Working Stiff: The Miz and Daniel Bryan

It’s August 1, 2018, on Smackdown, and Daniel Bryan is in the ring, staring up at the Titantron. The Miz’s face looms in the massive screen as the two of them cut a promo on each other, setting up their match at SummerSlam. The promo manages to touch on the key points in their history and to sum up their feud–though “feud” is hardly the right word for something both so slow-moving and so inevitable. It’s something less than a feud, more than a storyline: a distillation of the split at the heart of WWE, a clash of philosophies.

It’s weird and perfect, and this essay only really touches the surface of it.

“I have carried you on my back since I was a pro in NXT!” Miz barks from his screen at Daniel, standing small and solid and real in the ring. That’s NXT from before it was NXT, back when it was a bizarre, half-baked semi-reality program that lurched around wildly in tone, its purpose not entirely clear. The general concept was that WWE “pros” would be paired with aspiring “rookies” for advice and mentoring.

And in some inspired moment, someone in Creative paired the Miz and Daniel Bryan.

Mike Mizanin isn’t even a wrestler, if you ask some people. He’s a reality TV star, a participant on The Real World who parlayed that fifteen minutes of fame into a WWE career and somehow has managed to stick around for a decade. He’s never experienced the indies. He’s all flash and show, all shallow display, no heart. His wrestling style is cautious and conservative, taking none of the big risks “real” wrestlers do. A certain type of smark despises him.

Daniel Bryan is the wrestler’s wrestler, the ultimate indie guy, the epitome of the style. He has no flash, no panache; he’s a technician and an in-ring genius, but when he came to WWE was notoriously lackluster on the mic. He just tended to see no point to cutting a passionate promo. All that was to be expressed in the ring, which he did with daredevil recklessness and carelessness for his own health. A breathtaking wrestler made entirely of heart and skill.

Pairing them—making Miz the “pro” and Daniel the “rookie”—was deliberately designed to infuriate the indie-loving fan, and it did. Oh boy, did it. Message boards roiled with righteous indignation as the show went on, as Miz harangued and harassed Daniel and Daniel struggled to find his voice on a show not at all designed to showcase in-ring skills. From the very beginning, when Miz introduced his “rookie” Daniel, the dynamic was in place and crackling:

Miz’s introduction of Daniel is unctuous and condescending—he calls him an “Internet darling,” congratulates him on being a star in the “minor” leagues, and brags about his own career as Daniel reacts incredulously but without words.

It’s amazing stuff right away, a distillation of the tension in WWE between “wrestling” and “sports entertainment.” In his autobiography, Daniel will later admit he has no memory of this first promo because he hates cutting promos so much that his mind went absolutely blank during it.

He also, by the way, mentions that Miz was one of the very few pros who actually committed to the show, who didn’t see it as a burden and hassle. He mentions that Miz worked incredibly hard on the storyline, and if you read between the lines it’s clear that Daniel learned a lot about mic work from Miz. But the two characters never reached any kind of understanding—they couldn’t, given who they are, and their relationship remained hostile until the end. Once Daniel was on the main roster, he won his first title—the United States Championship—by making the Miz tap out.

And then, for years, there was very little interaction. Things happened, events moved on. The Miz cashed in the Money in the Bank briefcase and became WWE Champion. Daniel became World Heavyweight Champion, then won the tags with Kane. Both Miz and Daniel got married—to Maryse Ouellet and Brie Bella, respectively. They both main evented WrestleMania in different years. Daniel got injured. He got injured again. And again.

In 2016, Daniel was forced to retire. Because he was married to Brie Bella, he remained part of Total Divas, and then its spin-off, Total Bellas. Meanwhile, Miz kept wrestling. He held the Intercontinental Championship for some impressively long stretches.

As it turned out, the wrestler’s wrestler ended up a reality tv character, and the reality tv character kept wrestling. The savage irony of this was, I am certain, lost on precisely no one.

Daniel Bryan becomes the Smackdown General Manager, a job that must feel like purgatory for him, always in contact with wrestling and never able to wrestle. Miz needles him about it now and then: little jabs, little sneers.

And then on an episode of Talking Smack, the post-show interview program, everything goes off the rails.

The promo that Miz is mentioning takes place on a fairly random Talking Smack in 2016. It starts in a standard enough way, with the Miz and Maryse storming onto the set while Renee Young and Daniel talk about the show, Miz tossing his Intercontinental title onto the desk. Miz is angry because he feels Daniel gave the IC title short shrift. “This title has a rich history,” he announces, rattling off some of the great names associated with it. And then he says, “This is the last title that you held, Daniel. The last one.”

Daniel looks at the title and you can see in his eyes that he is not only aware of this, but that he is constantly aware of it. Stung by this reminder of what he’s lost, he comes back with “I have respect for the title, I just don’t have respect for the person holding it.” The Miz sputters with outrage, and Daniel adds, almost casually: “There’s no gentle way to say it. To me you wrestle like a coward.”  

He goes on, explaining that Miz wrestles as if he’s afraid to get hit, as if he’s soft, and you can see his words just scalding the Miz, who’s slowly turning red with fury, gathering all of his rage up and waiting for the right moment.

In the ring, wrestlers refer to “working stiff”–when you don’t pull your punches, when you risk actually hurting each other. Working stiff is generally something that happens only between people who truly dislike each other, or between people who deeply trust each other. I’ve always felt that promo work can also involve “working stiff”–using real pain and real issues in a feud, pulling them in to get the most genuine anger and anguish from the people involved. You can feel it sometimes, the real ache of passion in a segment. I’ve seen wrestlers talk about feuds where the improvised words hit too close to home, where they end up causing real pain, authentic damage.

This segment between Miz and Daniel is the stiffest promo work I’ve ever seen. Both of them seem to have a strange chemistry, a gift for touching on exactly what insults will hurt each other. Because when Daniel takes a breath, Miz comes roaring back at him and he is out for blood.

“The reason I wrestle the way I wrestle is because I can do it day in and day out for ten-plus years. I have never–NEVER–in my career, ever, have been injured,” he announces, shaking with indignation. “I don’t get injured for six months to a year.”

Daniel goes silent, staring at him as Miz basically argues that Daniel’s reckless wrestling style is a form of cowardice, that it’s braver to wrestle in a way that earns you scorn but lets you be there reliably for the fans.

“Let me tell you about a coward,” Miz snarls, aiming right at every weak spot Daniel has. “Let me tell you about a guy who tells his WWE fans, the people that he loves, that he will be back! He PROMISES them! I will be back in one year’s time to claim this title.” He drops his voice to a venomous hiss: “But you didn’t, Daniel, did you?”

Daniel is visibly rattled. He’s gone pale. “If they–if they would let me come back, I would,” he says, his voice breaking. To continue the working stiff metaphor, Miz has busted Daniel open hardway and Daniel’s soul is bleeding out all over the Talking Smack table.

Miz leans forward right into Daniel’s face. “Oh, y-y-y-you would?” he sneers with an audible stammer, and Daniel goes even paler. I didn’t know it then, but in his autobiography, Daniel mentions that as a kid he had a bad stammer that gave him terrible anxiety. Watching the segment again with this knowledge, I’m staggered by Miz’s breathtaking cruelty, his genius for finding the best possible way to strand Daniel in mute anguish. “You love wrestling so much,” he says, “you say you love wrestling so much, so why don’t you quit? Why don’t you go back to wrestling in bingo halls with your indie friends? And you say I’m the coward!”

And Daniel taps out. He flees. He puts down the mic with shaking hands and flees the set, stumbling past Renee as Miz yells after him, “Don’t you walk away from me, Daniel! Don’t you walk away!”

The camera wavers wildly, settling on Renee for a moment before Miz barks to put the camera on him, where everyone gets a great shot of the tears in his eyes as he rants wildly about how hard he works and how under-appreciated he is, so that not one instant of that hard-won emotion goes to waste.

People spent a lot of time after this happened talking about whether this moment was staged or whether it was “real,” and generally I feel the answer (as in most great wrestling promos) is “both and neither.” But my argument for at least some of it being unplanned and spontaneous is that, in 2016, there was almost no hope Daniel would ever wrestle again. The segment didn’t pay off in any useful way or further a feud. Trapped in a reality-tv funhouse world, General Manager Daniel Bryan can’t settle things in the ring, and the Miz will always, always be able to get the best of him in a battle of words. The segment is pointless–except to reveal the terrible gift they have to wound each other, the total disconnect between their worlds.

Look back at that promo from August 1: Miz on the Titantron, Daniel in the ring. Look at how perfect that is, given all of their long and painful history together. There’s the Miz: larger than life, two-dimensional, fake. He’s talking from “the set of his reality tv program” (mind you, that would technically just be his own house), using this feud to further his own non-wrestling tv program, a reality tv star even now. But do you really believe he’s actually on some set somewhere? No, you do not–my God, even his fakeness is fake.

There’s Daniel Bryan, in a wrestling ring where he has always belonged, demanding that they fight, that they stop talking and fight. He’s small and three-dimensional and real. It’s everything about their feud summed up in one simple image. When, the next week, Daniel crashes in on the Miz as he rants, it’s as if the reality of wrestling has shattered the “reality” that the Miz lives in, bursting into his two-dimensional world to drag him kicking and screaming to Brooklyn, where they’ll have the next confrontation in their terrible conflict, their brawl over the very contradiction embedded in the name World Wrestling Entertainment.

Daniel says one thing that’s false in this leadup to SummerSlam.  As he faces down the Miz on his screen, he announces:

He’s wrong. It’s about passion for both of them, it’s just a passion that neither of them can recognize in the other.  And that’s the tragedy and the resonance of their rivalry. In a perfect world, someday the two of them would reach some kind of rapport, some alliance that would symbolize the union of the wrestling and the entertainment in their world. But it’s nearly impossible to imagine such a thing, and I’m not even sure I’d want to see it happen.

Let the universe continue fractured forever, if it gives us such a spectacle.