Daniel Bryan Accepted Retirement Before WWE Return

In an interview with Booker T’s Heated Conversations podcast (via SportsKeeda), Daniel Bryan revealed that he had accepted his retirement from wrestling before he was brought back by WWE. Here are highlights:

On returning to WWE: “It’s also because I had just signed a contract before I had my last concussion but they hadn’t signed their side of the contract yet, so this when I had finally started to get popular and all that kind of stuffand they were like, we’re going to give you a bigger contract but then they took that away. It was a big step financially so there was that but the big thing was that I wasn’t able to do this thing that I was passionate about despite being cleared by all these doctors.”

On almost accepting retirement: “The weirdest thing about it is I probably would have been satisfied and just like accepted my retirement if they hadn’t brought me back as GM because it was so soon after I had retired and I had signed up for school, I had signed up for ASU, I was doing a permaculture design course. I was doing all this different kind of stuff trying to transition my life into more of a homelife but then they brought me back and it was only a couple of months after I was forced to retire. I’m sitting at ringide for a Dean Ambrose/AJ Styles match and I’m sitting there watching the match and I wasn’t wrestling when AJ got brought into WWE and I was just thinking, ‘what am I doing I should be in there?'”