Hey, want to start off your Tuesday with the crippling sadness of inevitability?
Here’s Daniel Bryan’s speech from last night’s edition of Raw. If you missed it, he talks about his connection with wrestling fans, how the Intercontinental Championship shouldn’t be sitting on a chair in a physical therapist’s office and the reality that he may never wrestle again. He even includes a self-depricating bit about how Stephanie McMahon was retroactively right to strip him of the WWE World Heavyweight Championship last year and the smark part of my brain’s like, “YEAH, SHE WAS,” and then my heart and all the parts of me that are loving and decent well up with tears.
We’ll commiserate about it more in the Best and Worst of Raw column, but moments like this are hard to take. All we want is Daniel Bryan back and performing at the level we’ve seen him at for five-14 years (depending on your level of fandom), but he keeps showing up in street clothes and terrifying us. It feels like he’s the only one who doesn’t know he’s done, and I hope we’re the ones who are wrong.
So, I guess we move on to the Elimination Chamber (surprise!) to crown a new Intercontinental Champion, and Bryan sinks into the background to get the serious, real surgery he needs and live out the remainder of his WWE contract as a Total Divas character. Maybe this’ll all still have a happy ending.
