Daniel Bryan is looking at the difficult aspect of wrapping up his full-time WWE career.
On tonight's SmackDown, Daniel Bryan will go one-on-one with Roman Reigns for the Universal Championship and if he loses, he will be banished from SmackDown.
In recent months, Daniel Bryan has openly spoken about wrapping up the full-time portion of his career and even stated that he feels the WrestleMania main event he just participated in could be the last WrestleMania he ever participated in.
Speaking with TVLine, Daniel Bryan retrospectively looked at what he has left to accomplish in WWE and what he finds most difficult about walking away from a full-time wrestling career.
“I don’t even think in those terms. A lot of those things are 'make-believe' in our own minds. There was a time where I was like, 'Oh, I’d really like to do this…' and I never got any real sense of fulfillment or accomplishment from that. Obviously, I’m in a blessed place where I’m regularly on TV, I’m regularly in cool stories, I regularly get to be on pay-per-view matches. It’s different when you’re struggling to get on TV and pay-per-view matches. It’s a different ballgame. But I don’t have those goals or checklists.
“Part of the thing that I’m mostly interested in learning, and the hardest part about stepping away from full-time, is the idea of how much I still have to learn. I’ve been fortunate enough to sit in a lot of production meetings and I’ve learned a lot. Whenever you get deep into something, you start to uncover layers and the different aspects there are to putting on a wrestling show. I spent years trying to learn how to talk in front of people because I was never good at that. Now, it’s looking at camera angles and things like that. It’s interesting just to learn deeper and deeper about this thing that I love so much.”
In recent months, Daniel Bryan has helped on the SmackDown creative side of things and Big E had stated that Daniel Bryan was a big proponent of his singles push. Learn more here.
Fightful will have live coverage of Friday Night Smackdown beginning at 8 p.m. Eastern tonight.