Bryan Danielson was in WWE when AEW started, and he says most of the roster was hoping to see the company find success. Danielson recalled the reaction backstage to AEW’s launch in January of 2019 during his appearance on an AEW panel at SXSW. Below are some highlights (via Fightful):
Bryan Danielson on watching AEW: “I see Cody [Cody Rhodes] wrestling Penta [Penta El Zero Miedo] on Dynamite and he does a top rope hurricanrana. Both men are standing on the top rope and Cody jumps and puts his legs on Penta’s shoulders, and flips him off the top. Knowing Cody, at first I was like, ‘Holy shit. This is what Cody is doing now?’ This is what you have to do. My reference point for that was not ‘this is what AEW guys are doing,’ my reference point was, ‘I don’t know if I can hang.’ That was the thought.”
On the reaction to the company’s launch in WWE: “Going back to the awareness in WWE at the time when AEW started, everybody was aware. Different people had different takes on it. The same thing whenever there is some kind of challenge or start up happening. You have some people who want them to fail right away. Just to prove whatever it is. ‘There’s only one way to do this’ and that sort of thing. Most of us, most of the wrestlers, wanted AEW to succeed. That’s better for everybody. You look at any industry, if there is just one bring on top and there is no competition, that’s not good for talent, that’s not good for people working on the creative side. It’s not good for a lot of people. For a lot of us, we were watching and hoping that it would succeed. Little did we know, any of us, four years in, they’d sell 81,000 tickets to Wembley. Everyone was watching it, and everybody had different opinions.”
