Though he has since become one of the true pillars of the promotion, when AEW started, Bryan Danielson was widely known as Daniel Bryan, the former Universal Champion who had just returned to action for WWE after a two-year forced retirement.
Discussing what it was like to see the promotion transform from a single event to a traveling Pay-Per-View-only showcase of indie wrestlers, to eventually a weekly stalwart of TBS and TNT, Danielson noted that, among the boys and girls in the WWE locker room, the prevailing hope was that Tony Khan's startup would be successful, as it could only make things better for the promotion as a whole.
“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 s**t. 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,” Bryan Danielson said at SXSW via Fightful.
“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.”
Since All In and the first ever AEW-branded show All Out, the promotion has cycled through hundreds of wrestlers, some local talents for a show or two on Dark, and others like Danielson, who are among the very best performers at their craft in the world today. Considering the three biggest free agents of recent memory just signed deals with AEW despite drawing interest from WWE, it's safe to say that initial hope has been made good on dozens of times over.
Chris Jericho's current AEW output is all about elevating young stars.
Speaking of WWE veterans who have taken their talents to AEW, Chris Jericho was recently a guest on Gabby AF and was asked about his current programs with the Don Callis Family and with Hook, the son of his fellow ECW alumni Taz.
While some have given Jericho a hard time for always globbing onto the hot young talents in AEW, for “The Ocho,” the push isn't so much about getting himself more over but instead helping to elevate the promotion's ascending stars under his spotlight.
“Things got kind of thrown into a loop, storyline-wise, when Kenny got sick. You do the best you can when you have to switch midstream. We kind of did the best we could with the Don Callis story, and then it was time to go into something new. The idea of working with HOOK was something I thought about for a while. It just seemed to fit with the match that we had at Revolution with the eight-man scramble and HOOK was in that. I thought, ‘let's do something with this.' The story is just beginning. I think we have good ideas and good stuff going on,” Chris Jericho told Gabby AF via Fightful.
“That's kind of what my mission in AEW has been since day one; do the best I can to elevate the younger guys. Contrary to popular belief, it usually works. Most of the time, when people work with me, they end up on a higher platform than they were prior. If you look at Orange Cassidy, Darby Allin, MJF, Hobbs [Will Hobbs], Takeshita [Konosuke Takeshita], guys in the Inner Circle, the Jericho Appreciation Society. Look at Daniel Garcia now compared to where he was a year ago. HOOK is another guy we've done a lot with, I think we can do some more with, add some depth to him, and give him a little more experience. You're only as good as the guys you're in the ring with. If you look at HOOK vs. Samoa Joe, that's probably the best match he's ever had because Joe has such experience. With the experience that I have, working with HOOK, and his persona is so unique, I think he's lighting in a bottle and something we can really get to the next level and that's what my idea is for this story.”
Could Jericho be fibbing? Is it possible he really does just want to remain relevant and has to find new ways to do so now that his Inner Circle storyline is no longer AEW's main event focalpoint? That is 100 percent possible, but if that truly was the case, why isn't Jericho working a legacy program with Rob Van Dam or pushing for title matches against Christian Cage, another former WWE star? No, even if it doesn't always read as altruistic to every fan of professional wrestling, it does seem like Jericho's heart is in the right place, even if getting himself over is a nice perk of that generosity.
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