By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
Insight With Chris Van Vliet with guest Bryan Danielson
Host: Chris Van Vliet
Podcast available via Podcasts.Apple.com
On making the switch to commentary: “It’s been interesting because I wasn’t anticipating being a commentator. So I was at home, and then they asked me to come in because Taz was getting shoulder surgery, and to come and help out a little bit. But traveling has been difficult for me. That’s one of the things I didn’t expect, because I’ve traveled my entire adult life. It’s no big deal. But with my neck as bad as it is, all of a sudden, it was almost eight or nine months where I was only traveling maybe once a month. I’d go to the pay-per-views and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, the weekly travel has been a lot, and it’s just been made sleeping hard and that sort of thing.”
On his neck injury: “So I have degeneration from C1 all the way down to T2. [Your entire neck?] Yeah. So it’s like I’m on the cusp of needing surgery. It’s this weird line. I’d like to avoid surgery as much as possible. So, my last neck surgery, I never fully recovered from it in the sense of getting back the strength gains and the mobility and all that sort of thing. So I’d really like to avoid it as much as possible, especially because my son is a menace. I had a broken arm, you have a big cast, I’m in a sling. I was like, ‘Buddy, you can’t touch daddy’s arm.’ And he’s jumping on my arm and all this kind of stuff. And I’m just like, Oh no, if I get neck surgery, it’s not like you wear a neck brace, not like you walk around in a neck brace. He’s pure boy, right? No matter how many times Brie tells him, and I tell him, but not as forcefully as Brie does, but Brie is like, ‘Get off of daddy’s neck!’ And he just can’t not do it. It’s just like a boy thing. Our daughter is super good about it, but he’s all boy.”
On if he has retired: “I hate the R word because I was forced to retire before. So I never consider myself fully retired. This is how I think, and this is how a lot of wrestlers think, ‘Well, I think I could do this in this situation, if needed, or called upon…’ or whatever it is. But effectively for the Bryan Danielson that I used to be, yeah, that guy doesn’t exist anymore.”
On being The Miz’s rookie in NXT: “I thought it was great, because what you want in WWE is some sort of story. So this is one of the things that I had a hard time with. When they signed me, I had longer hair and a little bit more of a wilder look. I liked that look, but they said, ‘Okay, you’re gonna do this thing with The Miz. You’re gonna be a rookie.’ So I really without anybody asking me to, and maybe that’s one of the things that I should have said was, ‘Hey, how much are we going to play [into this?]’ The reality was they didn’t put much thought into that show at all. So it was like, looking back on it, it’s like that was their main priority was they’d film Smackdown on Tuesdays. Their main priority was Smackdown, then they just threw NXT together before that.
“But I thought this is, and it was, a huge opportunity to be on TV. So what I did was cut my hair more to look more generic. I tried to look as generic as possible with the idea… and me and Miz were collaborating on this stuff. Miz was great about pitching ideas to the writers and all that kind of stuff about all these things of, okay, I can’t learn wrestling from Miz, but he’s going to teach me to be a Superstar, and me being frustrated like, ‘That’s not important. The only thing that’s important is the wrestling.’ That kind of thing that people think that I actually think, or that people think he would actually think, this could be a really good TV dynamic, and we both thought that, and then none of it ever happened. So then I just looked like a nerd for no reason. Not to say that I’m not a nerd. I’m just saying that I went out of my way to look less.”
On a possible Brie Bella return: “Yeah, only in certain contexts. She doesn’t want to come back and do a singles run or anything like that. If she comes back, she would want to do it with Nicole. But I think there’s something in her too, and I can appreciate this, because our kids see her as just a mom, just a mom, as if that isn’t the hardest job in the world. Part of her, I think, has a desire to have the kids see her in that light, too. I didn’t realize it until later, how amazing my mom was, in the sense of, okay, we didn’t have any money. She was a single mom. She was working two jobs, going to college. I don’t know if it was my junior year or senior year of high school. She was going on a walk with a friend, and she just collapsed from exhaustion. She had to be taken to the hospital, to the emergency room. She was somebody who probably needed food stamps, but we lived in a small town, she didn’t want to [use them], she was ashamed. She didn’t want to go to the grocery store and pay with food stamps, all these sorts of things.
“My mom is also an inspiration to me. She went to college, got her master’s degree in psychology, and ended up working with underprivileged kids. She worked with the Native Americans. She worked in the prison. She got attacked in a prison, being in a room with an inmate. You think about that, and you think of like, okay, I grew up knowing I was loved. Which is like, okay, Brie and I can fail at everything else in this life, but if we let our kids know that they’re loved. But all of that to say, I don’t understand how my mom did it. Now I’m in amazement. Because financially, we’re doing okay. We didn’t have any of the financial stressors that my mom had, and she still made a lot of time for us, and like I said, made us know that we were loved. With Brie, this whole mom thing, one day our kids will realize what a great mom she is. But it’s fun to see when they don’t appreciate it. So it’s like, I was FaceTiming her and the kids this morning, and then just our son being as wild as he is, and then our daughter, and part of me, but you never say that as a parent. You never say, “Do you realize how much I’m doing for you?’”