Daniel Bryan has been promoting his new book “Yes!: My Improbable Journey to the Main Event of WrestleMania” and spoke with The Mirror newspaper here in the UK.
Bryan gave a length interview while promoting the book and spoke about a number of topics including why he decided to write a book, main eventing WrestleMania and his fans.
If you want to read the interview in full, you can do so by clicking on this link. Below are some of the highlights from the interview:
Why he decided to write a book in the first place:
“[Laughs] To be honest I wasn’t even thinking about writing a book and WWE approached me with the idea. I had just had neck surgery, they asked me to do it and I was kind of like ‘okay, it seems like perfect timing’. It was May of last year, it was literally either the week before I knew I was having neck surgery, or it was the week after I had my neck surgery. It was one of those two times! I had a lot on my mind.”
On having such a strong connection with the fans:
“I’m not sure. We’ve entered this new phase in wrestling, where the fans acknowledge – and because WWE has done it for so many years – that what WWE is, is entertainment. Long gone are the days of you getting into trouble for saying that wrestling isn’t real. I prefer to use the term wrestling fiction. And so there is this acknowledgement that what they are watching is fiction. So fans don’t get as invested as far as like, for example if someone is really beating someone really hard. It’s not the same as it was in the 1980s when the Four Horsemen were beating on Dusty Rhodes. It’s a different vibe from the crowd. But there are still very real things that the fans catch on to. They think ‘this particular guy we like, and he entertains us, so we want to see him succeed, but the fiction is not allowing him to succeed’. And they think ‘it’s not that he’s not succeeding because he isn’t good enough to succeed, he’s not succeeding because whoever has decided to write the story, has written him out of this story’.
There is this realisation that by cheering they may have the power to change that. I think last year specifically it was almost the case that the fans didn’t know, they didn’t know if they could change it. But it’s very powerful, this idea is powerful. Imagine if you could watch a movie and as you’re watching the movie you realise that the supporting character is actually your favourite character, and you want him to be the guy who saves the day. And, somehow, by yelling at your TV screen or something like that, you could actually change how the movie pans out. That would be incredible! In wrestling you can.”
If in his book he talks about his time on the independent scene:
“Yes actually there is a big piece, a substantial portion written about that particular match when I wrestled Nigel in Liverpool to unify the Ring of Honor World Championship and Pure Championship. I talk about that match specifically a lot. I talk about my time in Dublin. I spent a lot of time over in England wrestling at Butlins holiday camps for Brian Dixon and All Star Wrestling. I talk about my first night ever in England, when I almost watched a man get thrown out of a building!”
Daniel Bryan’s book is available to purchase today. If you want to read the rest of the interview, click this link
