Look, the wound is still fresh. The stitches arent taking, and every time we sob a little bit, our salty tears fall into that gaping crevice to sting a bit more. Its admittedly tough to scale up just how impactful Daniel Bryans retirement will be in the long-run. All we can go on are facts, and the most important one was that Daniel Bryan was cut down at the peak of his careerquite literally, considering he never once actually lost the WWE World Heavyweight Championship cleanly the very first time, and was stripped of it the other two go-rounds. He was even stripped of his last title reign, the Intercontinental Championship. He never lost his championships... his injuries stole them from him. Daniel Bryan was well on his way to becoming a mid-card star, one of the types whod make a list of the greatest wrestlers to never win the big game, alongside luminaries such as Curt Hennig, Scott Hall, Ted DiBiase, and Jake Roberts. What happened instead was shocking, as the fans rebelled in unison against the stale product in the ring, and forced WWEs creative team to do an about-face and stare their paying customers in the eyes and give them what they wanted. It happened. We got our way. Daniel Bryan was champion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KzD06Wpofw The closest comparable in losing the wrestling talents of someone in their prime is Edge, who already had a whopping 11 combined WWE/World Heavyweight Championship title runs by the time the book closed on his career. We will not quite know the impact that Bryan had on the industry for another few years, though the influx of small independent wrestlers working in NXT is an indication. We remember athletes in all walks of life whose careers were cut short by injury, and all of those years Daniel Bryan sacrificed putting on five-star matches in banquet halls and parking lots weve heard so much about from the WWE machine, ultimately claimed some of his time on the grandest stage of them all. If he wasnt so selfless, wed have more of him, but its that selflessness that made him a star.
David McCutcheon is an American freelance journalist and writing consultant. Over the course of sixteen years, he has written for the likes of IGN, Future US, GamesRadar, PlayStation Magazine, Shout! Factory, and many others in the fields of video games, movies, and more. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his wife. You can find him on Twitter @ZoopSoul.