WrestleMania Reflections: WrestleMania XXX (Pt. 1) (Patreon)

WrestleMania XXX (Pt. 1)

Mercedes-Benz Superdome

New Orleans, Louisiana

Attendance: 59,500

Randy Orton vs. Batista vs. Daniel Bryan for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship

By: Bruce Mitchell

WrestleMania XXX was the first WrestleMania to be offered on the WWE’s new streaming service, the WWE Network. Despite the fact that subscribers using this service could pay a substantially lower price to see WM than before, (thanks to the Network, many legally paid nothing to see WM, many other illegally) a surprisingly larger amount of fans than expected paid the old, much higher, pay-per-view price.

The WWE Network streaming service was originally a compromise of WWE’s aspiration to own its own cable network that would offer sports and entertainment content 24 hours a day, seven days a week on Cable TV platforms worldwide. The streaming service became superfluous when WWE swiveled from earning revenue by serving the needs of millions of wrestling consumers to earning it selling content to a few large entertainment platforms like NBCUniversal Media and Fox Broadcasting.

The WWE Network was shut down just a few days ago and WrestleMania is now a subscription drawing loss leader for NBCUniversal’s own streaming service, The Peacock Network.

WrestleMania didn’t just make its debut with this show on the WWE Network. WrestleMania XXX was part of the ongoing era (interrupted by the pandemic) in which WWE has grown the event to where it was actually several events taking place during WrestleMania Week (WM, WM Access, WWE Hall of Fame, NXT Takeover shows starting a month after WM XXX). The ability to host the Week was, and is, bid on by municipalities looking to benefit from the economic impact of the large amount of wrestling fans traveling from around the world to attend WrestleMania.

In 2014, other wrestling companies also converged on New Orleans and held their wrestling events there that week, hoping to capitalize on the amount of wrestling fans already there. Many of these companies would not have survived without the money they generated by running events WrestleMania Week. WWE understandably resented other companies piggy-backing on the economic power they drew to specific markets for WrestleMania, seeing every dollar another wrestling company earned from the fans gathered at WrestleMania as a dollar out of their pocket, and did whatever they could to discourage the practice.

Because of the guaranteed content platform contracts, WWE Creative effort is less important now to their overall business than at any other time in any wrestling company’s history. At the time of WrestleMania XXX, though, WWE Creative was at war with a large part of their fan-base, specifically the part that recognized Daniel Bryan for his main event charisma and ability to both sell strongly for his opponents and, when the time came, kick their ass.

During the decades when wrestling companies relied primarily on their ability to sell tickets to wrestling shows, those companies would react quickly to any wrestler who suddenly, for whatever reason, showed the ability to sell tickets and would almost immediately put them on bigger shows and promote them higher on the card. It was how everybody involved in the company made their money, after all. Professional wrestlers, who were independent contractors unbound by contractual obligations, would travel wherever they felt a company would make the best use of their ability to sell tickets. They honed that ability to both talk fans into arenas (the most important skill of all in those years) and excite them with their matches into coming back and bringing their friends along with them.

Professional wrestlers may have given lip service back then publicly to their championship resume, but what they valued amongst themselves was the ability to set box office records, and to get paid for doing so.

Daniel Bryan was a pro wrestling outlaw of a different sort, the leader and role model of a new generation of professional wrestlers. He saw professional wrestling as a way of expressing himself, participating in pro wrestling matches as an art unto itself, not as the art of drawing money from wrestling fans. He was part of a generation (or two) of wrestlers who saw wrestling journalism not as a betrayal, you know, Rumors and Innuendo, but as the newsletters of record. These wrestlers, like high-dollar restaurants or major motion picture producers, wanted to earn five-star ratings from respected critics, a goal separate from making money. If Daniel Bryan suffered concussions or tore up his spine flying out of the ring, well, great artists usually paid a price for their art.

WWE management and many veteran wrestlers, though, looked at Bryan’s size, his unassuming manner, his lack of regard for symbols of material success, his curiosity and interest in important issues outside the wrestling world, and didn’t want him in main events, no matter what the fans wanted. They discounted his success, the ratings his segments earned, the merchandise he sold for the company, and the overwhelming interest in his matches and sometimes deliberately embarrassing storyline. They thought his “Yes!” chant was a fluke that would work for anybody and then proved it wasn’t true a couple of times. The irony that he had the strongest babyface offense in the company despite his height was lost on them.

Daniel Bryan didn’t fit WWE’s culture so WWE Creative actively worked against him making the most money for them.

At WM XXVIII, Bryan was beaten for the WWE Championship by Sheamus in 13 seconds, because Bryan got distracted when he got kissed by, yuck, a girl right before match. Bryan was booked as a nerd uninterested in women, even though in reality he married the woman who kissed him then, who the company itself marketed as one of the most beautiful women in the world. He even got over when they booked him as the type of nerd who goes to therapy and hugs the people he’s in therapy with, and he got over just he’s Daniel Bryan.

This certainly didn’t help Sheamus, who hasn’t main-evented WM since.

I’ll never forget the look on C.M. Punk’s face, who had clearly had enough of these people, on the Seattle Raw the December before WM XXX, when Daniel Bryan’s hometown sellout crowd hijacked the show-ending segment with thunderous “Yes!” chants for their hero. WWE Creative cluelessly had booked Bryan to stand in the ring watching Randy Orton and John Cena cut a promo hyping their main event at the Royal Rumble (more on that later), a match-up fans had gotten sick and tired of years earlier. Bryan just smiled, effortlessly upstaging two main event acts who had no problem fitting the WWE business culture.

Weeks later, I watched The Royal Rumble before WM XXX at a Hooter’s with a large number of well-connected local independent wrestlers. They were all convinced that Daniel Bryan, who was not booked in the Rumble, would be a surprise entrant, win the thing, and go on to main event and win the WWE Championship at Wrestlemania XXX. They even took Bryan’s loss to the much-less over Bray Wyatt as Even-Steven booking proof DB was winning the Rumble.

You know, common sense…

I just laughed and shook my head, telling them it wasn’t going to happen, not matter how much sense it made.

When the last entrant in the Rumble turned out to be Rey Mysterio, one of the most popular wrestlers of the previous twenty years, all hope was lost and Hooter’s exploded in boos. I just kept my head down and tried to limit my “I Told You Sos.”

That visceral hatred for the direction The Road To WrestleMania was taking was shared by fans around the world and had repercussions for years to come.

This nonsense not only ruined Rey’s return, it ruined the story of the Rumble itself - the surprise return of Guardians Of The Galaxy movie star Dave Bautista. He came back to WWE to do everything fans wanted Daniel Bryan to do, heroically win the Royal Rumble and go on to the main event of WrestleMania, but between that and his skinny jeans, he had no chance.

WWE Creative were forced to change their plans for WM XXX or risk having the biggest show of the year ruined by fan reaction.

They added a match to the show where if Daniel Bryan beat WWE Management representative Triple H, Bryan would be added to the main event where Randy Orton was defending the WWE Championship against his former Evolution stablemate, Bautista.

(C’mon, Evolution vs Evolution, that’s a shoo in, right? Wrong.)

Bryan beat Triple H in a ponderous too-long Triple H style match to go on to the main event.

Daniel Bryan won the WWE World Championship in the main event at WrestleMania XXX and the fans went wild.

WWE was shameless enough to claim, for awhile at least, that booking Daniel Bryan the way they had and he getting over anyway was actually their plan from the very beginning, and that WrestleMania XXX was the happy ending to the long-term story. They even tried a few times to make new babyfaces by having fans think they weren’t being booked fairly because they lost all the time and then they’d feel sorry for them and they’d be over that way. It didn’t work, because none were Daniel Bryan.

Next: Wrestlemania XXX pt. 2 - Brock Lesnar, The Undertaker, Vince McMahon, and The Streak.