Daniel Bryan recently spoke with Reyan Ali of The Classical. You can read some highlights below.
His favorite [and least favorite] finishers: I still think the Superkick is the best finisher ever. It was just so good. There’s so many [favorites]. I think Antonio Cesaro’s finish right now is cool. I always loved the Piledriver, so an adaptation of the Piledriver is very awesome to me. I’ve always loved submission holds, so I love the Sharpshooter, that sort of thing. I love Dean Malenko’s Cloverleaf.
The things that I never really liked as finishers were the stuff that was wacky, stuff like the Von Erichs [who] did the Tornado Punch, you know what I mean? [Laughs] The Ultimate Warrior—even though he was my favorite as a kid—[had] the Press Slam, and then he’d hit the ropes a couple of times and give ’em the Big Splash, the Hulk Hogan Legdrop—stuff like that was all stuff [where] I was just like, ‘Eh.’ To be fair, I honestly always hated the Rock Bottom. To me, it was just like, ‘Uh, that’s weird and stupid.’
Being a reality TV star like The Miz: Right, but you look at Miz, and he aspires to be somebody in a reality show. That’s his thing. He wants that sort of thing. I never had any desire for it. [Laughs]
What WWE can take from UFC: Okay, so there’s a lot of things that wrestling can take from MMA. One of the things that MMA does very, very well—and boxing does this, too—is creating personality profiles leading up to big fights, like the 24/7 stuff and the UFC Countdown specials — promoting people as personalities and how they’re training and how important this particular fight is for these fighters. I think they do an incredible job with that, especially given that they don’t have the hours of TV time that we do on WWE.
