Daniel Bryan was the first guest on Jimmy Jacobs‘ podcast “Jimmy Jacobs Doesn’t Know” and Jacobs has an in-depth talk with his longtime friend about several topics. The first part focused on Bryan’s initial fandom of wrestling and how being the most popular wrestler in the world back in 2014 was so surreal, yet so bittersweet as he went through several major life moments the days after WrestleMania 30, including the passing of his father, Connor “The Crusher” Michalek, and the Ultimate Warrior. Quotes from the first part of the interview are below:
(Transcription credit should go to @DominicDeAngelo at WrestleZone)
On what his WrestleMania 30 moment meant to him then and what does it mean to him now?:
It’s a moment, you know what I mean? I think it’s interesting cause lives are a collection of moments and I have so many good and bad memories tied to that. This is the hard thing about WrestleMania 30 for me. I actually think more fondly of this past WrestleMania, then I will probably ever think of WrestleMania 30 and that’s because it’s too closely tied to my dad’s death and Conor [Michalek]’s death. It was this really weird thing because okay, there’s these three people who are intertwined in this WrestleMania 30 moment to me. More, four people really. My wife, Dana Warrior and Steve, Connor’s dad [gives background on Connor Michalek].
[On Connor] He was just like, the most awesome kid. This was at the time when I wasn’t the most popular guy in the world and he just liked this little weirdo who was a tag team partner with Kane, and after that he was just attached to me this whole time. And so I had kind of grown close with Connor and his family and WWE had grown closer with Connor and his family. And then I was a huge Ultimate Warrior fan when I was a kid and so the night before WrestleMania 30, the Ultimate Warrior finally comes back to WWE and he gets put in the Hall of Fame. Okay, cool. That’s an awesome moment. WrestleMania 30 happens, I win the championship. It’s this amazing thing, my sister’s there, two of my nieces are there, Connor is there and I see him when I’m done and I give him a big hug and all that kind of stuff. That next Friday my wife and I get married. On the Sunday we leave for our honeymoon, we go to Hawaii. The first time I’ve ever been to Hawaii. That was the end of the greatest two weeks of my life.
We get back to our home on Saturday, we fly out Sunday, on Monday I get a call from my sister freaking out saying that my dad’s wife had called her and saying that like they had to rush him to the hospital. “I don’t know what’s happening, I don’t know what’s happening.” Turns out my dad had died. He had a heart attack at 57. Very unexpected. I’m in Baltimore for RAW that night, the same place where I won my first World Heavyweight Championship for WWE and I’m just a mess.
So my dad was an alcoholic which is why I don’t drink. And a lot of people when you talk to them about that, that doesn’t define my relationship with my dad, but when I was writing my book and I had a ghost writer and stuff and he would ask me about my dad. And we delved into the alcohol topic a lot because it fascinates people because I’ve never drank in my life because of this thing so you end up talking about it, but that’s not how I think of my dad. You know what I mean? He was more like me than anybody else that I know and I really lost something there and I didn’t know how to handle it, right? So then my dad dies on the Monday, I fly back to Aberdeen, WA to see him one last time on the Tuesday before they cremate him. And on the Wednesday—oh, I’m sorry I missed out on the fact that the Ultimate Warrior died several days after that WrestleMania. And then Connor died on the Wednesday. So it was just like these three things. And so then we have my dad’s funeral and I have to speak at my dad’s funeral and you know anybody who had to speak at their parent’s funeral when it’s an unexpected death like that is very, very tough and then I’ve always dealt with hard things in my life through wrestling. Like wrestling is a creative process for me. That’s how I deal with my problems, right? It’s like okay, some people deal with it in other ways, I start think about wrestling and okay that helps me escape a little bit, but that also helps me as I’m thinking about it, I helped do other things. Well then my neck was getting so bad. At WrestleMania 30 my neck was so bad, like I was having shooting pains down my arms, like all that kind of stuff.
I have a 2010 Honda Fit, it doesn’t have automatic locks so I have to manually unlock it each time and so it got to the point where I couldn’t unlock my car door and that’s when they said, “Listen if you don’t get surgery now, you’re going to risk permanent damage.” And so I had to get surgery and then I’m home by myself for eight to nine months cause my wife is on the road and I just had no way of just dealing with that. So to me that whole time period is marked by joy and death and loss and just this, I don’t know, it’s almost like an empty feeling, you know?
On his biggest regret in regards to his WrestleMania 30 main event moment:
The worst part about WrestleMania 30 [the event] itself, was that my wife didn’t get to come to the ring, right? Like she was in Gorilla, like I was going to marry her. That was a Sunday. I was going to marry her that Friday and she was in Gorilla waiting for me. I had pulled my sister in and one of my nieces and –
JACOBS: She didn’t come in the ring, afterwards?
BRYAN: She wanted to, and she asked, “Should I go down? Should I go down?” And they said, “No, no, no, no, no, don’t go down!” And they told her not to go down. Now I’m not somebody who relives life through pictures or anything like that, but one of my favorite pictures of me and my sister and my niece is that WrestleMania 30 thing, cause the three of us are in the ring and it’s really funny because that niece, it’s my oldest niece, her name is Hayden, and when she opened her suitcase the next day, there was some of the confetti and she opened it up and she was like, “Oh mommy, look! This confetti is from Uncle Bryan’s little party with his friends!” And so it’s like, to me, if you were to ask me, what did we do in those matches, I don’t even remember.
To me, the moments are hugging Connor, seeing my mom and my sister and my nieces there, seeing Brie and Regal and all these people that I know and I love in the back and they’re so happy for me. It’s interesting, seeing that gave me more emotion than the actual thing and the actual fan base and all that kind of stuff. It’s just crazy and like I said, my biggest regret is that I didn’t get to celebrate in that moment, with the confetti coming down with my wife.
More transcriptions from this interview to come, but you can listen to Jacobs’ entire chat with Bryan below:
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