SATURDAY, APRIL 5, 2014—5:11 P.M.
The lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel is starting to fill up with Superstars and Legends in evening wear as they prepare to head to the 2014 WWE Hall of Fame Ceremony. Several floors above, Daniel Bryan is slipping on his suit jacket and wrestling with his feelings about his tie. It’s the color, really. To Bryan, it’s a little too much on the purple side. To Brie, it’s the perfect shade of blue for her fiancé tonight. (Hint: She bought it.) Mid-debate, the stunning Bella slides on her stiletto heels and convinces the “Yes!” Man to say just that to the neckwear. What’s more important to Bryan is that tonight he will watch his childhood favorite join an exclusive grouping in the Hall.
“Other than WrestleMania itself, the thing I’m looking forward to the most is Ultimate Warrior’s Hall of Fame speech,” says Bryan of ’Mania week.
A late Saturday night arrival in New Orleans adds a guest to “Braniel’s” Hall of Fame crew: Daniel Bryan’s mom, Betty. A social worker from Aberdeen, Washington, the “Yes!” mom has traveled to the Big Easy for the definitive Daniel Bryan bout on the Grandest Stage of Them All. Tonight, she gets a glimpse into what may one day be in store for her son, which is enshrinement in WWE’s Hall of Fame. Overwhelmed and humbled by the pleasantries of those she encounters, Betty beams as she joins Bryan through crowds of Superstars, Legends, and more. The mom and son (in a decidedly indigo tie), plus Brie and her family, head toward the bus heading to the Smoothie King Center for a momentous night in the WWE Universe.
Regardless of the circumstances, winning the World Heavyweight Championship was cool, just from an “I’ve been a wrestling fan my whole life, now look at this” perspective. I felt very fortunate because even though what we do is fiction and entertainment, standing out in front of thousands of people holding a giant championship that, in theory, signifies that you’re the Man, the whole thing is pretty amazing.
Regal was really happy for me, but also told me to use being the champion as a way to develop a better relationship with Vince. Being the driving force in stories for SmackDown, it was important to know exactly what Vince wanted from me and to start getting comfortable going into Vince’s office to get any questions I had answered.
Things may have been different when Vince was younger and on the road more with the talent, but nowadays, it’s intimidating for the younger guys to go in and talk to him. I always imagined him sitting in his office as if it were some faraway castle tower, annoyed with any peons such as me that would knock on the door and want to talk. But that was just my mind going into fantasyland. The first time I knocked on his door after I became champion, he seemed genuinely happy to see me.
Once we started talking, I asked him what he wanted from me as World Heavyweight Champion. I had been a good guy since I started with WWE, but as a character, the way I cashed in the Money in the Bank contract was cheap and a little slimy, and lent itself to turning bad. I just needed to know which way he wanted me to take it.
Likely because me winning the title hadn’t been the original plan, Vince wasn’t sure, but his direction was to let my character take shape organically; we’d allow the fan reaction to determine which direction I would go in. The one thing he did want was for me to be the happiest guy in the world as champion; every time I went out, I had to treat it as if I had won the lottery. “In this instance, there’s no such thing as too over-the-top,” he said. You don’t have to tell me twice.
That’s how and why I started using a very simple yet emphatic word: Yes. I used the term as a way to show how happy I was to be World Heavyweight Champion, an idea I actually got from one of my favorite MMA fighters, Diego Sanchez. As he walked down to the Octagon for his fights, he’d hammer down his fist and with a serious, intense face, he’d yell “YES!” Apparently, for him it was about positivity, but I saw it as great showmanship and almost covertly annoying.
I started by occasionally “Yes!”-ing during my entrance, and then after I’d win a match, I’d scream “Yes!” again. From there it evolved rapidly, to the point where I was “Yes!”-ing the entire way down the ramp in celebration of being champion. I started pointing my ring fingers in the air as I did it, the gesture moving in sync with my yelling. I added a side trot in order to “Yes!” on the move. People started to see my overt enthusiasm as irritating. Also, I was put in a story where AJ Lee would valet me and I would be mean to her. It didn’t take long for me to turn into a smarmy little asshole the fans wanted to see get beat up by monsters like Big Show and Mark Henry.
For the first time, I was given opening promo segments and main events on SmackDown. Week by week, the better I did, the more trust Vince put in me to go out and carry the stories. I’m not sure if he thought I could pull it off at first, but every week I’d go in to talk to him, and every week he would say how pleased he was with my performances, giving me suggestions here and there, as well as tips on how to evolve as a WWE Superstar.
I turned into this very beatable champion, and I’m not sure people expected me to walk in to WrestleMania XXVIII with the title—an aspect I truly I liked about my character because it added drama to the matches. On the pay-per-view before WrestleMania, for example, I defended the championship inside the Elimination Chamber—a massive chain-link steel enclosure with glass pods containing opponents on each ring corner—against five other Superstars. The odds suggested any champion was in jeopardy, but especially me, given my beatable character. It came down to me and Santino Marella as the final two match participants, and even though Santino was predominantly a comedic character, people actually believed he could win the title. When he hit me with his signature move, the Cobra, a hilarious faux-ninja move where he pokes you with his hand closed outward like a duck, people went crazy and thought he was going to win it. If Daniel Bryan could do it, why couldn’t Santino Marella? I ending up beating him and retaining the title, and the closing minutes of that match with Santino were my favorite part of my World Heavyweight Championship run.
The first time I noticed the audience “Yes!”-ing with me was a SmackDown we were filming in Seattle shortly after that Elimination Chamber 2012 pay-per-view in February. Despite doing an untelevised backstage interview designed to get the people in attendance to boo—something along the lines of “I love the city of Seattle [yay!] but I moved away because I hate the people [boo!]”—the crowd still cheered me when I came out because I’m from the area. When I turned to my left, I saw a large row of people, each and every one of them holding up a homemade YES! sign. And as I got closer to the ring, they started “Yes!”-ing when I did. Then the whole section started doing it, then half the crowd. It was infectious. Initially I thought these Seattle fans would be the only people to do it, because I’m their hometown guy. But after that aired, I started seeing more and more pockets of people throwing their arms in the air and yelling “Yes!” I thought it would fizzle out as soon as I lost the title. Boy, was I wrong.
When Sheamus won the 2012 Royal Rumble, I was positive he and I would be paired up at WrestleMania. A year after getting bumped to the preshow match, we were both looking at the match not only as an opportunity for redemption but as a chance to steal the show. We didn’t care that John Cena was wrestling The Rock or that the Undertaker was taking on Triple H in a Hell in a Cell match. We were confident we would outperform them all and tear down the house. Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to tear down much of anything.
I first heard our match might be shorter than we expected from Chris Jericho. I had anticipated Sheamus and I would get at least fifteen or twenty minutes of wrestling time because we were in the World Heavyweight Championship match, a really good spot on the card. A couple of weeks before the show, however, Jericho came up and asked me if we were having a really short match. I told him I didn’t think so and explained that nobody had talked to me about time yet. Chris knows a lot. He regularly goes in and talks to Vince and is constantly in the writers’ room working on what he’s doing, and while doing so, he keeps his eyes and ears open. Chris told me he saw a match listing with times on it, and saw that we were only scheduled for eight minutes. I was blown away. With entrances down the long ramp and a championship introduction, that equated to about a three-minute match!
Arn Anderson was the producer for our ’Mania match, so I immediately went to him and asked him if he knew anything about what kind of time we’d have. He said he didn’t know for sure, but he thought roughly twenty-five to thirty minutes, which, after entrances, would be right about what I figured. A week or so later, Arn found out the true plan and pulled me aside. He looked beside himself as he told me the bad news: AJ and I would kiss, distracting me, then Sheamus and I would have a one-move match at WrestleMania XXVIII.
I was instantly pissed off, and so was Sheamus. I started thinking it was a rib, or maybe just something to amuse Vince: Every year, put Bryan and Sheamus on WrestleMania, then pull the rug out from under them at the last minute. I thought they were doing it to fuck with us.
Sometimes my narcissistic side gets the better of me and I think everyone’s out to get me. Looking back, my thinking almost seems foolish. I’m sure they weren’t doing it to mess with us, or to rib us, or to amuse Vince. I’m sure they thought it was a good idea, a memorable way to coronate Sheamus as the new World Heavyweight Champion, and a great way to kick off WrestleMania. Arn didn’t seem to like it any more than Sheamus or I did, but he also tried to look at the positive, given we couldn’t change it. Arn thought it might end up working well for me, a “chickenshit champion.” He saw the quick finish as giving my character something to gripe about before demanding a rematch. It would keep me in the main event picture another month, and another month in main events would put more equity in my character. Try as he might, it was hard to change my negative slant on the whole situation. Prolonging my main event run another month paled in comparison to the opportunity to have a killer WrestleMania match with a live audience of nearly eighty thousand people. Also, I didn’t know if I’d ever be in a position to have a match like this again—a championship match against a friend, where we knew we’d have a great match. I needed to take my WrestleMania moment when I could get it.
I was bitter, and so was Sheamus, but he was also worried. He felt like there might be a backlash from the fans for the outcome and that they might turn on him. We had the main program on SmackDown for the six weeks leading into WrestleMania, and it felt like fans were looking forward to the match. Wrestling in 2012 was different than it was in 1988, when Ultimate Warrior ran out and did essentially the same thing to the Honky Tonk Man. Wrestling had changed, and what wrestling fans wanted had changed. If they’re looking forward to a match, sure, they want their guy to win. But rarely do they want to see it happen in under a minute.
The title bout that Sunday, April 1, in Sun Life Stadium is kind of a blur to me. In fact, the whole day is kind of a blur. The only thing I really remember is going down the ramp. I knew I wasn’t doing anything in the match, so I put everything into “Yes!”-ing my way down the long ramp—and looked really good doing it with my new robe and gear. (A quick side note: I had this awesome gear made for WrestleMania in anticipation of my big match. When the gear was delivered to me the week before the show, I put it on and it looked great—by far the nicest-looking gear I’d ever had. I’ve never worn it since, and not because of the bad memories, but because there were hard sequins on the kickpads. Had Sheamus and I actually had a match with me wearing those kickpads, every kick would have cut him to shreds.)
Everything went as planned: the kiss, then I turned around to get kicked in the face and pinned. Eighteen seconds was all it took. And it sounded like the crowd liked it, as they cheered because they couldn’t believe what they’d just seen. Despite the audience’s apparent enjoyment, I was discouraged afterward and thought WWE treating me like this would make it difficult to rebound back into the main event. Shows what I know. In hindsight, if we’d gone out and had a really good fifteen-minute match, I’m sure people would have liked it, but in terms of my career, it would have never had the same impact of the eighteen-second loss.
It turned out I wasn’t the only one pissed about that eighteen-second loss. A bunch of guys came up to me backstage and said they couldn’t believe the match. The funniest was the Great Khali, whose English is sometimes hard to understand. It wasn’t this time. “Whuh happen, man? Thass bullshit, bruddah.”
More importantly, the fans were angry. The people who attend WrestleMania travel from all over the world, and they are pretty hardcore into wrestling. If they don’t like something, they’ll let you know. The rest of the show, fans would randomly break out into “Yes!” chants or “Daniel Bryan!” chants. I didn’t really notice because I wasn’t paying much attention to the rest of the show, but the following night, the chants were impossible to ignore.
The night after WrestleMania at Miami’s AmericanAirlines Arena, my only appearance on Raw was in a backstage interview with Matt Striker where I didn’t say anything. That was it. I was only on the screen for about fifteen seconds. Still, somehow it became Daniel Bryan night. The Rock had an interview in the opening segment of the show, and throughout the whole thing there were loud “Yes!” chants. The Rock acknowledged it, and for a split second, I thought he was going to use it and make it his own new thing. He’s so witty and quick on his feet that I’m sure he could have done it. But he didn’t. In fact, after the interview, on his way out he stopped and said to me, “Hey, man, the crowd is really hot for you out there.”
At first I didn’t quite understand what was going on with all the chants, and I assumed they would eventually die down. They didn’t. The longer the show went on, the more it happened, and when Sheamus—the new World Heavyweight Champion—came out, they booed him mercilessly. I felt bad for him, because it wasn’t his fault. “Daniel Bryan!” and “Yes!” rang out through the arena the entire night, even though I wasn’t on the show.
Immediately after Raw went off the air, I performed in an untelevised six-man tag match—Sheamus, Big Show, and Randy Orton against me, Cody Rhodes, and Kane—and people were very, very excited to see me. Each time I got in, they cheered and “Yes!”-ed with every kick I did. Anytime I got hit, they yelled, “No!” and they booed when I tagged out of the match. It was crazy. Since I’d been in WWE, never had I felt like I was the guy the entire arena wanted to see. The finish was Sheamus hitting me in the face with his boot again and pinning me, and the crowd went crazy booing.
Sheamus, Randy, and Big Show semi-rushed to the back, and so did Cody and Kane, but I stayed out there. The crowd was giving me a great reception as I got to my feet, so I asked for a microphone, which the ringside production guy seemed hesitant to give to me, though he eventually did. I thanked the crowd for turning what had been the worst night of my career into something memorable and special. In a less important but mildly amusing addition to this story, I had been bothering the WWE merchandise guys on the road for about two months to make me a “Yes!” shirt. They tried to push it through, but someone in corporate thought it would never sell. Halfway through Raw, one of them told me if the chanting kept up, I had a lot better chance of getting the shirt made. Before they even told me they were going to make the shirt, I announced to the live crowd in my speech that thanks to them I was also getting a new shirt made. The “Yes!” shirts were available for sale the very next week.
Not only that, but most importantly, the crowd’s reaction changed the direction WWE was headed. They really had no plan for what they were going to do with me, and they were going to put Sheamus in a story with Alberto Del Rio. But WWE couldn’t ignore the people, and they extended my story with Sheamus for another month, keeping me in the main event picture.
I had a great time working with Sheamus. We did the two-week European tour shortly after WrestleMania, and we main-evented every show. The crowd reactions were a trip. Some nights they’d be intensely behind Sheamus; other nights the crowds were more like the one at Raw after ’Mania and were firmly behind me. Either way, we had great matches every night, and every night we did something different based on the audience’s response.
That month, we did another World Heavyweight Championship match at the Extreme Rules pay-per-view, and we were given the time that we thought we should have had at WrestleMania. It was a two-out-of-three-falls match in front of a hot Chicago crowd, and though it was overshadowed by the excellent Brock Lesnar–John Cena main event, it’s still one of my favorite matches in WWE.
After the Sheamus story played out, I wasn’t sure what was next. I was in a weird position where I was a very popular bad guy. The fans kept cheering for me and chanting “Yes!” which made it a challenge for whichever good guy I was wrestling. That’s why when WWE moved me into a story with CM Punk, I thought it was perfect.
I first met Punk in 2002 at a sixteen-man tournament called the Jersey J Cup. I’d heard about him and Colt Cabana because the two of them were tearing up the Midwest independent scene, but had yet to meet either of them. At the show, we exchanged a passing hello, but there were several different locker rooms, and Punk was changing in a different one than I was, so we never really got a chance to chat. All of a sudden, after his second-round match with Reckless Youth, I saw both Punk and Cabana rushing out of the building in the middle of the show. It turned out that Punk had fractured his skull during the match and had to head to the hospital immediately. Fractured skulls, kids: That’s one of the many reasons you don’t try this stuff at home.
Punk later became a very important part of Ring of Honor, too. The company was in the doldrums after a scandal in 2004 involving owner Rob Feinstein, but a three-match rivalry between Punk and Samoa Joe that created great DVD sales almost single-handedly lifted ROH out of its funk. Punk and I did a lot of the same shows, but for some reason we didn’t wrestle very much on the independents, though when we did, it was fun. We once wrestled for Full Impact Pro in Florida for nearly forty-five minutes in front of fewer than thirty people. That’s why it was all the more special when we got to face each other several times on pay-per-view for the WWE Championship.
CM Punk wasn’t just the perfect opponent because we’d known each other for so long. The hardcore fans sometimes turn against people they perceive to be pushed too hard by WWE, like what happened with Sheamus after WrestleMania. But Punk wasn’t one of WWE’s chosen ones. He had climbed his way to the top by consistently being the most entertaining person on the show with both his wrestling and his interviews. The same type of fans who were cheering for me liked cheering for him even more. When you’re trying to be a bad guy, you absolutely need that.
At the time, Punk was in a strange position as well. Most of the top bad guys on the show were positioned to face John Cena, like Brock Lesnar was. Then, after John beat them, somewhere down the line, they’d wrestle Punk after they’d already lost momentum. Even though I’d lost to Sheamus, I was getting stronger and stronger reactions from the crowd and seemed to be coming in on an upswing, so I was a good fit and even better opponent for Punk at the time. WWE was comfortable putting us in championship matches on the pay-per-views but didn’t think we could carry the main event position. Our first title match, for example, was at Over the Limit 2012; we had a great match, but the show was main-evented by John Cena versus John Laurinaitis.
We were, however, entrusted with being the main event at nontelevised live events—the first of which actually turned into a disaster. Prior to the match, I addressed the crowd and did my best to get them to boo me, but my promo just ended up getting goofy. Punk did a goofy bit after that, and though none of it was bad, our main event match was a street fight. We made the mistake of taking comedy too far, and it was impossible for people to get into the violence of this match. Unfortunately, we were never able to get them back. Afterward, John Cena asked me what I thought of my match with Punk, and I admitted we didn’t get the reaction we needed. He responded, “That’s right. That was not a main event.” And he was a hundred percent correct. The crowd came to be entertained, and they enjoyed some of the comedic elements, but it took them away from the purpose of the match. I’ve always been confident in my ability to regain control of matches when they seem to be flying off the handle, but I’d let it go too far, and that was not a good thing, especially as a relatively new main event player.
Because our match was so bad, the next evening, Punk and I moved to the spot before intermission and Cena’s match slid into the main event instead. Punk was furious. He knew we didn’t have a good match, but also knew we could fix it. He fought for us to be in the main event, and he got it. We didn’t do any goofing around that night and focused exclusively on tearing down the house, and we did. From then on, he and I were in the main event at the live events.
My last match with Punk was a no-disqualification WWE Championship match at the Money in the Bank 2012 pay-per-view event. We had what I thought was a really good match, but that’s not what I remember most about it. When I found out about how short my WrestleMania match was going to be a few months earlier, I anticipated a need to change my character. I wanted to become unhinged by the loss and move toward a more crazy, militant, revolutionary type—like a crazy Che Guevara thing. So I talked to my friend Jill Thompson, a comic artist, and she created this awesome gear that would match this mentality. It included a new logo with a “DB” placed within an anarchy symbol and ripped into the back of a green military jacket. Maroon paint came out of those rips and out of torn kickpads, creating an image of the gear bleeding. I loved it, but since the crowd changed everything, it never felt like the right moment to bust out the new gear. I thought a no-disqualification match might be the right moment.
I knew people within WWE wouldn’t like the gear. It was too much of a departure from what I’d been wearing before. So I hid the jacket all day and wore shorts over my trunks until right before I went out. (Keep in mind, this is about as rebellious as I get, wearing unapproved gear.) I passed through the curtain into the arena, and when I got to the ring, referee Chad Patton leaned in and told me to take the jacket off. I wasn’t quite sure I heard him correctly, so I asked, “What?” Chad told me Vince himself had directed him to tell me, “Take that jacket off!” I did as I was told. Afterward, I felt bad because our producer Dean Malenko was the one who really got yelled at for the whole thing, and he didn’t even know about it. And, unfortunately, I’ve never been able to wear the gear since.
Bryan’s sole night in the “bleeding” logo ring jacket, 2012
That was the last televised match I ever had against Punk. You can never say never, but I suspect I’ll never get to wrestle him again. For some reason, I always thought that the two of us would someday have a WrestleMania match against each other, and it would be a modern version of the Bret Hart–Shawn Michaels ’Mania match that I loved when I was in high school. Some things just aren’t meant to be.
Around the time the “Yes!” chants really started taking off, Bri and I decided to move in together, which stemmed from Bri and Nicole departing WWE in April of 2012. Their contracts were expiring, and they became frustrated when the writers told them they had run out of story ideas for twins. Bri and Nicole wanted to wrestle and be in good stories, not just be eye candy. I encouraged Bri to do what she needed to do to make her happy, but her leaving WWE put our relationship in a bit of a pickle. Since she was living in New York City and I was living in Las Vegas, we either had to accept that we would barely see each other, in which case our relationship would slowly dissipate, or we could take the next step and move in together. We, obviously, chose the latter and moved to Mission Bay in San Diego in a little apartment a couple of blocks away from the beach.
Initially it was very hard on me not seeing Bri on the road. I had gotten used to her being there with me in hotels and on long drives. She always makes a point to go to fun restaurants and do touristy stuff when she has a chance—stuff that makes life on the road a little bit more enjoyable. It was hard to convince the guys to do that kind of thing, and eventually I gave up.
That said, coming home to Bri in San Diego was wonderful. She’s a bit obsessive when it comes to cleanliness, so our place was always spotless. She’s a great cook, so there was always good, healthy food when I came home. With her doing all the housework, my days off became a true joy; we’d ride bikes together on the beach, go to the farmers’ markets, and really, truly relax. You need that when you’re on the road as much as we are. Most importantly, it allowed us to spend more time together in a nonwork environment, which made our relationship healthier.