In the lead-up to WWE WrestleMania 30 (and the WWE WrestleMania 30 Party in Woolshed Baa & Grill, Dublin), our WWE correspondent Rick Nash is running a series of special preview articles. Click the below links to read the previous pieces thus far. This week, he discusses Daniel Bryan...
Are There Enough Hours A Day For WWE Network?
A recent debate in the world of NBA basketball has posed the question, "Who would be featured on an NBA equivalent of Mount Rushmore?", with up to ten names having a valid shout and only Michael Jordan's place secure. When you ask the same of question of WWE, the field is restricted to an undeniable list of GOATs who have shaped the history of the company we know today: Hulk Hogan, Bret Hart, Shawn Michaels, Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock and John Cena (If you were to further decrease it to a Rushmore four you'd have to say Hogan, Michaels, Austin and Cena; much as it pains me to leave out The Rock).
These are the undisputed 'faces of the company' (don't worry, you won't have to hear that phrase for much longer) who had sustained runs as top guys and drew millions of dollars off the back of their talents.
Beneath them in the all-time pecking order are the 'high profile enhancement guys', i.e. stars who held their own as multi-time Heavyweight Champions but whose ultimate role, in the grand scheme, was to lose the big matches. Think Triple H, Roddy Piper, Randy Savage, Ted DiBiase, Mick Foley, Chris Jericho, Kurt Angle and current outgoing WWE World Heavyweight Champion, Randy Orton.
Ranking right alongside them in terms of stature and pull are 'special attraction' stars, with The Undertaker and Andre the Giant being far and away the most successful in this category. These are stars who could easily be considered A+ players, and hold their own as faces of the company if necessary, but their role is to ultimately be the 'something a bit different' on the card. They exist almost parallel to your main event stars and are billed in equal reverence, but they are at their best providing some depth and stature to a card rather than headlining it outright. Brock Lesnar, Big Show, Yokozuna, Kane, Kevin Nash, Bam Bam Bigelow and Batista are further examples.
However, the unfortunate thing about pro-wrestling is that you can't just wake up one day and simply be thrust into these roles like a Hogwarts kid wearing a Sorting Hat. What's magical about each guy's place in history is that the fans, and them alone, filed them in their rightful place after years of hard work, booking, trial and error.
And, as WrestleMania enters its 30th incarnation in less than two weeks, it's with great trepidation that we introduce the fourth perceived category of WWE main event lore, our most controversial and arguable by far: the 'one-hit wonders'. Guys who had their WrestleMania moment then...not a great deal else, as they either slid down the card shortly afterwards or disappeared from our screens altogether. Some of these are on many (soon-to-be-irate) fans' top 5 lists, but they could never hold down a sustained run at the top despite many people's wishes. So sincerest apologies to fans of Eddie Guerrero, The Ultimate Warrior, Sgt Slaughter, Sid Vicious, Lex Luger, Rey Mysterio and The Miz, they're all going in. Significantly less apologies go out to fans of Chris Benoit. His push flopped and he did something awful years later. And please don't abuse me on Twitter fans of CM Punk, but if he doesn't come back then he's going into this category. You'll agree with me in time, trust me.
Aside from being a great way for us wrestling nerds to kill a few hours chatting at the bar while attractive women overhear and judge us, this subject is important to bring up now, more than ever, for another reason: it looks like we're about to see which category one Daniel Bryan will ultimately belong to.
Currently, Bryan is set to capitalise on a two solid years of deafeningly loud "YES!" and "NO!" chants across arenas worldwide as WWE seems ready to pull the trigger on a main event push that began at last year's SummerSlam. If he defeats Triple H, he is slated to be added to the WWE World Heavyweight Championship match with Randy Orton and Royal Rumble winner, Boo-tista. It would seem inevitable, from there, that WWE finally give fans their moment by making him undisputed Champion and, in doing so, mark the moment with the largest "YES!" chant of all-time as 70,000 fans scream down the New Orleans Superdome. While this isn't a guarantee, it seems too delicious and fitting a moment for WWE to resist the temptation. If the time isn't right for them to pay off this storyline in the WrestleMania 30 main event, when will it ever be?
Bryan has earned this push the old school way: by wrestling the best match on the card, night-in and night-out. He's won fans' affection through regularly having to pull double (or sometimes triple) duty on Raws when other material appeared short on the ground. In doing so he's also tapped into a large number of fans' dissatisfaction with the current product, which isn't particularly new territory as the likes of Paul Heyman, Rob Van Dam, Joey Styles and CM Punk have also run this route in recent years. But what Bryan has done (with help from an inspired WWE creative team and underrated foil performances by Triple H and Orton) has turned that dissatisfaction into a money angle. It's art-imitating-life and WWE have convincingly played fans like fiddles for the past 8 months, playing on their real-life doubts in the brain thrust of the company and cashing their cheques with the glimmers of hope they've fed us each month.
Now it seems like it's, finally, his turn to be judged. Is the 'YES Movement' (copyright - WWE) the real deal or a by-product of effective booking that will slowly fizzle out when he stops raging against the machine and, instead, becomes the face of the machine? That all comes down to Bryan, and while there's no way to know for certain, recent history can give us some clues.
When looking at the list of 'one-hit wonders' in comparison to Bryan, the names Eddie Guerrero and, particularly, Chris Benoit immediately spring up as having similarities. Both, like Bryan, were immensely talented in the ring and made a routine of stealing the show from the midcard. As their WWE careers progressed, fans demanded more at each stage: longer matches on PPVs, high-profile feuds, main events and, ultimately, title reigns.
Benoit's push, resulting in a title win 10 years ago at WrestleMania 20 (which he celebrated by hugging fellow champion, Guerrero), bares an almost eery comparisons with Bryan's situation: he won it in a triple-threat match; his opponents were (surprise surprise) Triple H and his long-time DX stablemate Shawn Michaels, while Bryan faces Triple H and then (presumably) will go onto challenge the latter's long-time Evolution stablemates Orton and Batista; the storyline back then was about how Benoit never won the big one, with the subtext being that Triple H was 'big bad' given his marriage to Stephanie McMahon. This is pretty much identical to Bryan's storyline, except Triple H is now the company's COO and Orton the paper champion.
Forget what Benoit would do in his final moments and let's focus on the immediate aftermath of his win. Sure, it was emotional seeing him and Eddie hug it out in Madison Square Garden, and WWE repeated the trick by having him submit Shawn Michaels in Montreal a month later at Backlash. From month-to-month, though, Benoit found it a struggle to shake Triple H following his uninspired title programme with Kane in June.
When it came time for him to drop the belt, oddly enough to Randy Orton, not many complained. As great a moment as the WrestleMania 20 climax had been, going forward fans had forgotten about it by the time Triple H gave Orton the thumbs down and kickstarted the Evolution split storyline. Benoit returned to his place stealing the show in the match before the main event, and everyone was happy.
Ultimately, what caused fans to feel this way were his lacklustre mic skills. Benoit never seemed fully comfortable selling himself as the star of the show. It wasn't in his nature. It's all well-and-good holding your own when WWE creative are working around-the-clock creating month-by-month diagrams getting you from SummerSlam to WrestleMania, with the rolling ball gathering momentum and increasing in size each passing month. In that case, while the fans' admiration has put you in that slot to begin with, they are reacting as much to the different directions the story is pulling them as they are to you.
What separates the Cenas from the Mizes, the Hogans from the Warriors, and the Austins from the Mysterios is when creative are having their attention pulled elsewhere and need you to hold the fort in a mediocre programme against Kane (even more odd parallels: this exact programme is almost definitely in Bryan's future too). And, as cool as the "YES!" chants are, they don't pay the bills. Ratings and buyrates - or WWE Network subscriptions, from now on - do.
This is the part that die-hard Daniel Bryan fans should be sweating about. Much as we may blissfully ignore it for the time being, mic skills aren't Bryan's strongpoint. He's not Benoit bad, but it could be said at times that he's guilty of sounding like he's reading from a carefully constructed WWE script. Bryan showed he could work comedy skits in his tag-team stint with Kane, but funny rarely equals money.
Is it in his nature to sell himself as a guy worth investing in? This is another point where alarm bells could be raised, Bryan even described himself as a 'reluctant hero' in a candid interview with Grantland's Masked Man last year. The wording of that description alone is enough to get concerned about.
So is it possible that fans are reacting as much as the push-pull of the story as Bryan? Well think back to the story's high points since SummerSlam and how people reacted: euphoria at the initial title win at SummerSlam, outrage at him being stripped of the belt a month later and the subsequent hijinks that followed in the coming months, unforgettable scenes at his rejection of the Wyatt Family inside the cage, near riots (and broken Batista DVDs) after he was snubbed in the Royal Rumble match, Mick Foley freak-outs when he lost at Elimination Chamber, before sweet release when he occupied Raw and finally got his wishes for WrestleMania 30. Now think about it from WWE's standpoint: is there any point at which fans aren't reacting exactly as you'd want them to?
This isn't going well so far, is it?
Now for the flip side of the argument: the fact that none, absolutely none of this, was supposed to happen until Daniel Bryan made sure it happened.
To write him off as a mere benefactor of a pre-planned hot streak is to do a severe disservice to a man who was released after his first appearance on Raw under the Daniel Bryan moniker. His choking of WWE announcer, Justin Roberts, with a cable proved too violent for sponsors of a PG-rated product. Despite the fact that he was just following orders, Bryan was made scapegoat for the whole incident and handed his P45. After being given a second chances several months later, he would never look back.
I spoke about this last July, and it remains true today:
His Money in the Bank win was shocking to many, yet almost immediately people predicted that front office’s apparent contempt for him would mean he was the first man to lose the resulting championship match.
That wasn’t to be the case, and even as Daniel Bryan moulded into one of the most charismatic guys on the roster (in a World Heavyweight Championship reign that involved him screaming the words “YES!” and “NO!” a lot, to the fans delight), fans’ skepticism remained.
When he lost the belt in a matter of seconds to Sheamus at WrestleMania 29, it seemed to confirm a lot of fans’ fears. We closed our eyes and braced ourselves for everything we’d come to love about Daniel Bryan’s new persona being phased out of existence, as WWE would surely reduce him to positions on the card so lowly that only the Brooklyn Brawler and the Mean Street Posse could relate.
Again, not to be. This new-look, charismatic Daniel Bryan refused to be reduced to obscurity in the mid-card and, either by fluke or sheer determination, found himself and Kane becoming one of the most popular and entertaining Tag-Team Champions in recent memory. Team Hell No almost single-handedly kept the tag-team division relevant and the WWE mid-card an enjoyable watch.
This whole 'Daniel Bryan keeps proving the doubters wrong' phenomenon isn't just a storyline. Well, it is, but that storyline began last August. It hasn't been in the works since 2010, when fans first began building his apparent glass ceiling, only for him to shatter it every night. Every single time we've predicted Bryan's downfall, he's confounded expectations.
And, as spooky as the parallels are with Chris Benoit's eventual title win are, Bryan is not Chris Benoit. An identical outcome is by no means a given. Ten years have passed. The landscape of pro-wrestling has evolved. Daniel Bryan has, ironically, shown his capacity to evolve with each passing challenge put in front of him. There will be a lot of juice left in this storyline once Bryan is champion (one-on-one title feuds with Triple H, Batista, Kane, Brock Lesnar and Bray Wyatt are all possibilities with very little imagination required), and in terms of both fan reactions and execution, the story itself is not dissimilar to that of Stone Cold Steve Austin's battles against Vince McMahon's Corporation in the late-90's, a rivalry that ran for years and engaged fans at a level they had never been before.
Instead of asking whether Bryan can sustain a run at the top, it would be fair to also posit if it would be possible for WWE to continue in the immediate future without him as 'the guy'? Recent (genuine) attempts to focus attention elsewhere, such as when Randy Orton and John Cena looked to sell the go-home promo for their TLC Title Unification Match in December, proved unfruitful as fans simply refused to let anyone speak unless their name rhymed with Nathaniel Lyon. As much as everyone wanted Benoit and Guerrero to get their hands on some WWE gold, they at least allowed the show to continue in the meantime.
So, all things considered, is Bryan destined to be a new 'Face of the Company' or a mere 'One-Hit Wonder', a fad that we'll all remember hazily in years to come. I suppose there's only one way of putting it:
YES! Bryan has some bad historical omens.
NO! They don't condemn him to surefire failure.
YES! He's about to enter hallowed ground, where few have succeeded despite many, many attempts.
NO! ...people who have come before him in recent years have been this insanely over with fans.
YES! We need to find out, once-and-for-all, if this is the real deal. And,
NO! We won't know for sure until we do.
So YES, do the right thing, WWE, and give Bryan the belt at WrestleMania. Or you might have NO fans left come April 7th. Don't fuck with Daniel Bryan.
Rick Nash (@AMTRick) is a former independent pro-wrestler and currently runs WWE Parties Ireland, who present the WWE WrestleMania 30 Party @ Woolshed Baa & Grill on Sunday 6th April. Limited tickets still available (click the link for full info). Check out an ad below for a preview of what's in store!
