Daniel Bryan appeared on tonight’s WWE Off The Top Rope segment on ESPN with anchor Jonathan Coachman and talked about his Talking Smack confrontation with The Miz, concussion issues and other topics.
Bryan talked about going through depression after being forced to retire, not being able to compete but still being on WWE TV and more; you can read a few excerpts (transcripts courtesy of ESPN.com) and watch the interview below:
Daniel Bryan comments on dealing with not being an in-ring competitor on WWE TV:
“When I go out there, the whole arena is like, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ and then I just sit in a chair, and I just watch the match. And then I go home to Brie [Bella, his wife] and say, ‘I’m going to quit. I’m going to go wrestle somewhere.’ And then she talks me down off the ledge, and I’m just like, ‘OK.’ I’ve got to think about her, and we are trying to have a family and that sort of thing. But that part of it is tough.”
Bryan comments on if he feels he could wrestle again:
“If you were to ask me nine days out of 10, I would say, ‘Absolutely!’ I keep trying to convince people that I’m OK to wrestle, and I think that’s probably the hard part. A lot of times I’m trying to convince myself, too, that I can wrestle. It’s really hard, because the concussion issue is very subjective, and that’s the part that a lot of people don’t understand.”
“I was cleared by a lot of concussion specialists. There was one test that kind of flagged me, but then the more I learned about that test, the more I learned, ‘Hey, maybe that shouldn’t have stopped me.’
“There’s a lot more than meets the eye to this situation. I feel great, and I feel like every day that I can wrestle. I’m doing jiu-jitsu and kickboxing and stuff like that, and I feel 100 percent.”
Bryan says the Talking Smack segment with The Miz was not completely scripted and his anger was real, talks about how they’ll coexist going forward:
“I just knew that Miz was going to come up and we were going to banter back and forth. But Miz and I have known each other for a long time, and we really know how to get at each other’s nerves. I brought up the idea that he wrestled like a coward. He knows I don’t like the way he wrestles. I just don’t like it. It’s not my thing. And I called him out on that.”
“He knows that’s really pushing on a nerve. And calling me a coward for not doing it — which I kind of sometimes think of myself as a coward for not doing it — you know, it’s tough. Part of me wanted to punch him in the face, but I figured that probably wasn’t such a smart idea on live TV.”
