Earlier this year, Daniel Bryan shocked the world by announcing his return to the wrestling ring. The former World heavyweight champion has had his ups and downs since he first laced up his boots at WrestleMania, but there’s no denying that Bryan hasn’t missed a step once he enters the ring.
On Booker T's Heated Conversations podcast, Bryan details the struggle he endured when he was retired:
"It was a real struggle for a long time," Bryan said.
"I think it's because I've been doing this for my entire adult life. I started wrestling when I was 18-years old. I think one of the things is that wrestling is how I dealt with things. So when bad things would happen in your life, whatever it is, like OK, I had this creative outlet that was wrestling. I never cared about how much money I made or anything like that. If something's kind of going wrong, that's OK. I get to use my creativity.
"One of the hard things especially about it when I had to retire was that my dad had passed away. Now the way that I relate to that, I just didn't properly know how to grieve. I'm sitting at home and my wife is on the road, and this is actually before I retired after my neck surgery, so I just really didn't have this outlet to release this kind of thing."
For some time, Daniel Bryan thought he would never wrestle again, or at least in WWE. Speculation about Bryan’s status with the WWE circulated and the former IC champion noted that those rumors were indeed true:
"100 percent true," Bryan continued.
"So I had just signed a contract before I had my last concussion which is when they put me up, but they hadn't signed their side of the contract. So this is when I started to get popular and all of that kind of stuff. They were like 'OK, we're going to give you a bigger contract' and all of that kind of stuff. Then they took that away. And this is how I relate to people that don't understand the passion that I have for wrestling because financially too it was a big setback. You [Booker T] know we only have so much time doing this, so there was that. But the big thing was that I wasn't able to do this thing that I was passionate about despite the fact that I had been cleared by multiple doctors. And these weren't my doctors. It's not like I went to some quack. These were doctors that WWE sent me to.
"The weirdest thing about it is I probably would've been satisfied with and accepted my retirement, if they hadn't sent me to be GM, because it was so soon after I retired. I had signed up for school. I had signed up for ASU, so I was doing all this different kinds of stuff. And I'm like, OK, I'm going to transition my life into more of a home life. But then they brought me back and it was only a couple months after they forced me to retire. I was sitting at ringside for a Dean Ambrose, AJ Styles match and I'm sitting there, I got a great reaction coming out, I'm sitting there watching the match and they're getting great reaction. I wasn't wrestling when AJ Styles got into WWE and I'm sitting there thinking 'what am I doing?' I should be in there. I shouldn't be sitting on the sidelines."
Bryan is scheduled to face The Miz at WWE Super Show-Down on October 6th in Australia, with the winner receiving a WWE championship match. To hear the entire interview with Bryan, listen to the episode of Heated Conversations below.