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Though it's already been over a month since Bryan Danielson's final match as a full-time professional wrestler, getting choked out with a plastic bag by Jon Moxley and the Death Riders at the end of AEW WrestleDream, the “American Dragon” is still dealing with his new reality.
How is it going? Well, considering he still hasn't had neck surgery, probably not that great physically, but on an intellectual level, it's been tough, too, as he noted in an appearance on his wife's The Brie & Nikki Show.
“That's one of the things I haven't found something for, for that part of my brain, to use that creative part of my brain and coming up with things,” Danielson explained via Fightful. “I still, it's been over a month now since my last match, and I still wake up in the middle of the night and think of wrestling things. ‘This is not useful. I wish I would have thought of this a few years ago.' That's been the part that's hard, but I anticipated it.”
Gosh, if that doesn't just break your heart as a professional wrestling fan, I don't know what does.
Fortunately, there's a silver lining in Danielson's plight in the form of Tony Khan, whom the “American Dragon” worked with closely in AEW before calling it a full-time career. If Danielson has some ideas he wants to share, it's safe to assume TK would be willing to lesson, signing him to a new creative contract in the pursuit of keeping one of the best minds in the business's ideas on television for the foreseeable future.
Bryan Danielson is still coming to terms with his future
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Elsewhere during his appearance with Brie and Nikki on their namesake show, Danielson broke down how he's feeling a month after his final match in AEW.
“I was very cautious to not say ‘retirement,' except for the match where if I lost (against Swerve), I would retire,” Danielson told reporters via Fightful. “After that, it was all, ‘the end of my full-time wrestling career.' We don't know what's going to happen with my neck, but it honestly feels like I have a bobblehead.”
Touching on the “R” word a little further, Danielson noted that while his in-ring career may be over on a full-time basis, wrestlers never actually retire, even when their promotion attempts to force it, like his almost ending in WWE.
“To me, at the end of the day, I realized this with my last retirement, which was forced. I didn't want to retire, but they wouldn't let me wrestle again,” Danielson noted. “What I found is people are sad for a bit. Then, everybody just moves on and it doesn't matter. The hardest part for it is probably for the person who does it.”
Will fans eventually see Danielson back in a ring, for AEW, Prestige, or just some lockups in a ring in his backyard? Yes, it's safe to say that day will eventually come, especially considering Tony Khan has routinely called the “American Dragon” his best friend. When that day comes, however, remains to be seen, as neck surgery is no joke.
