Bryan Danielson and Brie Bella shared insights into their young son Buddy’s growing love for professional wrestling and the complex considerations surrounding a potential future in the family business, during Danielson’s guest spot on “The Nikki & Brie Show.”
Brie initiated the topic, asking Bryan about his feelings seeing Buddy “so in love with wrestling,” adding, “He loves to watch it, he loves to wrestle, and he’s a little natural at his movements and his moves.” Danielson expressed mixed emotions: “Sometimes it makes like it’s so much fun, and then other times it’s really hard, because he jumps on my neck,” he shared. “And no matter how many times we tell him, ‘Hey, Daddy’s got a bad neck, please don’t jump on my neck,’ he just jumps on her neck, or on my neck.”
Despite the physical hazard, Danielson cherishes sharing wrestling with his son. “But it really brings me joy to see like, what he’s drawn to, just in life,” he expressed. He enjoys watching AEW together: “His favorite wrestler in AEW, is Bryan Keith, the bad apple… When the bad apple comes on screen, he’s like, ‘Ooh, daddy, the bad apple.’ It’s actually one of my one of my favorite things it right now is watching wrestling with bud, and him saying to me, ‘Daddy, who’s gonna win?’ And you know? And then I tell him who I think is gonna win… And then to see his reactions to certain people, and like, how much he loves different things.” Brie confirmed, “He loves watching the women too. Yeah, he loves women wrestling. Yeah, he does.”
When Brie posed the question, “What is it when he gets into it that you hope that your legacy has left for him?” Danielson immediately addressed the potential pitfalls. The benefit of having him as a dad, he acknowledged, is “it opens doors, right?” However, he quickly countered, “But then that also creates expectation… when you look at some of my friends who are second generation wrestlers there, there’s a lot of pressure right off the bat, yeah, if you’re, you know, if you’re ex, somebody’s son.”
His primary concern is Buddy’s motivation. “If he wants to wrestle, I want it to be, because he wants to wrestle,” Danielson stated emphatically. “Not because, ‘Oh, hey, I can make some cash being because of who my parents are.'” He contrasted this with his own start: “I left the night I graduated high school… started driving from Aberdeen, Washington to San Antonio, Texas… Go to wrestling school… Shawn Michaels… To be a wrestler.” He values the struggle: “There were a lot of doors that weren’t open to me, and I had to go and learn all these other things and explore these different paths… that journey was what made it incredible. And so I almost wouldn’t want to deny him that.” He cited William Regal’s son, Charlie Dempsey, as an example: “People fans didn’t even know his son was his son until relatively recently.”
Ultimately, Danielson’s focus is protective. “If he really wanted to do it… I would just, I just want to protect him,” he said. “You know, in those first stages of wrestling where you’re protecting from the expectations of other people.” Brie, while seeing Buddy’s aptitude (“I kind of look at him and I’m like, I feel like it’s his calling”), kept it in perspective: “But you know, that might just be a wild four and a half year old.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit Nikki & Brie Show with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
