SmackDown Live General Manager Daniel Bryan recently spoke to PhillyVoice.com to promote tonight’s episode of SmackDown at the Wells Fargo Center and more. You can check out the full interview here along with some highlights below.
CM Punk’s fight at UFC 203: “I did watch the fight. Punk and I have never been best friends or anything like that. I don’t even think I have his number in my phone, but I really support him in that fight. I was really hoping he would win. The reality is that even though he lost, he was dead on in his promo afterwards. It’s the whole thing with me and him, and guys like Sami Zayn and Neville even trying to wrestle. Right? It’s just this idea of you have this dream that everybody tells you that you can’t do, but you just keep going after it. Sometimes, you’re not successful, right? He wasn’t “successful” in the fight. But he fought a professional fight in UFC. That’s crazy! You know? It’s crazy and it’s awesome and he may have lost and he may have gotten beat up, but hey, he tried it. How many people would be afraid because of their ego to not even put themselves out there like that? I like to train jiu jitsu and I like to muay thai and the number of people who train all the time but won’t put themselves out there to even do like a tournament and nobody knows who they are. The ego part of you that says, ‘Well, if I go and I do it and I lose, what does that mean?’ Well, [Punk] went out and did it, right? He’s a huge public figure. I have the utmost respect for him trying to go do it.
“It’s hard, too. At that age, and I know at my age and how many injuries I have, just getting up out of bed every morning, you know, for the most part, I feel really good. But then to get up and go train with killers – that camp is a great camp. And so you go in there and train with great guys and getting beat up every day. It’s tough. That’s the job. The job is getting beat up every day. And right towards the fight, then you have to lose a bunch of weight. So, it’s like, ‘OK I get beat up every day, now go lose 15 pounds. Oh, just like that? Oh, OK.’”
WWE’s roster today compared to how it was when he debuted in 2010: “It’s interesting because WWE has evolved. I think part of that is Raw being three hours. You can’t have guys who don’t regularly put on really good matches. With a three-hour Raw, everybody has to wrestle more. If you’re just a decent wrestler, but you’re a really good interview guy, those guys in the past would be really protected, so they wouldn’t have to wrestle long matches all the time. Now Raw is three hours, so you have to wrestle two-segment matches nearly every week, and do a promo, and do this and that sort of thing. You have to have guys who are capable of doing it and making it still interesting every week. To me, that’s why you see a lot of the former independent guys doing really well. Like a guy like Kevin Owens. He’s a really good talker, he’s a really good personality, but he can also go out there and have great matches. That puts him in a good position to succeed there.
