Daniel Bryan Talks Why He’s Not Cleared to Wrestle

Daniel Bryan was a guest on the Edge & Christian Pod of Awesome and goddamn, was that ever a source of information again. It’s a long interview that I would recommend you listen to, so I’m not going to quote it word for word, but I’ve gone from my Shibata-level “God I hope Bryan never works again or he could die” to “Ohhh, now I get why you agreed to retire, was emotional after it, but want to wrestle anyway” because it feels like he was led on to a substantial degree.

After his last concussion, he went and got cleared by his own doctor. I think that’s common knowledge by this point. It wasn’t enough for WWE and Vince, so they sent him to a hand picked concussion specialist in Phoenix place and… They cleared him. Clearly something must be wrong according to WWE so they sent him to UCLA where they, say it with me, cleared him. Finally he gets sent to get some experimental things done, things that aren’t FDA approved like reflex and impact testing while hooked up to a brain scanner and they come back to him and say he has a lesion in a certain region on his brain. He calls Vince and he’s crying when he got off the phone thinking his career is done and the next week Vince calls him up and asks him to do the retirement speech which he didn’t want to do, but was convinced in the end it was for the best.

Fast forward a little and after that dies down, one of the doctors that clears him calls him up and asks why he retired. He tells the doctor that they found a lesion on his brain, but the doctor tells him that in medical terminology that doesn’t mean what it normally means. Bryan thinks it means he has a cut on his brain, but the doctor says a lesion just means “something” is there. The doctor looks at his report and all it says is that a certain region of his brain was slower than expected to react so they wrote it as a lesion. The stupid thing here is that the region of his brain was slow compared to MMA fighters and football players who usually use that region of their brain, not slow compared to a normal goddamn person. They didn’t have a baseline for how fast the reflex in that part of his brain used to be, so how can they make that call? He went to the Joe Namath institute to get more tests done and they said his brain is no different from a college football player. He has had some concussions, but he is not at risk of brain damage. He has had even more testing done and they say tha with the time he has had out of wrestling, his brain looks like someone who has never even played a contact sports. Bryan says he is sad looking back because he feels he wasted the prime years of his career.

This is really messed up to me. Why did he have to jump through so many hoops? I really hope he does get into wrestling again now instead of fearing it. And good goddamn luck to him.