Daniel Bryan Speaks Out About His Retirement & A Possible Return

While appearing on Edge and Christian’s podcast, Daniel Bryan spoke in detail about his retirement and possibly wrestling again. You can check out the segment below and here is a recap courtesy of Reddit user Sweggeh:

So his story starts with the time of his last concussion. He gets cleared by his own doctors, but that isn’t enough for WWE.

So first WWE and Vince in particular force him to see their hand picked experts to get testing done on his brain. So they sent him to these doctors (that aren’t his own doctors which already cleared him), first of which was a concussion specialist in Phoenix. They cleared him.

That wasn’t enough for WWE, and he asked WWE what more they want him to do. He said he would go get a 3rd opinion. So he went to UCLA to get testing from a team of concussion specialists who had him run a lot of different tests. They cleared him.

He comes back to WWE, and yet again they say no you are not cleared to go, even though 3 independent institutions had already cleared him, 2 of which were doctors WWE chose.
So they send him to go get some experimental stuff done. Testing that isn’t even FDA approved. They do some kind of reflex or impact testing, so they hook stuff up to his brain and test that and whatever. So he does that, and they tell him he has a lesion in a certain region on his brain. So he calls Vince, and he tells him he has this lesion on his brain. He says he was crying when he got off the phone because his career was done. And the next week Vince calls him and tells him to come to RAW in Seattle and give a retirement speech. Initially he didn’t want to do it but he became convinced it was for the best.

Then after everything dies down, he gets a call from one of the doctors who originally cleared him and he asks him what happened that made him retire. He tells the doctor that they found a lesion on his brain. And then the doctor tells him that in medical terminology, a lesion does not mean what it usually means. Bryan thought it meant he had a cut on his brain, but the doctor says that in medical terminology, a lesion is a very vague term. It just means that something is there. Not necessarily a cut or anything like that.

Then that doctor looks at the report that said he had a lesion. And what he found was that Daniel’s brain reflexes in that region were slower than they expected. Thats why in the report they wrote it in as a lesion.

Now here is the really messed up part. That region of his brain had a slow reflex compared to MMA fighters and football players and athletes that they usually test at that facility. It did NOT have any reflex that is slower than what you would expect in a normal human being. And since Bryan is a performer and not really a sports person, obviously you would expect his reflex time to be closer to an average persons, not a high level sports athlete.

In addition to that, they didnt have a baseline for how fast the reflex in that part of his brain used to be. So they had no way of even knowing if there was actually any damage there, or if that was just the normal speed at which that region of his brain functioned.

He went to this Joe Namath institute to get more tests done and they said his brain is no different from a run of the mill college football player. He has had some concussions, but he is not a person at risk of brain damage.

He has had even more testing done and from certain tests they say that now, with the time he has had out of wrestling, and with continued work and treatment, his brain could look like someone who has never even played a contact sports. And he says he is sad looking back because he feels he wasted the prime years of his career.

As some people have mentioned, DB has said he is continuing to get healthy with his treatment and he has said categorically that if he ever found a problem that legitimately made it unsafe for him to wrestle, he would not do so.

Daniel Bryan has also said that he understands why WWE did what they did, implying he feels WWE were only doing what they thought what was best. If people are getting the idea from this that he is implying they purposely screwed him, I don’t think that is the case.