It’s difficult to alter the landscape of an industry, doubly so if your occupation is a professional wrestler. That task takes on an added air of impossibility when working for Vince McMahon, the godlike figure who has molded “sports entertainment” in his own image, created characters and manipulated audiences’ emotions for more than three decades.
For a burst of time Daniel Bryan changed everything.
On Monday, Bryan announced his early retirement from wrestling due to a litany of head injuries. His latest, a concussion that forced him to vacate his Intercontinental Championship shortly after WrestleMania 31, was the final head trauma that would cut short the career of a man who possessed otherworldly in-ring attributes.
While his career may be over, Bryan’s impact on the entire industry will forever loom large.
For years, really beginning in 2002 as a member of the upstart Ring of Honor roster, Bryan started getting himself noticed around the world of professional wrestling. He was a guy who didn’t need a vicious promo, a catchy name or any cartoonish attributes. He just went out there and did his job in the ring. Very soon we’d all come to realize that he did it better than anyone else on the planet, and the chants would follow. “BEST IN THE WORLD!”
As loyal as independent are, in order to be best in the world it was essential that Bryan prove his worth in the juggernaut that is WWE. Would he always be the best to diehards and smarks? Of course, but that wasn’t good enough. The entire world–casual fans, men, women and children–deserved to see his brilliance in the ring and on the mic.
In 2009 Bryan would get his chance, though not without a healthy collection of bumps along the way.
The night Bryan made his main roster debut with The Nexus, he was fired from the company for choking ring announcer Justin Roberts with his tie. In Bryan’s head it was a perfect move to get the angle over, but unfortunately the actions were ill-suited for the WWE’s PG-era. Advertisers complained, and he had to go.
This, though, offered the mainstream its first inclination of just how much weight Daniel Bryan carried with fans. The outcry for his rehiring among the masses was so large that he was indeed eventually brought back in August of 2010 as a babyface, joining in a feud with his former group at SummerSlam.
For the next few years, Bryan would spend his time toiling around the mid-card, having fantastic matches in the process. The work was second nature to him–give Bryan a broomstick in the middle of the ring and he could have a perfect match with it. Little by little, as he spent more time within WWE, he started to come into his own and the perfect package began to take form–all while stealing the hearts of fans in the process.
Of course, credit for this does go to some of the people that he worked with, especially Kane. The tag team of Bryan and Kane evolved from something hackneyed and forced to must-see television every single time their mugs were in front of the camera.
Amid the comedy, a change was happening. There was a new way to become the biggest superstar in WWE. You didn’t have to be 6-4 and 275 pounds of chiseled muscle to make it. Regardless of who McMahon saw as a top star in his empire, fans vocally and persistently rejected his parade of guys billed as the “next big thing.”
And here is where Bryan changed the landscape of not just WWE, but professional wrestling as a whole. It was a slow burn. One giant puzzle that he put together piece-by-piece, no matter how difficult the pieces were to fit from time to time.
When 2013 arrived, the people had had enough of McMahon’s archetype performers. They had tired of the company’s force-feeding of John Cena. They had bored with the reboots of the good-looking and talented malaise of Randy Orton. Fans clamored for one man, and one man only to be the company’s new face: Daniel Bryan.
At first it was easy for McMahon to ignore the crowds, but soon he too was overtaken by the swell. For the first ever, one man’s grassroots popularity proved just much for the empire to handle. After Bryan was absent from the 2014 Royal Rumble, and the crowd was at a near riot, McMahon was ready to pull the trigger on changing the main event at WrestleMania to include his diminutive superstar.
WrestleMania cards are not something thrown together on a napkin the night before the event. It is the biggest show and gate of the year for all sports entertainment. McMahon plans out storylines months in advance, and with surgical precision.
For this particular event, McMahon was dead set on Randy Orton putting his title on the line against Batista. The people would love it, he thought. He thought wrong. Fans would hijack shows, impose their will and eventually bully management to insert Daniel Bryan into the title picture.
A man who had wrestled in gyms for 50 people and gotten paid in cheeseburgers, stepped into the Superdome in New Orleans and defeated three future WWE Hall of Famers–Triple H, Randy Orton and Batista–in one evening to claim the strap.
The movement was complete. The point was proven.
On that night, Bryan had proven himself to be not only an excellent worker, but someone who could be the face of professional wrestling’s monopoly; the same monopoly that had spent so many years degrading someone like him. With the help of the fans, he had ascended to the top of the mountain.
And yet this isn’t all about Bryan, but rather what he helped create with his journey.
Right now, the most popular show in WWE isn’t RAW, it isn’t Smackdown and it isn’t one of the myriad of pay-per-views provided on the WWE Network. It’s NXT. Something that, for the most part, has been constructed by talent like Bryan. Some of the most popular wrestlers on that show are performers that would not have received a serious look from WWE 10 years ago.
While he likely won’t admit it, McMahon absolutely learned a lesson from Bryan–a man so hot and so talented that he hijacked the company. Bryan proved that the industry had shifted. That McMahon could make serious coin with guys not built like Adonis, ones whom he never cared for as more than jobbers.
Daniel Bryan was more than the best technical wrestler of his generation; he was transcendent. He opened doors for others in the industry. And while this all might have gone unrealized by a man so consumed with professional wrestling, Bryan’s career as a whole helped changed the way success in the business is viewed.
The WWE was, for so long, a company that wanted its stars cut from a specific mold. Wrestlers of Bryan ilk would receive an emphatic “no” whenever seeking their big push. Thanks to the persistence of the man Bryan Danielson and his fans, now any performer has the potential to be pushed to the moon and say — “YES! YES! YES! YES!”