Bryan Danielson has recalled breaking down and crying upon being given the news that he was able to return to the ring.
On February 8th 2016, Bryan Danielson was forced to retire from in-ring competition. His career which had taken him all over the world had also come at an incredible physical cost and after a series of concussion related issues, he was informed that he would never wrestle again.
However, the story had a happy ending for Danielson as on March 20th 2018, after a tremendous amount of testing and more medical evaluations than he could count, he was given the all-clear to return.
After the news became public, Danielson appeared on that day’s SmackDown and confirmed that he would be resuming his in-ring career.
During an appearance at Starrcast V, on a special edition of The Sessions with Renee Paquette, Danielson recalled the moment when he was told he had been cleared. The American Dragon revealed that he cried when he was given the news.
“Oh it was wild. I was just doing a signing in the Middle East somewhere, the Bahrain Comic Con is where I was. I flew to Pittsburgh and got cleared by Dr. Maroon, which actually made me cry. Flew that night, no flew the next morning from Pittsburgh to Texas. I slept in, then I got 3,000 text messages from people ‘Where are you? You should be at the building.’ I was like oh, ok. And then they kind of let me say whatever I wanted.
I was very lucky in that a lot of the time I would collaborate with writers, I wasn’t just given a script and told ‘Hey, say this.’ And that was really nice, really fun.”
While Danielson was out of the ring he appeared on talk show Talking Smack alongside Paquette. The show quickly earned a cult following largely due to it’s unscripted nature, a huge contrast to regular WWE programming. While discussing this period of his career at Starrcast, the now AEW star admitted that he was so frustrated with his lot with WWE at the time that he was actively trying to get fired by being as outrageous as possible.
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