THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 2014—3:48 P.M.
In between workout sets, the well-maned athlete swigs from the ÖKO water bottle pressed up against his beard. He’s been toting it all week long—and all 2014, actually—because he stopped using plastic bottles in January as his New Year’s resolution. It appears to be catching on, as you can sense from his fellow Superstars, who’re seen carrying their own hard plastic bottles around New Orleans. A water container emblazoned with the WrestleMania logo is even part of the roster’s hotel-arrival gift bags.
The trend is a small win for a man looking for the biggest victory of his life at WrestleMania.
“I tend to believe that wrestlers can be a particularly wasteful breed,” he concedes, “but I think it’s the nature of the volume of travel we do. We’ve just gotten used to throwing away so much stuff. We go through so many bottles of water in this company. I don’t know that I’ve influenced my fellow Superstars, though I do think I made a contribution with the ÖKO water bottles.”
He adds, “People look at global problems and they seem so incredibly vast. The idea behind the water bottle is that it’s a small thing that I can do, that I can change about myself. You can make little changes, and those little changes become habits, and those habits may transfer to other people.”
In early 2012, Bryan was nominated for and ultimately honored by being named PETA’s Most Animal-Friendly Athlete. He’s had animals around him throughout his entire life—dogs Millie, Mikey, Asparagus, and now Josie, as well as cats Mitten and Chowder—and Bryan sees a vital connection between all animals and the planet, as part of a greater responsibility he acknowledges.
“Protecting wildlife is important, and so is not making everything so homogenized to the point where wildlife and nature can’t exist,” Bryan asserts. “I feel like, as humans, if we are the keystone species of our planet, we should do our best to keep it alive.”
These progressive statements are not what you’d expect to hear midworkout from a professional wrestler with the grizzliest facial hair in the entire facility.
People are always asking me about my beard, so I figure I might as well address it. I never intended to grow a beard; it just kind of happened. Growing up in Aberdeen is like growing up in a sea of beards. A huge percentage of men work outside or in the mills around town, and it’s cold and rainy a good part of the year. Beards help keep your face warm, so most of the men keep at least a short one going.
My dad almost always had a beard. There were times when I’d see him clean shaven, and it would just look weird, as if he had miraculously gone back to childhood. I tried growing a beard several times in my late teens, but I am not especially gifted in the realm of facial hair, and for the most part, attempts at growing facial hair just made me look silly. Despite the length of my beard today, it’s never been overly thick; beard density is measured in follicles per square inch, and mine are relatively low.
The first time I started growing a big beard was in 2004. I had just come back from Japan and happened to have left my razor in a hotel room. Since a nice razor was around $10 and I am very frugal, I decided I’d hold off on getting one until I absolutely needed it. I went on the next Japan tour a couple of weeks later, still without shaving. I was about to shave before the first show when Jushin Liger, one of the best lightweight-style wrestlers in history, told me he liked the short beard. He said it made me look older and tougher. I would have been an idiot if I went and cut my beard right after that.
I tend to go overboard with some things, and not shaving became one of those things. I went six months without using a razor, and my beard became much longer than it had ever been. Shaving my head added to my refreshed look as well. In June 2005, while I was in England, I finally decided to shave it. One of the factors was that my sister’s wedding was coming up and I wanted to look presentable for it. Another reason was that in England, I still wore my American Dragon mask, and the beard made the whole thing look pretty ridiculous. The final straw was when we were out at a local bar, where a fifty-plus-year-old, heavyset English woman came up to me and said in a thick accent, “Your beard, it looks like me minge.” “Minge” is an English term for “vagina.” I couldn’t get the image out of my head, and I shaved the next day.
My current beard grew in much the same way. I started by keeping a little stubble, and then I let it grow a little longer to about an inch in length. Shortly after Kane and I formed Team Hell No, I just stopped trimming entirely, and it grew to be pretty long. At that point, I stopped trimming the hair on my head as well, and nobody even noticed at first because everyone was distracted by how thick my beard was getting. A lot of times when you’re in WWE, you have to ask for permission to change your look. This particular change in my appearance was so gradual that nobody really noticed until, all of a sudden, there I stood with long hair and this big beard.
Admittedly, sometimes having a substantial beard can present unique challenges. This one time, I was traveling out of Canada, and as I went through security, the TSA agent asked me to lift my chin up. He then combed his fingers through my beard, as if he was checking for something inside of it, which I thought was really odd. I get a lot of protein shake caught in the beard, and when I’m grappling or doing jiu-jitsu, my beard hair gets all over the mat. Still, I just let it grow. I shampoo and condition it. Those are pretty much “Daniel Bryan’s secrets to having a good beard.”