Ring of Honor was on Bryan Danielson’s radar in 2018.
In March of 2018, the announcement was pushed out by WWE that Bryan Danielson was cleared to return to in-ring competition. Bryan went on to win the WWE Championship later that year.
There was a point in that timeframe when Danielson’s contract with WWE was coming up and he shared with Inside The Ropes that he considered going to Ring of Honor. Danielson added that he was in contact with Cody Rhodes and The Young Bucks (Matt & Nick Jackson) but soon discovered that their deals were coming up.
It was Danielson’s lawyer who advised him that maybe he should not go to Ring of Honor because of the then-potential exits of Rhodes and The Young Bucks.
It was really interesting. My contract with WWE was up in 2018 and I was considering going to Ring of Honor and I was talking to The Young Bucks and I was talking to Cody [Rhodes] just to kind of see — all their contracts were up with Ring of Honor and I was like, ‘What are you guys gonna do?’ Because even my lawyer, who doesn’t know anything about pro wrestling, he said, ‘Hey, I don’t think you’d wanna sign with Ring of Honor if these Young Bucks aren’t going because they’ve got this YouTube show. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, called Being The Elite’ and it’s essentially the driver for the popularity of Ring of Honor at the time, right? And so those guys go away, we don’t know if Ring of Honor will nearly still be as popular and then with Cody’s contract coming up, if they leave and Cody leaves, what will Ring of Honor’s popularity be like? So that was a part of the discussion.
While speaking about AEW World Champion Jon Moxley, Danielson said he views Moxley, Chris Jericho, Kenny Omega and The Young Bucks as guys who are the heart and soul(s) of AEW.
It’s cool for me that Mox is where he’s at. To me, there was that excellent interview segment with CM Punk and Jon Moxley and he talked about being the heart and soul of kind of AEW and I see him as that as well. Him, Kenny Omega and The Young Bucks is kind of like — and Chris Jericho, you know what I mean? But I see those kind of people as the guys, right? And it’s cool that when I first wrestled him, it was in front of like 75 people on a Wednesday show in the middle of nowhere. Mox actually knows exactly where it was but I don’t even remember so it was like, all of that kind of stuff is just neat.
Danielson was in action on the 10/26 episode of Dynamite and scored a win over Sammy Guevara. Prior to the match, Danielson had some back and forth verbiage with fellow Blackpool Combat Club member Wheeler Yuta.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit Inside The Ropes with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
