After three years on the sidelines and two years since his memorable retirement
speech, the WWE has cleared Bryan Danielson to return to wrestle.
Danielson, 36, was almost surely going to be wrestling by the end of the year.
After being cleared by numerous doctors, if WWE had not cleared him, he would
have likely worked for New Japan, ROH, CMLL and other promotions starting in
October.
Danielson was pretty well told he would be cleared after an examination in
Pittsburgh on the evening of 3/19 by Dr. Joseph Maroon, the Medical Director for
the WWE. Maroon, who has been categorized, and unfairly, as the villain in this
story to some fans (while equally unfairly Danielson has been portrayed by some
as ignoring medical advice to insist on continuing his career), made the ruling
in 2015 that Danielson would not be medically cleared to continue wrestling.
Maroon made the ruling after learning that Danielson had suffered two seizures,
that were thought to be concussion related, suffered around 2012, along with a
history of perhaps more than 20 concussions dating back to the start of his
career in 1999.
He has not had a seizure since. However, it wasn't until 2015 that he told Dr.
Javier Cardenas, one of the first doctors he saw after a concussion shortly
after WrestleMania that year, that he admitted to it. Maroon was also told about
it shortly after.
Maroon then made the call that he be retired.
Danielson worked with other doctors over the next year and had been cleared to
return, but Maroon was adamant on the subject. There was some speculation that
outside factors could have played a part in this, including a concussion lawsuit
filed by a number of ex-wrestlers against WWE making the company leery of taking
a risk on a wrestler with a history like his. There was also the portrayal of
Maroon as a villain in the 2015 movie "Concussion." The movie portrayed Maroon
as the NFL defending doctor who tried to deny the conclusions in Dr. Bennett
Omalu's research on CTE, its link to football and the long-term effects of
concussions.
Still, Danielson has always made it clear that he believes Maroon was acting in
what he believed was Danielson's own best interest, but he disagreed with his
conclusions, even more as more doctors cleared him.
During this period, he asked to be released from his contract and work
elsewhere. WWE refused to do so. Worse, WWE had frozen his contract during the
period he had been out of action, meaning that, essentially, the contract was
never ending. He continued to get paid his downside guarantee but he was not
able to wrestle anywhere. There was, at the time, seemingly no light at the end
of the tunnel. He even contemplated different attempts to get fired, which,
incidentally, probably wouldn't have worked.
But as long as he wasn't performing on television, he couldn't go elsewhere, for
years, perhaps ever. For many, people would see this as a lucrative deal making
easy money for a long time, without having to do much except some public
relations and media work. For him, it was the opposite.
He also had experience in 2014 with a neck injury, which was feared to also end
his career. He had been experiencing neck problems and a weakness in strength in
one arm from a stinger in a match with Randy Orton in 2013. But he was on fire,
as the crowd got behind him and the "Yes" chants. At times, crowds went so wild
for him that they took over shows and got in the way of planned angles.
He was scheduled to face Sheamus in an undercard match at that year's
WrestleMania. But two unrelated things happened, one being that C.M. Punk, who
was miserable, quit the promotion. The other was that Dave Bautista, who was
brought in to be the babyface superstar at WrestleMania, to win the Royal Rumble
and face Orton for the title, wasn't getting over as a face.
Plans were changed for a two-match storyline, where Daniel Bryan would at first
beat HHH, who was Punk's scheduled opponent, and if he did so, would be added to
the title match, making it a three-way. Bryan ended the night with two big wins
and one of the biggest championship win reactions in modern wrestling history at
the Superdome in New Orleans.
But the neck injury got worse, and he underwent surgery a few months later. It
wasn't considered serious, and they did an angle where he was bullied and
refused to vacate the title, since he wasn't expected to miss much time. But his
strength didn't return after the surgery. In a move that screwed up the planned
storyline, he actually then had to actually vacate the title. Still, as popular
as he was, the long-term plan when he won the title was to feud with Kane, and
then lose in convincing fashion to Brock Lesnar, who would then be pushed as
unstoppable, until losing at WrestleMania in 2015 to Roman Reigns.
The role played by John Cena in that one-sided match at the 2014 SummerSlam show
was the role planned for Bryan.
When almost all hope was lost, he found a doctor using a new technique who was
able to provide treatment where he gained most, but not all of his hand strength
back and returned to action. He was kept somewhat strong, but even with his
popularity, he was not booked as a top guy.
Worse, the live crowd was furious in the 2015 Royal Rumble when he didn't win,
just as they were in the 2014 Rumble when he didn't even enter. In 2014, he was
only scheduled for a match with Bray Wyatt and never advertised for the Rumble,
but fans somehow convinced themselves he was going to win as a surprise entrant,
even when it was clear and reported Batista was winning.
In 2015, he was kept in for a short period of time, and eliminated long before
Reigns came out. The crowd that year turned on Reigns' winning and it's been an
uphill battle getting Reigns cheered ever since, as it became the cool thing at
TV and PPV especially, but even at house shows, to boo Reigns. The decision was
then made to put Reigns against Bryan for the Mania title shot, in which Reigns
would win, and Bryan, the most well liked wrestler on the roster by the fans,
would then endorse him as the top guy. But that didn't work either, and
eventually, one week before the show, Vince McMahon decided to delay the Reigns
coronation, the big win over Lesnar, for a short period of time. That short
period of time has since extended to three years.
He was in a six-man ladder match at the 2015 Mania in Santa Clara, CA, where he
won the IC title. Two days later, he was banged up badly in a match with Sheamus
in Fresno at the Smackdown TV tapings.
Danielson has said that it was one week later, in Dallas, where he suffered the
concussion that, until recently, looked to have ended his career. The entire
situation was a mess because WWE was under the gun on the concussion issue and
clearly mishandled everything.
Danielson, right after suffering the concussion, went on the European tour and
clearly was not right. He worked seven straight nights on the tour, all in
six-man tags. Within a few days, it was clear things weren't good and in his
last few matches he was limited to doing 30 second spots for the finish and only
taking one bump, for his busaiku knee finisher. His wife, Brianna (Brie Bella),
was in particular adamant that he was not himself and something was wrong. We
were told at the time from a few people that he was working after a concussion.
However, after reporting that, WWE was adamant that he had not suffered a
concussion.
After an April 14, 2015, match in London's O2 Arena, where Cena & Bryan beat
Tyson Kidd & Cesaro in a dark match at the end of a television taping, a match
where he did almost nothing, he was sent home from the tour. He has never done a
match since, and shortly after, Maroon ruled that he could never wrestle in WWE
again.
In early 2016, in an attempt to get more evidence to clear him, Danielson took a
new brain test from Evoke Neuroscience, Inc, in New York. His finding out about
the test was based on a series of flukes, largely related to an off-hand remark
by Kevin Kelly while announcing the January 5, 2016 New Year's Dash show, where
Matt Striker made a joke in reference to the IQ of Mark Briscoe, only to have
Kelly note that they had done IQ testing of the ROH roster years earlier, and
Mark Briscoe had the third highest score, behind only Bryan Danielson and Nigel
McGuinness.
The key is that people with high IQs who may have some brain damage can often
create new pathways around the injured area and appear to have no damage. There
was new testing purported to be able to isolate a damaged part of the brain, and
had already been used by the military and in some MMA circles to determine when
it was healthy to return to sparring after suffering a knockout.
In theory, the test would find out if his not showing any signs of his multitude
of career concussions affecting his thinking ability was a sign of that, or that
nothing was wrong and his brain was fine.
He took the test on January 21, 2016, in New York. The results, which he got
several days later, were exactly the opposite of what he had hoped for. A small
acute lesion was found in the temporoparietal region of his brain, where the
temporal and parietal lobes meet, was found. The belief is that is what caused
the seizures.
He reported the results to the WWE, and it only made WWE stronger in its
position that he would never wrestle for them again. As coincidence would have
it, the February 7, 2016 Raw was held in Seattle. Vince McMahon called Danielson
a few days before the show and, since he would never wrestle again, asked him to
do a retirement speech, feeling Seattle is the closest thing to his home town.
He at first didn't want to, but his wife convinced him it was the best thing. In
Seattle, his mother and all of his family could come and see his final moment in
the ring.
The 25-minute speech combined humor, sadness, unbridled joy, and nearly every
other emotion possible. It was a longer, and really a better version of the most
famous sports equivalent, the July 4, 1939 speech by Lou Gehrig in his final
appearance at Yankee Stadium. Gehrig was one of the greatest baseball players of
all-time, whose career had ended two months earlier after being diagnosed with a
disease that would end his life two years later, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis,
a term virtually nobody to this day knows. Instead, it's been known for almost
80 years as Lou Gehrig Disease, or ALS for short.
"For the past two weeks, you have been reading about the bad break I got," said
Gehrig. "Yet today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this
Earth."
The last line was immortalized forever in an award-winning movie, and is still
among the most famous lines in American cultural history.
One could argue that the Daniel Bryan interview that closed Raw was the greatest
segment in the 25 year history of the show.
The afternoon before he gave the speech, one of the doctors he had seen, when
finding out about what was going to happen on Raw, said, "Oh my God. This was
too soon."
Another doctor he had seen Dr. Javier Cardenas, told Danielson shortly after the
speech the same thing.
Danielson went into a depression. WWE had scheduled a series of events in major
cities, Madison Square Garden, the U.K. tour, likely something at WrestleMania,
for him to make appearances for a Daniel Bryan retirement tour. He didn't go to
any of them.
The thing people don't realize is that he had made a pact with himself, and his
wife, that he loved wrestling, wanted to wrestle badly, but if his brain was in
a condition that wrestling wasn't the right thing, he would move on with his
life.
A second test by Evoke Neuroscience confirmed the same thing the first did. At
first he seemed to accept that wrestling was over.
He had a great career. He was one of the best, some would say the best in-ring
performer of the prior decade plus. He had also achieved a level of success and
popularity that nobody ever could have expected, given his size and look. As it
turned out, historically, people like he, Rey Mysterio and C.M. Punk were among
the people who changed the idea of what a star wrestler had to look like. Vince
McMahon and Paul Levesque had been around for decades, and they knew what a star
looked like, and what a great wrestler inside the ring meant. He was fired once
years earlier because, as good as he was, it was perceived he had no star
qualities. When he did become a star all over the world, he was seen more a guy
who could give you a good match on the roster, but could never headline. Then
when he got over, he was seen as a guy who could be a real player, but not a
tippy top guy. Then he was actually made champion, but it was portrayed as a
fluke, with the idea he was delusional in that he really believed he was a real
champion and could beat massive men like The Big Show and Mark Henry, while the
audience was supposed to be laughing at the silliness of his believing in his
fluke win. Except the audience wasn't laughing.
Some of it was luck and timing. He saw something UFC fighter Diego Sanchez did
when he was chanting "Yes" as he would go to the ring, copied it, and somehow it
caught on far beyond anything anyone could expect. It got bigger than wrestling
and moved on to the sports world. He became almost like a symbol for
championship runs by the San Francisco Giants and Seattle Seahawks title winning
teams, something WWE didn't even push because in their view, he didn't look like
a guy who could be a star outside the bubble of the hardcore wrestling fans and
WWE saved that stuff for their top guy--John Cena, and later, Roman Reigns.
Then Punk walked out, which had nothing to do with him, and Batista didn't get
over, which to a degree did because fans resented that anyone but him be in that
year's WrestleMania title match.
But without the ability to connect with the fans on interviews in a genuine way,
and without the respect of the audience to his in-ring ability, the "Yes" chant
would have made him only a temporary footnote, Scotty 2 Hotty making the crowd
explode in every match doing the worm or Godfather or Enzo Amore's popular ring
entrances.
Maroon del orto marioneta culiá wn 
