With All In literally days away, seemingly the entirety of AEW has descended on the UK to help promote the company's biggest show of the year, with everyone from Bryan Danielson to Swerve Strickland, Mariah May, Toni Storm, and even Mercedes Mone – in her Mone Mag Weekly – using their platforms to get a few more eyes on the promotion.
And for the “American Dragon,” that involves firmly and definitively explaining the stakes of his match with the AEW World Champion, as if he doesn't secure the win, he can never wrestle again.
Discussing what is shaping up to be one of the biggest matches of his career with the BBC, Danielson noted that he's bringing the entire family over to London for the show, even if his daughter Birdie isn't excited to see him wrestle the match one bit.
“Yeah, it’ll be the first time my son’s ever seen me wrestle live. My daughter got to see me wrestle live at WrestleMania 35, but she was two years old, and she doesn’t remember. It’s really exciting. It’s exciting for our family. My wife will be there, my kids will be there. My son, he hopes I win, but he also wants to see me get beat up a little bit,” Danielson told the BBC via Fightful.
“My daughter doesn’t want to see me get beat up, but she hopes I lose so that I can come home and just be a dad [laughs]. The big shift in my daughter came last year when I broke my arm. I wasn’t able to do All In last year because I had broken my arm two months before. That whole process, the first time she’d really seen Daddy hurt, and she did not like that. Shortly after that, I came back, I was back for like six weeks, and I had two fractures in my orbital bone and this stuff. She’s like, not only is Daddy away from home, he’s having these really weird, horrific injuries [laughs], so yeah, it’s been difficult for her as a child to see that kind of happen to her dad. But she’s really looking forward to it.”
By his own admission, Danielson is largely retiring because of Birdie, who does not like that her father is often away and suffering these ugly injuries as his primary source of income, with the “American Dragon” instead transitioning away full-time in-ring action with his focus instead placed on helping AEW grow as a backstage advisor and public spokesperson, assuming, of course, he actually agrees to a new deal with the promotion. That, apparently, has been a bit of an issue for Tony Khan to get locked down due the Danielson's lack of technological ability.
Bryan Danielson still doesn't have an AEW contract for an odd reason
Speaking of Bryan Danielson's contract status ahead of All In, the “American Dragon” was asked that very question in an interview with Fightful's Sean Ross Sapp and let it be known that he doesn't have a new deal largely because he's a tough man to get in contact with, as he has 4,000 unread texts and even more unread emails that might have a new AEW deal hidden away somewhere.
“Not a single person. People who really know me, know that I don’t look at my phone very much. Even for this interview, the AEW representative and my manager were reaching out to me and [my manager] ended up calling my wife, and then my wife called me to remind me that I had media this morning. It’s a blessing and a curse. It allows me to be more in the moment as my with my wife and kids and doing all these different things, but when people want to really get ahold of me, then I’m not available,” Danielson told Fightful.
“That said, right now, I have 3998 unread text messages. I’m almost at 4000. There is also a lot of missed calls. There could have been somebody in there, but that would require me to go through and look at all my missed text messages.”
While nothing is set in stone, Tony Khan has spoken pretty openly and honestly about his desire to keep Danielson in the AEW fray for the rest of his life, going so far as to suggest that if anything ever happened to him, the BD would be the first man his father should call to put together an episode of Dynamite, Rampage, or Collision. Whether or not Danielson decides to agree to a new deal, however, will largely come down to what Brie, Birdie, and Buddy decide is best for their family moving forward, as it's clear this decision belongs to more than just the “American Dragon.”
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