Posted in: Movies, Sports, TV, WWE | Tagged: Cody Rhodes, daniel bryan, ring of honor, wrasslin, wrestling, wwe
Daniel Bryan Wants To Fight Cody Rhodes For The Ring Of Honor Title In September, 2018
Fans hoping for "retired" WWE Superstar Daniel Bryan to return to the wrestling ring may get their wish next year. Though Bryan retired from in-ring in 2016 after medical tests revealed he had suffered a brain lesion as a result of concussions that happened while wrestling, Bryan was cleared to wrestle again by basically every doctor he saw except for WWE's medical team.
Of course, WWE's medical director is Doctor Joseph Maroon. Also a doctor for the NFL, Maroon is one of the co-creators of ImPACT, described as "the first computerized system to determine concussion severity and the timing for return to contact sports." Maroon was depicted in the 2015 Will Smith movie Concussion as one of the people attempting to deny that concussions incurred by football players leads to CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease that many NFL athletes (and wrestlers) suffer from later in life. Under the spotlight, Maroon and WWE are likely to always err on the side of caution, which means they'll never clear Daniel Bryan to wrestle again.
But when Bryan's WWE contract runs out, he has hinted that he would consider wrestling somewhere other than WWE. "I understand why they won't let me wrestle," Bryan said just last month. "It's a liability thing. It's also that they're trying to protect me and that sort of thing. But there's good reason to believe that I should be able to wrestle. So we'll see in a year and a half what happens."
Saturday on Twitter, Bryan dropped a hint about what we might see in a year and a half after congratulating Cody Rhodes on his Ring of Honor World Championship victory Friday:
It could be that Bryan is merely joking about coming for Rhodes if he breaks his record. But it's also entirely possible that Bryan has just begun booking his own return to Ring of Honor once his WWE contract is up, provided Rhodes can hold onto the belt.
And now, a preview of what's to come: