Bryan Danielson is the Reason I Love Pro-Wrestling

Coming in as a brand new wrestling fan, it was difficult to know where to start. The Undertaker is what hooked me on the business, but by 2013 he wasn’t around very often, so I looked to the most recent WrestleMania – ‘Mania 29 – in which Team Hell No successfully defended the tag titles against Dolph Ziggler and Big E Langston.

I thought Team Hell No was a fun act, but I didn’t yet know what “great wrestling” really was, so Bryan didn’t stand out to me compared to the people who were bigger stars at the time (though even then, I knew Cena vs Rock 2 sucked). So, when I fast-forwarded to Summerslam, I was surprised to see him suddenly challenging Cena for the world title, but the video package told a good story and I watched the match with an open mind.

Safe to say, it didn’t take long before I “got” Daniel Bryan. He was the best wrestler in the world and the eternally lovable underdog, and it was even better when he won! And then… and then…

The way that show ended, ripping Bryan’s moment away from him before he could even enjoy it, took the wind out of my sails a bit, but the angle was engaging and set the stage for what was to come, even if WWE management never wanted any of it to happen.

The Yes! Movement

Even though I didn’t have to experience it in real time like everyone else, it was really disappointing to see how Bryan’s quest for the world title was handled after Summerslam, and looking into that frustration in the internet wrestling community (IWC) is how I started to learn the ins and outs of wrestling from the real-life business perspective, which added another layer of enjoyment into my wrestling fandom.

The fervor around Daniel Bryan in late 2013/early 2014 was infectious and rightfully so. The fans shouting so loudly for so long about wanting Bryan to succeed was an incredible thing, and it made me feel like I was immediately a part of something upon beginning to watch the product on a weekly basis. Daniel Bryan as world champion is what we wanted, and we would keep booing Batista until we got it, and in doing so we changed the main event of WrestleMania, because how could you not see that this is the guy?

"Here I stand, unbroken, with these people behind me!" Come on, those are the words of a hero.

WrestleMania 30

WrestleMania 30 was a complicated night for me. On the one hand, The Undertaker’s WrestleMania undefeated streak – the very reason I became interested in pro-wrestling at all – had a sad ending, but on the other, Daniel Bryan’s quest for the WWE Championship – the thing that made me stay and watch every week – had an extremely happy ending.

His opening match with Triple H was the best Bryan match I had seen up until that point, and it was such a cathartic moment when he won in the main event. I may have only joined the ride part-way through, but by this point, I’d gone back and learned more of pro wrestling’s history, and I understood just how big of a deal it was for a smaller guy like Bryan to reach the mountaintop

It was where I started to analyze the storytelling of pro-wrestling on a deeper level, interrogating how the complete merging of a fictional universe with a real-life business allows for stories that draw powerful emotions out of me like almost nothing else I’ve ever experienced.

It’s a shame this happy moment couldn’t last.

The First Retirement

I’m not going to spend long on this because I want this to be a celebratory piece, but it was a heartbreaking moment to see Bryan have to vacate the world title he’d only just won, spend eight months on the shelf, have a big return, only to get injured again a few months later. Bryan’s retirement speech was a rough night, but I can now stand here in 2024 and look back with a smile, knowing it wasn’t truly the end.

The Return

When, after three years of fighting tooth and nail to get just about every doctor in the country to treat him, Bryan came out and announced he was cleared to return to the ring, I almost burst out crying. Then I actually did cry when he gave his return promo.

“If you fight for your dreams, your dreams will fight for you,” is the most invigorating and inspirational quote I’ve ever heard in my life. It sounds like it’s straight out of a cheesy Disney film, but it means so much coming out of the mouth of a man who really did spend three years fighting with everything he had for the dreams that were cruelly snatched away from him.

It didn’t matter that his return match was some lame affair where he teamed with sweaty Shane O’Mac, it was just nice to see him doing what he loved again.

The Planet’s Champion

After his return, there was no way Bryan wasn’t going to win the WWE Championship at least one more time. It was an easy decision, and WWE could’ve taken the easy route. WWE could’ve had Bryan win the title in a triumphant moment, have a great babyface run, and I would’ve lapped it up, but instead, it surprised us with something new and interesting.

Bryan once again proved that there is nothing in this business that he can’t do, as despite being the eternal underdog and the people’s hero, he won the WWE Champions by turning heel in the process, hoofing AJ Styles in the balls and beating him to a pulp. Going into this match, there was no way this man could ever make us boo him, but somehow he managed it by reminding us that we’re all killing our planet.

It was a difficult role to pull off, but Bryan became the best kind of heel – the heel who’s 100% right but is an absolute dick about it. I don’t want to get too into it, but I’m entirely in agreement with his message about how we’re destroying the earth and climate change is slowly killing us, but every time he talked about it he was just such an unbelievable prick.

Every week was a new highlight from him, whether he was ranting against the most meaty American burger you’ve ever seen, or replacing the leather and metal WWE Championship with a sustainable (and beautiful) alternative made of wood, lapis, and hemp.

Survivor Series 2018

While this isn’t all that important a part of the overall story, I had to mention it as, against all odds, Daniel Bryan vs Brock Lesnar at Survivor Series 2018 is one of my favorite matches of all time.

I’m far from the first person to espouse its genius, but the way it used Brock’s suplex-spamming style – which is usually super dull – to its advantage as Bryan scarily sold every one with this unsettling stillness, harkening back to the neck issues that almost cost him his career. It drags on for what feels like forever until a chance referee-bump and kick to the dick sends everything into overdrive.

It was a magical moment where even the most cynical of wrestling fans were able to forget the reality that there was no way Bryan would beat Brock and just wholeheartedly believe that Brock Lesnar was about to tap out to the Yes Lock. It was a heart-stopping thrill ride of a match that I love to rewatch.

KofiMania

I’d honestly argue that KofiMania may not have happened without Daniel Bryan as the villain, because he truly was perfect for the role. Just a few years ago Bryan was the one being held down by WWE management and denied the opportunities that the fans were begging for him to get, and yet here he was labeling Kofi Kingston a “B plus player” and trying to stop him from getting his moment of glory.

Plus, there’s the fact that Bryan was the best opponent to get the most out of Kofi’s in-ring style. Without Bryan’s input, the Smackdown gauntlet match that lightning-charged Kofi’s momentum might not have been good enough to get the fans behind him, which turned out to be one of the best stories of the last decade.

That starts to become a theme from here on too. After having so much of his own glory, Bryan seemed to switch into this completely selfless mindset where he just wanted to see everyone else around him rise up and get the opportunities that he was denied for so many years – something you don’t often see in such an ego-driven business as pro-wrestling.

WrestleMania 37

Over the next couple of years Bryan would be a steady hand on the WWE roster. He’d always have good-to-great matches in various storylines, but he was no longer one of the primary focuses of the company, especially come 2020 when Roman Reigns reached his final form.

Now back as a babyface, Bryan was the perfect opponent for this new “Tribal Chief” version of Roman Reigns, in a way that Cody Rhodes would build off for WrestleMania 40.

We didn’t yet know that WrestleMania 37 would be Bryan’s last hurrah in WWE, but what a way to go out. The triple threat between him, Roman, and Edge is one of the underrated great WrestleMania main events and Bryan found a great role in the story. He was still the lovable underdog we’ve rooted for up until now, but here he had a bit more of an edge (no pun intended) to him, he felt more like a wiley veteran this time who didn’t mind being a little underhanded every now and then.

As expected, Roman stacked ‘em, pinned ‘em, then one month later Daniel Bryan’s WWE contract expired and he was gone…but not for long.

All Out 2021

To get this out of the way, I like both WWE and AEW. I’m not one of those weird angry people who violently despise one or the other, I watch and enjoy both on a weekly basis.

As soon as Bryan left WWE it was pretty obvious where he was going to end up, it was just a matter of when. AEW was the promised land for a wrestler like Bryan, the kind of promotion that was all too happy to just get out of the way and let awesome wrestlers do awesome wrestling, and there was a whole roster of new opponents for Bryan to face.

All Out 2021 is considered by many to be AEW’s finest hour, and that’s due in no small part to the finale of the show, which saw the surprise debut of the ever-popular Adam Cole, only for him to be immediately upstaged by the debut of the American Dragon, Bryan Danielson, and the dream match with Kenny Omega was set almost immediately.

The American Dragon

That’s pretty much the story of Danielson’s entire AEW run. He came in, had a five-star match with Omega, then had two more with Hangman Page, then another against Jon Moxley, and so on, and so on. It was exactly what we all wanted when he arrived in AEW, he just wrestled dream match after dream match as the company gave him more freedom than WWE did with his in-ring style.

Blackpool Combat Club

After his match with Mox, William Regal of all people showed up, and just like that, we had the wrestling super-group, Blackpool Combat Club. Bryan and Mox came together as a team and brought in Claudio Castagnoli and Wheeler Yuta for good measure.

It was the kind of faction we don’t see all too often in Western wrestling. Normally faction-mates are joined at the hip and are never involved in any stories without the entire faction being a part of it. BCC did plenty of that – their big feud with The Elite was especially great – but the sheer star power of everyone involved meant that it felt perfectly natural for Bryan to split off and do things on his own whenever a big match was on the table.

Dream Match Machine

This relationship with BCC allowed Bryan to go out and have…you guessed it, yet more incredible matches with dream opponents. Injuries would unfortunately sideline him here and there, but whenever he stepped in the ring it was a sight to behold. Once again all I can do is sit here and list the all-time great matches he had against the likes of Kazuchika Okada, Zack Sabre Jr, MJF, and Ricky Starks.

Often these matches were just sold on the promise of “this’ll be a banger” with not much in the way of a story during the build-up, yet Bryan would always go out of his way to inject a compelling story once the bell rang. Bryan just has this innate quality to drag you into something and make you care, even if you didn’t before the match started. The way he paces his bouts is masterful, constantly feeling like he’s seconds away from collapsing in a heap and never being able to walk again, yet always managing to eke out just a little more willpower to win.

He’s not the only wrestler who is good at this, of course, but when Danielson does it there’s an extra special something. We all know he’s one of the best wrestlers in the world, and yet every time he wrestles he manages to make you believe that his opponent could snap him half like it was nothing, and make you relieved and overjoyed when he comes out on top.

Will Ospreay

In late 2023, Danielson announced that in one year’s time, when his daughter turns seven, he would retire as a full-time pro-wrestler, which meant that we had one year to get every dream match we’d ever wanted out of him, and there was one name on everyone’s lips, Will Ospreay.

Ospreay is to many, myself included, the next Bryan Danielson. He is the best in-ring worker in the world right now, with every single match he’s competed in since he joined AEW in early 2024 being must-watch. As the year goes on I like to track and rank my favorite matches of the year, and right now my top 10 is almost exclusively Ospreay matches.

To put it lightly, when this match was announced for AEW Dynasty in April 2024, the expectation was that this would be the greatest pro-wrestling match of all time, and do you know what? It bloody well was.

There are a few matches that I love more for personal reasons, but as far as bell-to-bell action goes, I have never seen anything better than this. Both men fired on all cylinders, showcasing the variety of in-ring styles they could work to pack in as much pulse-pounding action as they could. The critique of “this match has no story” was floating around in the build-up to this, but once again, Bryan found one during the match and told it to perfection, launching Ospreay into a months-long storyline about how he almost killed Bryan with the Tiger Driver, and setting Bryan up for his final run.

All In 2024

I was there in Wembley Stadium on the night of All In, the night when it genuinely seemed like Bryan Danielson’s career was going to come to an end. It had been almost exactly a year since he made the proclamation that he would retire on his daughter’s seventh birthday, and the AEW World Championship he was fighting for felt like it was just out of reach.

Yet once again, Bryan Danielson’s intangible magic to make you forget all logic and just believe shone through. His theme song, The Final Countdown by Europe, had never felt so emotional as he stood across the ring from Swerve Strickland, his career on the line.

Being in that stadium for that match is one of the most magical experiences of my life. Despite being exhausted at the end of a 5-hour wrestling show, I was on my feet with my heart in my throat as the final moments of the match played out, all culminating in the moment I honestly didn’t believe was going to happen going in – Danielson winning the AEW World Championship, and his career continuing.

…briefly.

The End

That brings us to last Saturday. I had a feeling this championship run would be more of an epilogue for Danielson than a new chapter, but I didn’t expect it to end quite this soon or in such a brutal fashion, but it’s the way Bryan wanted to do it.

It’s tradition in wrestling that “you go out on your back” putting over the next big star on your way out to set up the future, but Danielson didn’t just do that, he had his former faction mates in the Blackpool Combat Club choke him out with a plastic bag and then stomp full-force on his neck – a neck that legitimately requires surgery right now – giving us the most shocking downer endings to a wrestling show of all time.

That’s who Bryan is though. He would never have wanted to go out on a big triumphant moment. Heck, rumor is that if he’d have had it his way, he never would’ve even won the AEW World Championship to begin with. He leaves us on this downer now so that in a little while all of the young babyfaces that are ready to break through in AEW can have their moment when they take down the BCC.

Guys like Darby Allin, Hook, and Daniel Garcia are right on the cusp of becoming top guys in this industry, and Danielson just set them up in the perfect position to fill his spot as the beloved underdogs.

After he’s gone away and had his neck surgery, Bryan will come back and wrestle again on the odd occasion, but coming away from the show it feels like something truly special to me is over, so I sat here and wrote…jeez, over 3,000 words about it to express my gratitude to the man who made it all possible, and a man who without whom, I may not have even stuck around all these years to enjoy it.