I reach out and rest my hands on the barricade in front of me. Dan and I are in Brooklyn for SummerSlam 2018, and we’re in the very front row, on the end, right at the stairs to the ring. The crowd roars and rustles around me, and I cheer with delight as Seth Rollins wins the Intercontinental championship, groan with disappointment as the Bludgeon Brothers retain their titles. There’s a lot on the card…
Tag: 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.…
Let me tell you a story. This is a story about Sami Zayn, Kevin Owens, Daniel Bryan, and Shane McMahon. Like most stories, it has a hero. But wrestling narrative is weird, because the supporting character of one story will be the hero–or the villain–of the next, so all four of these characters could be the main character, depending on how you look at it. So let’s try an experiment. What happens if we make…
The air is heavy with the scent of rice crackers and seaweed-wrapped rice balls, and I am grieving. It’s February 2016 in Osaka, I’m here for the New Beginning show, and three days ago Daniel Bryan announced his retirement from wrestling. The people around me are nibbling on snacks, chatting about the card in the darkened arena, waiting. Beside me, Dan is bowed over with his head in his hands. He started to get a…
Tim Kail reads from my piece On Mankind vs. the Undertaker on the Work of Wrestling podcast this week! When Tim reads my words, I hear ideas in them I hadn’t noticed before. Have a listen to this truly stellar podcast: https://twitter.com/MaximusWrestler/status/580009196717936640 Also on the podcast is Kyle & Oliver’s latest parody, a song about Daniel Bryan which is incomplete without a viewing of their video: I really think Kyle and Oliver have outdone themselves…
One of the most exhilarating types in wrestling to watch is He Who Cannot Be Kept Down. The Comeback Kid, we might call him. We now have this in Roman Reigns. We’ve needed one of these for a long time. Not Daniel Bryan — he is the underdog. We need the persecuted hero who always prevails in the end. These are difficult times, aren’t they? We’re prone to following false prophets, like Bray Wyatt. We…
The Daniel Bryan of 2014 is among the more nuanced characters in wrestling’s Stephanie era, an era in which so many winding threads of complexity have morphed the WWE’s metaphoric narrative from sideshow gladiator sport into finely tuned, formidable cable drama. In much of this wrestler’s early career he sported well-tended short hair and often a clean shave, but this current Daniel Bryan look is sloppy, with a scruffy beard and a mop of overgrown…