It is nearly impossible to script a better underdog story than the journey of Daniel Bryan from late 2013 through WrestleMania XXX last year. Bryan reached the absolute top of the company against all odds, becoming arguably WWEs most popular hero and winning the WWE World Heavyweight Championship after beating Triple H, Randy Orton and Batista in one night. In the span of the next two months, Bryan tumbled right off that mountaintop. Days after Mania, his father passed away. When he returned from mourning, he engaged not in a logical feud with Orton or Batista, but in a cartoonish and groan-inducing battle with Kane. But even that could be forgiven if Bryan was indeed on a trajectory to face Brock Lesnar at SummerSlam as was rumored. That would have been a great David versus Goliath story to tell. Instead, Bryan landed on the shelf for the rest of 2014 with various neck and arm injuries. He was forced to surrender his world title, and WWE went on without him. The biggest push of his career evaporated in an instant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrqUP35yqEg Today, Bryan is once again competing and leading thousands of fans in Yes! chants. Its now rumored that he could once again headline WrestleMania for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship, but losing that unprecedented momentum a year ago certainly was an unlucky situation. Can he recapture it? We might soon find out
Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.
