew, from speaking with William Regal, that I liked the independents and that I preferred being more of a “starving artist.” (This was the first time I’d heard that in reference to me, and it kind of made me proud, since I never aspired to be wealthy and it was mostly the artistic form of wrestling that I truly enjoyed.) We had a good conversation, and I expressed that I’d be interested if we could work things out with ROH, with whom I was still under contract.
It was most certainly the real Vince McMahon on the phone. He said Shawn had spoken highly of me, and then he told me he’d like to have a meeting with me in Oakland, California, that Monday before Raw.
I mentioned that I could meet him that day if he wanted, noting that I was in Hartford, Connecticut, which I confused with Stamford, where WWE Headquarters is located. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t just meet me that same day. It was kind of embarrassing, though Vince never pointed out my stupidity, which I only realized when we passed Stamford on the way from Hartford to our show in Newark, New Jersey. That all aside, I agreed to the meeting in California.
In hindsight, I should have just had them fly me to Oakland from Newark. Instead, I flew home from Newark to Seattle, then had to fly from Seattle to Oakland some six hours later. I needed that time, though. After talking to Regal, I thought I should get a suit to meet with Vince, and all I had was workout clothes, so I went to a department store near the airport. My mom was nice enough to bring me new workout clothes so I could switch everything out. I bought a cheap suit with a cheap shirt and equally cheap tie, packed up my stuff, and headed down to Oakland.
I met with Vince on Monday and was very uncomfortable. Wearing the suit didn’t help, as I was awkward in it, which is especially noticeable in the presence of people who wear them so easily. That wasn’t the only thing. Almost as soon as he saw me, Vince seemed taken aback that I was the one Shawn had talked so much about. I’m not sure if it was because of my size or just because of how plain I look, in general. And my personality didn’t seem to help things. Our conversation went a little something like this:
“Shawn says you’re very good,” Vince said.
“Yeah, I’m OK,” I replied.
“Just OK?” he asked.
“Well, yeah,” I very casually stated. “I’ve got a match tonight if you’d like to see.”
Knowing Vince a little better now, I could see how he would have hated that. He wants people who will say, “No, I’m the best!” And not just say it—believe it. But except during promos, I wouldn’t say that then and I wouldn’t say that now. Some people think I’m good, some people don’t; I let people decide on their own, which is not a top-guy attitude, at least not to Vince.
We talked a bit longer, and I explained that I was under contract with Ring of Honor but had their full blessing in coming to see him. He asked me if I wanted to come wrestle for WWE (probably because Shawn mentioned the “starving artist” thing), and I told him I had concerns. I said that WWE didn’t have the best history of pushing smaller guys like me, and I wasn’t as acrobatic as somebody like Rey Mysterio. I think that comment made Vince raise an eyebrow as well. But overall, despite my nervousness—and my slight anxiety about whether or not I was supposed to keep the suit jacket buttoned when I sat down—I thought it went well.
My match that night went well, too. I wrestled Lance Cade, and not only did we have a good little match, but there were quite a few fans who knew who I was and gave me a good reception. It helped that Lance and I had known each other for years, and he did his best to make me look good.
Afterward, John Laurinaitis, who was in charge of WWE talent relations, told me they were definitely interested and that he’d call me that week. Two days later, I went to Mexico for a week to perform in one of its biggest wrestling shows, TripleMania. When I came back from Mexico, I had an ROH show and then left for three months to England. I didn’t hear from Laurinaitis until he called, literally, as I checked in my bags for the flight to the U.K. I told him my phone wouldn’t work while I was in England, but I gave him my e-mail address so he could contact me if WWE was interested in using me. I checked my e-mail religiously that trip, but I never received a message from him. On the flip side, it would have been very easy for me to have called Johnny regularly while in England, just to check in and see what the status was. But, of course, that sort of ambition was not my style.
I had another great time in England, and I was able to add more shows in Europe during some weekends, just for fun. I wrestled at an anime convention in France, which was surreal, and performed at shows in Germany as well. I went straight from England to Japan on another tour with Pro Wrestling NOAH, which had teamed with Ring of Honor to promote some ROH shows in Japan at the end of the tour that were held in the Differ Ariake Arena, the same building where NOAH had their dojo and offices.
A few of us who had been on the NOAH tour—me, Rocky Romero, Eddie Edwards, and Davey Richards—had a couple of days off before the ROH shows. In years past, on their days off, wrestlers would be out partying or whatever. Then, you had us. We decided to have a cookie-eating contest at midnight in the hotel lobby. We made several trips to this little convenience store to pick up boxes of Country Ma’am cookies, which we’d never seen in the States. The winner of our contest would be whoever ate the most boxes of these ever-so-soft sweet treats.
The only one not participating was Davey Richards, who actually walked in on us after going for a midnight run because he couldn’t sleep. He was disgusted. I suspect if old-school wrestlers who had come to Japan before us—like Stan Hansen or Bruiser Brody—saw us, they would probably punch us all in the face. If notoriously tough wrestlers like them ever had any contest, it would’ve been a drinking contest, not one with soft cookies. But in my mind, there are few things better than a good old-fashioned eating contest … even if I never win.
It was at an ROH show called the Tokyo Summit on September 14, 2008, where I won the Global Honored Crown (GHC) Junior Heavyweight Championship from Yoshinobu Kanemaru, who was the title’s very first champion and had held it multiple times. During my many tours of Japan, it was the only singles title I had won. Despite holding it for only a month, I was pleased they gave me the opportunity to be the champion, as I was only the second gaijin wrestler to win the title. I ultimately lost the title to KENTA on the following NOAH tour at a show in Hiroshima on October 13. (I consoled myself by eating more Country Ma’am cookies.) I was treated really well by Pro Wrestling NOAH, and it was just another example of why I loved wrestling overseas in general.
When I returned home from the Japan tour, I was shocked to find out that Gabe Sapolsky had been fired from Ring of Honor, and I was devastated. Gabe had been the booker since ROH’s inception, and we had a great working relationship. He always listened to my ideas and was honest with me when things were good and when things weren’t so good. Unfortunately, the business side of ROH had grown stagnant, and the organization was losing a significant amount of money. Wrestling’s popularity had declined, and the amount of people looking for alternatives to the wrestling they saw on television was limited. So Cary Silkin, the sole owner of ROH and the individual whose finances kept it afloat, decided to make a change.
Cary loved wrestling and grew up as a big WWE fan when Bruno Sammartino was the champion. He collected old wrestling posters and magazines and loved showing them to the guys who appreciated them. He would often give me old wrestling magazines, my favorite of which had “Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers on the cover in an iconic wrestling pose.
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, doing 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 five 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.
My last match for ROH was on September 26, 2009, and fittingly, I wrestled Nigel in the main event. It was a difficult task. We wanted to do justice to the matches we’d had before, but we also wanted to stay safe, which is easier said than done in wrestling. When Nigel caught me on the springboard dive into the crowd, the back of his head hit a chair. All of a sudden, he was loopy and probably concussed. We continued on and tried to give the audience one final classic match. I’m not sure we quite reached that, but the fans reacted like we had, all the same. When the match was over, all the ROH wrestlers and employees surrounded the ring as Nigel and I said farewell to Ring of Honor. The crowd gave us a standing ovation, a demonstration of appreciation for all the hard work we’d done to entertain them over the years. I got pretty emotional about it. I still do. When you have that many good memories, it’s hard to walk away.
Soon after that, WWE advised Nigel that they wanted him to get bicep surgery before they would sign him. Not only could Nigel not afford the surgery, but he was receiving a different, conflicting message from his own doctor, who kept telling him that his bicep was healed already. Nigel refused the surgery, and WWE rescinded their contract offer. He ultimately signed with TNA, and after doing really well for a year there, he ended up needing to stop wrestling entirely because of his health.
As far as my health, doctors never found out why my liver enzymes were so high (and remain high today). They ran all the typical tests, and all the results came back clean. Once I had passed all the tests, my medical paperwork finally went through, and WWE pushed through my contract on October 2, 2009, almost ten years to the day of when I had my first match.