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DANIEL BRYAN *IS* WRESTLING AGAIN


RIPPA

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2 hours ago, CreativeControl said:

Remember when they tried to pawn the YES thing onto Big Show as well? WWE tried everything possible to ignore Danielson, it was utterly bizarre self-sabotage

Why did they keep having Bryan beat Orton if they were not pushing Bryan. Why was he is a featured segment every show? If they were ignoring him, they would take him off TV. 

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3 minutes ago, Victator said:

I mean look at the year. Aside from the Wyatt side trip, Bryan was bearing Orton's brains in and coming within inches of the title. He had Orton beat at Elimination Chamber. 
It was sloppy booking which is how WWE does business. 

I kind of saw it as Mankind keeping The Rock busy until he could start his Wrestlemania program with Austin. 

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I'm gonna hate myself for this, but Vic is right.

 

Removing the subjectivity and looking at the sequence of events in a vacuum, it becomes more apparent that the story from SummerSlam to Mania 30 was set up to be Bryan's story.  There's no conspiricy to keep him down, and while I was one of the big "They're brainless and fucking him over", it was a lot of us were caught up in the hype and got worked.  Yeah, he had that side trip with Bray, but that was a keep him busy until the Mania ramp up.  They just underestimated the fans response with Bryan getting removed from the Rumble.  But if you look at how things progressed, but look at how WWE books everything for years, it all lines up.  We just got more invested because like people said, "Bryan was our guy".  That emotional investment made Mania 30 sweeter, but man, did it have some negative outcomes.

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Per the newest WON

Quote

He also had experience in 2014 with a neck injury, which was feared to also end his career. He had been experiencing neck problems and a weakness in strength in one arm from a stinger in a match with Randy Orton in 2013. But he was on fire, as the crowd got behind him and the "Yes" chants. At times, crowds went so wild for him that they took over shows and got in the way of planned angles.

He was scheduled to face Sheamus in an undercard match at that year's WrestleMania. But two unrelated things happened, one being that C.M. Punk, who was miserable, quit the promotion. The other was that Dave Bautista, who was brought in to be the babyface superstar at WrestleMania, to win the Royal Rumble and face Orton for the title, wasn't getting over as a face.

Plans were changed for a two-match storyline, where Daniel Bryan would at first beat HHH, who was Punk's scheduled opponent, and if he did so, would be added to the title match, making it a three-way. Bryan ended the night with two big wins and one of the biggest championship win reactions in modern wrestling history at the Superdome in New Orleans.

But the neck injury got worse, and he underwent surgery a few months later. It wasn't considered serious, and they did an angle where he was bullied and refused to vacate the title, since he wasn't expected to miss much time. But his strength didn't return after the surgery. In a move that screwed up the planned storyline, he actually then had to actually vacate the title. Still, as popular as he was, the long-term plan when he won the title was to feud with Kane, and then lose in convincing fashion to Brock Lesnar, who would then be pushed as unstoppable, until losing at WrestleMania in 2015 to Roman Reigns.

The role played by John Cena in that one-sided match at the 2014 SummerSlam show was the role planned for Bryan.

EDIT - Stupid select all not working. The rest I meant to post

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When almost all hope was lost, he found a doctor using a new technique who was able to provide treatment where he gained most, but not all of his hand strength back and returned to action. He was kept somewhat strong, but even with his popularity, he was not booked as a top guy.

Worse, the live crowd was furious in the 2015 Royal Rumble when he didn't win, just as they were in the 2014 Rumble when he didn't even enter. In 2014, he was only scheduled for a match with Bray Wyatt and never advertised for the Rumble, but fans somehow convinced themselves he was going to win as a surprise entrant, even when it was clear and reported Batista was winning.

In 2015, he was kept in for a short period of time, and eliminated long before Reigns came out. The crowd that year turned on Reigns' winning and it's been an uphill battle getting Reigns cheered ever since, as it became the cool thing at TV and PPV especially, but even at house shows, to boo Reigns. The decision was then made to put Reigns against Bryan for the Mania title shot, in which Reigns would win, and Bryan, the most well liked wrestler on the roster by the fans, would then endorse him as the top guy. But that didn't work either, and eventually, one week before the show, Vince McMahon decided to delay the Reigns coronation, the big win over Lesnar, for a short period of time. That short period of time has since extended to three years.

 

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My problem with the timeline is "Vince doesn't change shit for anybody" and the booking "fell" into place too neatly, looking back.  I wanna say fan response changed something, but there's been a lot of fan response before and after DB that never made Vince change course (except with getting gunshy about Roman at XXXI), 

 

But we'll never know, since the players involved say one thing, and Dave says another, and everyone's a carny and are always working.

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I always got the impression that HHH had clearly been wanting to build to some sort of WM match with Bryan that got screwed up and only returned in some form once the fan reaction became what it was.

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25 minutes ago, Eivion said:

I always got the impression that HHH had clearly been wanting to build to some sort of WM match with Bryan that got screwed up and only returned in some form once the fan reaction became what it was.

Once Punk was gone, sure. A big piece of the fallout with him leaving was that Hunter thought Punk should be stoked he'd do the honors for him at Wrestlemania and Punk couldn't have given less of a shit about that match. 

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They a) used Bryan to heat up Orton for the title unification in December, b) wanted to transfer the Yes chants onto Big Show to heat up Hunter and c) wanted to use Bryan to heat up Bray for Cena. Bryan had to get Vince's number after his injury because he didn't have it. It wasn't the plan.

Anyone who thinks that Bryan winning at Mania was the plan as early as Summerslam or even the Rumble is extraordinarily wrong. Wildly wrong. They couldn't be wronger. 

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2 hours ago, Raziel said:

My problem with the timeline is "Vince doesn't change shit for anybody"

What bullshit is this? Vince is famous for writing months and months of storylines ahead of time and then changing shit minutes before they go on air cuz he doesn't like it anymore.

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2 hours ago, RIPPA said:

I am 99.4% sure Bryan is one of Dave's sources so I think Dave's version is what Bryan believes happened

Take that for whatever it is worth

Yeah, I think the smoking gun there would be Dave and Bryan saying the "we might put you with Sheamus at WM."

Knowing Vince McMahon's sense of humor (and his willingness to make jokes like that to keep people down before telling them the big plans), the fact Sheamus wasn't even on TV at the time,  and just seeing how the story looked (if Bryan WASN'T in the World Title match, he absolutely would have been facing Kane), this seems likely.

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Similarly, Batista has said the plan was for him to win the Rumble as a face, then go to Wrestlemania, and beat Orton for the title. (Neither here nor there, but he's also claimed to argue at the time that this would all backfire, basically how it did.) I know workers are gonna work, but in order to believe Bryan's ascendance was the plan all along, you basically have to ingore every primary and secondary source that have gone on record about it.

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23 minutes ago, Beech27 said:

Similarly, Batista has said the plan was for him to win the Rumble as a face, then go to Wrestlemania, and beat Orton for the title. (Neither here nor there, but he's also claimed to argue at the time that this would all backfire, basically how it did.) I know workers are gonna work, but in order to believe Bryan's ascendance was the plan all along, you basically have to ingore every primary and secondary source that have gone on record about it.

Frankly, I think it ended up working in the WWE's favor, strangely enough.  Everyone knew Bryan "wasn't supposed to win."  Which made his gauntlet of death through HHH/Stephanie, Batista, AND Orton all the more exciting to see.  

There really was a legitimate chance that Vince would have pulled the plug at any time and HHH or Batista could have walked out champion.   But not Orton.   Fuck him. 

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1 hour ago, Cristobal said:

What bullshit is this? Vince is famous for writing months and months of storylines ahead of time and then changing shit minutes before they go on air cuz he doesn't like it anymore.

I think it'd be more accurate to say that "Vince doesn't change shit for anybody except injuries and Vince McMahon". He'll write months and months of storylines and stick to them regardless of what anyone says but will change it if someone sneezes in front of him.

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3 hours ago, Raziel said:

But we'll never know, since the players involved say one thing, and Dave says another, and everyone's a carny and are always working.

Everyone involved who has talked about it substantially says the same thing Dave does. Triple H and Stephanie in a big piece on Bryan with, I think, Shoemaker. Batista in various interviews. Bryan himself. I don't think Orton or Vince have ever commented.

Plus, I mean, it's not like they weren't already laying seeds for Punk/H at Mania before Punk noped on out of there.

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47 minutes ago, Beech27 said:

Similarly, Batista has said the plan was for him to win the Rumble as a face, then go to Wrestlemania, and beat Orton for the title. (Neither here nor there, but he's also claimed to argue at the time that this would all backfire, basically how it did.) I know workers are gonna work, but in order to believe Bryan's ascendance was the plan all along, you basically have to ingore every primary and secondary source that have gone on record about it.

Similarly Bautista blamed the failure of this run on wrestling fans all being comic book nerds and now he’s been such a big comic book nerd his whole life he couldn’t bring himself to read the infinity wars script. 

Coolest poser ever and I mean that. 

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I wonder what happens if they somehow get wind of how big GOTG was going to be (nobody really knew but humor me.) Batista probably goes over at WM, holds the title until he gets bored or has to do press for the movie, then drops it to Bryan in a multi man match without eating the fall. Then Bryan gets the title for maybe a month before being pulverized by Brock. I believe Vince would totally eat shit from the crowd for months to make that happen. 

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1 hour ago, West Newbury Bad Boy said:

Four years later, I'm just happy to see people still enthusiastically re-litigating this. 

No kidding. All we need is for everyone to turn on Gregg and we're fully back in 2013.

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7 hours ago, Victator said:

Why did they keep having Bryan beat Orton if they were not pushing Bryan. Why was he is a featured segment every show? If they were ignoring him, they would take him off TV. 

That’s the one thing that’s always been fishy to me. Bryan was kicking the dogshit out of everyone, especially Orton, heading into that Rumble...

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