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Today’s installment takes a look at the absurd friendship between Daniel Bryan and Kane. Once in a while, it is good to take a step back and enjoy a read which leaves a smile on your face. This is what we intend to do with today’s story.

These stories come from Daniel Bryan’s highly recommended autobiography, Yes!: My Improbable Journey to the Main Event of WrestleMania. If you haven’t grabbed a copy of this book already, we highly suggest you do as it is loaded with innocent and funny musings like the ones you’ll read today.

Kane and Daniel Bryan on “Exposing their Taints” in the Sun

“Kane’s real name is Glenn, and I’ll refer to him as such from now on because calling him Kane now feels really weird. Glenn is someone who is almost universally respected in the locker room. He debuted as the Undertaker ’s evil younger brother Kane in 1997, though he wrestled previously in WWE as the “fake” Diesel doppelganger of the original character portrayed by Kevin Nash, and Isaac Yankem even before that. I graduated from high school in 1999, so it was my junior year when Kane first appeared in WWE, and a veteran like Glenn could be intimidating to young new guys coming in, like me. He’s also relatively quiet except with his closer friends, so I didn’t get to know him very well until we started working together. Once we did, though, I was able to see a whole different side to him.

The two of us are a pretty absurd duo, and the first time we really started joking around was over a pretty absurd premise. I was reading a book by Mantak Chia called Awaken Healing Energy Through the Tao: The Taoist Secret of Circulating Internal Power. It’s a long story, but I don’t sleep well, and at the time I really lacked energy. I could feel it catching up to me in my body, so I was reading this book that talked about taking your sexual energy up your chakras and then back down, circulating the energy to help you heal and be more vibrant. It’s a very Eastern way of thinking. In order for it to work, you have to stop ejaculating, which, as you can imagine, makes most people stop reading right away. But not me; I plowed through the information, some of it interesting and some of it ridiculous. I was showing the book to someone in the locker room when Glenn came in, and we got him involved in the discussion. At first, he was put off by the conversation entirely, but soon he started to enjoy the ridiculousness of it. He grabbed the book and started thumbing through it, then immediately stopped at a little drawing of a naked man lying down and a sun, along with an arrow that went from the sun to the man’s perineum (otherwise known as the “taint”). The suggestion was essentially that to increase your sexual energy and, therefore, overall energy, you should expose your perineum to the sun. It was the most outlandish idea Glenn had heard in a long time, but for some reason, he couldn’t stop talking about it. And neither could I. The first bond I formed with this towering man who had participated in some of the most twisted scenes in WWE history was based on the idea of us tanning our taints.

Kane gets “Downtowned” by Daniel Bryan

Another time, in Spokane, Washington, there was a separate coach’s office in the locker room. As the senior member of the locker room, Glenn claimed it and had his own little space. That day, for whatever reason, Cesaro and I had gotten the Petula Clark song “Downtown” stuck in our heads. While Glenn was sitting in his office, I blasted the song on my phone, tossed it into the office, and immediately closed the door. I hid underneath the window and slowly peeked my head up to watch as he picked up the phone, stared at it for a long time, confused, then looked up to see my stupid grin peering at him through the window. He shook his head in disgust. I had “Downtowned” him.

After our tag match on the show, I was the only person in the locker room. Earlier, I’d been ribbing Cesaro by stealing and hiding his chair every time he left the room, which would force him to go find a new chair. I decided to use all of those chairs to form a wall over six feet high in the middle of Glenn’s office, creating an enormous barrier that separated his bags from the entrance. I turned off the lights to the office, slid my phone back in with “Downtown” blaring on repeat, and waited.

When Glenn got back to the dressing room, he looked a little confused when he saw that the lights were off. As he stepped through the door and turned the lights on, he saw the work I had done. This whole thing could have gone very wrong; Glenn was a veteran, and someone of his status isn’t necessarily a person you should rib. But I didn’t think about that before I started. When Glenn saw the chair wall, I saw a flash of anger cross his face. He dropped his head, looked at the phone (still playing “Downtown”), and then just shook his head. I popped out with a big “I gotcha, Glenn!” thinking I was the funniest man alive. At first, he didn’t think it was funny at all, but when he realized how much effort it took for me to build all the chairs so high, he came around and laughed at the ridiculousness of my hard work. Although it could have easily gone the other way, that was the moment when our bond became closer, from tag partners to friends.”

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