Is being the greatest professional wrestler of all time about how much you can draw? How many arenas you can sell out? How large the attendance is?
Is it about how well you can talk? How good you can wrestle? How many decades you’ve performed?
To be a great wrestler, you have to make people believe. To believe that you can overcome the odds, to believe that you can get through every hurdle possible to achieve victory. To make people believe that you will end with your arms raised. To be the greatest professional wrestler of all time, you have to be able to do that better than anyone else ever has, or will, and then do even more.
Bryan Danielson is the greatest professional wrestler of all time.
He has done this exact match so many times. An iron man match, a match that goes to a draw. Really, it’s a staple of what defines Danielson, especially prior to his run in WWE, but still, this match with MJF is different. There is no true “formula” for a Danielson match. You can pick up and notice things that have been done in his matches before, yet there is still an unpredictability about every time he steps into the ring.
At the beginning of the match, he starts overconfident, assure of the moniker that his career has been defined by – “Best in the World” – after all, he defeated an arrangement of some of the world’s top athletes of different styles to get to this point. He can wrestle against a lucha libre style, he can wrestle against a hard-hitting style, he can wrestle that mat-based style. However, he finds himself against an unpredictable opponent in MJF – someone he’s never faced before.
And as the match goes on with the minutes ticking down, Danielson begins to learn and adapt to his opponent’s moves. MJF’s knee is a focal point that the “American Dragon” meticulously targets following an impressive landing of a springboard moonsault to the outside that pinches his opponent’s knee.
Throughout his career, Danielson has acquired a variety of different moves that he can end a match with, and every single one makes you believe that he can defeat MJF and become the world champion. Pressure is nothing to him, he once beat every active member of Evolution on his quest to become WWE World Heavyweight Champion at WrestleMania. He knows what it takes, but this isn’t WWE.
AEW established itself as much edgier, and just three matches before was a brutal Texas deathmatch between two of the company’s best. Barbed wire, bricks, blood. That last one is something that the “American Dragon” loves spilling, whether it’s himself or his opponent. He viciously pulled Nigel McGuinness towards him and right into the ring post, he had his retina detached by Takeshi Morishima and continued to wrestle another fifteen minutes. Danielson is not afraid.
Although he has the advantage early on by hitting the running knee to make it 1-0 in the sixty-minute iron man match, the dirty tricks up the sleeve of his cunning opponent bring the score up to 2-2. The challenger is no stranger to using the same strategies to get a win or advantage, getting himself counted out in order to retain his ROH World Championship against, again, Nigel McGuinness in 2006.
Yet the fire of the Dragon burns deep, and every step of the way, every minute, the crowd cheers him on. He can’t be cocky any longer, but he can adapt, develop, and understand his opponent now that he’s in an underdog position that he’s been in multiple times.
This is where you truly begin to believe in Danielson. He has been cut open, and so has MJF, he has kicked out of so much, escaped so much, but he won’t give up because he is the “American Dragon.” A career made out of proving time and time again, no matter how big or small the venue is, that he is the best that professional wrestling has. A crowd erupts in roars as Danielson locks in a simple single-leg Boston Crab onto his opponent’s injured leg that he has continuously targeted. MJF escapes somehow, is met with a Busaiku Knee, and kicked out.
As the last five minutes of the match come into play, the score is 3 apiece, and either competitor needs one fall to win. They hit back and forth and MJF starts crying – a moment of weakness that the challenger responds to by just laughing. MJF throughout the course of the match has learned who Bryan Danielson really is. He was given this name by wrestling spectators all over the world for a reason. MJF, to his credit, has been an incredible foil for Danielson and is a great wrestler – he hits a jumping tombstone piledriver from the top rope that incapacitates the two momentarily.
Danielson gets MJF into a single-leg Boston Crab, and the audience cheers through every fiber of their being, they believe in Bryan Danielson. MJF taps, but only after the time limit expires, a move that feels very Danielson-esque of his time in the independent scene. The match ends in a draw – in classic “American Dragon” fashion. But that isn’t the case for long, as Tony Khan has the match restarted in sudden death.
However MJF can’t recuperate for long, and overtime starts with the champion having little time to prepare, sitting on the floor, scared, shocked, and vulnerable. Danielson is on his feet smiling.
MJF pushes the ref into the corner, but the referee pushes him back and the champion finds himself in a rollup by Danielson, another way that the Dragon has won matches and championships in the past.MJF kicks out, then as the challenger tries to hit another move, MJF pushes himself into the referee and low-blows Danielson behind the referee’s (well, his own) back. The champion does a roll-up of his own. Danielson kicks out.
MJF is desperate, grabbing the title and fooling the referee so that the distraction allows him to get out the Diamond Ring. Instead, he walks straight into Reverse-Rana, a move not particularly known to be part of the moveset of Danielson.
With the champion now stunned, the “American” Dragon begins to crawl to the corner. In this moment, he forgets his own promise to not carry over the “Yes!” chant from WWE – the underdog roots of Daniel Bryan spill all the way out, the entire crowd chanting “Yes!” in unison, just as they did when Bryan faced Bray Wyatt in the steel cage match. It’s as though time goes back ten years, the Daniel Bryan that was never meant to win has the full support of the crowd against a desperate and dastardly opponent while he sports grown hair and a long beard.
The crowd shouting along loudly 1-2… kickout. The “American Dragon” takes almost no time to breathe and targets the champion’s leg before putting him on his back into a leg submission whilst the referee confiscates the diamond ring from MJF’s finger and MJF refuses with all his might to give up. With no way to cheat, and an entire leg lock on the champion, the world believes in Bryan Danielson. MJF gets to the ropes and begins tapping, but it doesn’t count – and Danielson thinks he’s won.
The champion falls out of the ring and gets the oxygen tank out from underneath the squared circle, hitting the unsuspecting Danielson with it then getting back into the ring and applying Dragon’s own Lebell lock.
Referee Bryce Remsburg commences the count with the arms to see if Danielson is out. 1… 2… and Danielson holds on, to an eruption of cheers. Another “Yes!” chant breaks out. The world believes in Bryan Danielson.
Even with the entire world fully in support of the “American Dragon,” he has no choice but to tap, and MJF retains his championship.
Bryan Danielson is a one-of-a-kind professional wrestler. There is no one in the world who can compare to what he is able to achieve once he enters that ring or goes up against a camera. This iron man match against MJF – it’s almost like an ending.
The Dynamite following Revolution saw him cut an emotional promo about wanting to go home. And truth be told, if Danielson had decided to announce his retirement right there – who could blame him?
The “American Dragon” has nothing to prove to anyone anymore. His match at Revolution was a masterclass and highlighted what a complete performer Danielson is. From his legendary run in the independent scenes across the world, to fighting Jushin Liger, Marufuji, Morishima, KENTA, and his intense rivalry with Nigel McGuinness, to defying the odds to win the WWE World Heavyweight Championship by defeating all active members of Evolution, having a thirty-minute draw with Kenny Omega all the way to his match with MJF.
The Heart of the Dragon has always beaten for professional wrestling, and for twenty-four years he has gone out time and time again, showing the world in venues one phrase that will forever ring true:
Bryan Danielson is the greatest professional wrestler of all time.
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