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Daniel Bryan has not wrestled since WWE’s last European Tour. That was seven months ago. The clock is ticking on WWE clearing Bryan to wrestle again with his concussion situation, and he’s becoming increasingly frustrated, which he talked about in interviews with the local media in India during his recent tour.
“My wife (Brie Bella) is a wrestler, so she is on the ring, and I am just sitting, it is difficult,” Bryan told The Statesman publication in New Delhi. “When I am upset, when I am angry, wrestling was always there as an outlet. … You can call your mom and you can call your sister, but sometimes you just need a physical outlet. I don’t know how to cope with this situation.”
Bryan is continuing to “train really hard to be back to wrestling” while mixing in gardening to keep himself occupied. He noted that he wakes up in the morning thinking about wrestling because it’s how his brain works. It’s become difficult to only be able to think about wrestling the past seven months.
The other side of Bryan’s frustration is feeling like he let down the fans who kept pushing for him to be featured more on WWE TV, leading to his WWE Title victory at WrestleMania 30 last year.
“I think the frustrating part for me with the injuries is feeling like I’ve almost let the fans down, because they’re the ones who pushed me to the super high level,” Bryan told Sportskeeda.com. “They were the ones who, without them, I would’ve never gotten here. They were the ones who wanted it so bad, so it’s almost like, I feel like I let them down.”
Bryan had to wait seven months to get back in the ring after his previous major neck injury in 2014. He built to a ladder match victory at WM31 in 2015, then the concussion ended another run.
Since then, Bryan acknowledged the rise of Seth Rollins, Kevin Owens, and other former independent stand-outs who he is itching to get in the ring with. It’s another source of frustration.
Bryan also acknowledged the issue of WWE talent being over-exposed with three hours of Raw and two hours of Smackdown. Interestingly, he thinks the wrestlers who are handling it the best are the former independent wrestlers.
“We have a three-hour Raw and two hour Smackdown, so guys are wrestling long matches on both shows. And who’re going to stand out on that kind of platform? Guys who know how to be different in the ring, who can go out there and wrestle a 10, 12, 15-minute match twice a week, and not have the fans get bored by it,” Bryan told Sportskeeda.
“Because realistically, if you take wrestlers from the previous generations, and if they had wrestled as much on television as we have, they would be over-exposed. But then, you won’t like them as much. That’s one of the biggest battles our generation faces; the previous generations’s battle was getting exposure, trying to get exposure. Now our battle is over-exposure, and those who can handle over-exposure the best are the ones who are popular, and incidentally, people who handle over exposure are the ones who’ve spent years wrestling in all the different places. So they know how to interact with people in different settings, and that kind of stuff. So I think it is natural that the independent stars are the people coming up and doing very well.”
[ FYI: WWE returns to India in mid-January for two live shows in New Delhi. ]
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