— Prior to the Smackdown tapings last night, Daniel Bryan spoke to the Kansas City Pitch prior. Below are the highlights:
Shaving His Beard: “I don’t know if I could shave my beard right now if I wanted to. We’re filming Smackdown tonight. Imagine if I just showed up to the arena tonight clean-shaven, how mad everyone would be. [Laughs.] It’s no longer something that I can control myself. I have to accept that this is what I am.”
Separating His Personal and Professional Lives:: “It does feel like I live my life for the public as opposed to myself, which is very different from how I lived my life before I came to WWE. Before, I would wrestle all over the world, but then I could go back to my little house in Aberdeen, Washington, and just be me, just be a normal human, and nobody recognized me. I didn’t have to live up to any sort of public persona. Now, even going to the grocery store, people will come up to you, and they expect you to be this character that they’ve seen on TV, whether it’s from Total Divas or wrestling. And the truth is, I’m neither. I’m just this normal dude.”
The “YES!” Chants: It’s so bizarre. It feels like it’s not even real. It feels like it’s not my life. It feels like I am a character watching my life unfold, and I’m walking down and looking at all of these people and I’m doing the motion myself, but I’m also looking at them going, ‘What are these people doing? Why are they doing it with me?’ Sometimes you get that moment of complete escapism, where it’s almost like I’m looking down on myself in this arena as all this is going on, going, ‘What did I do to deserve something as awesome as this?'”
