WWE’s Daniel Bryan Returns To New Orleans For Wrestlemania

If you're a big WWE fan, you probably already know the story, but if you're not a huge fan, you might not be totally familiar with the YES Movement. Now since it's Wrestlemania season, and the big show is happening in our state, there are a lot of former wrestling fans, or low key wrestling fans, who will be paying attention to this.

Daniel Bryan is one of the best stories in recent WWE history. He's an undersized wrestler who worked his butt off through the smallest of pro wrestling promotions across the country to get to the WWE (since the WWE is the biggest pro wrestling company in the world).

But once he got there, it wasn't everything he'd dreamed. He was fired early on (not in a story line, he was legit fired), and was stranded in the mid-card range for years. But then something changed. He kept working, and pushing, and connecting with fans. Which brought him up to the Championship level.

Check out this promo video on his evolution:

So you get the idea, now that he's at the top, the management is doing everything they can to keep him down. He has every crowd behind him, but they still won't let him have a legit chance to win the Championship.

So when Wrestlemania 30 rolled into New Orleans, he was given a chance to win. But he had to beat three of the biggest Champions in WWE history.

The first of those three matches was against his boss, Triple H. Here are the highlights of that:

So after he scores that win, and the beat down that followed, he still needs to beat two more guys to win the Championship. Here's how that one went:

Spoiler alert, Bryan beats both and wins the Championship. Here's a shorter version if you don't have all day:

So how did the crowd feel? If you couldn't tell by the chants, this was one of the greatest crowd moments ever. Based on the way this story happened, the crowd truly felt like they were responsible for a part of this success, and they shared in it. Here are the chants from the night after that win:

But, there were troubling times ahead.

Bryan continued to wrestle for WWE a couple of years, but nagging injuries, and something far more serious was coming up on Bryan.

After years of pro wrestling, Bryan has suffered enough head trauma to cause serious brain issues. So then the point came in February of 2016 that Bryan finally had to come to grips with what doctors were telling him...he wasn't going to be able to wrestle again. So in front of his home crowd, he entered the ring, in front of his family, and retired from in-ring competition.

Not even a full two years after one of the best nights in pro wrestling history, the man at the center of it was being forced to walk away.

Now Bryan had become so big inside the WWE, that he wasn't pushed off completely. He was kept on-board as an on-screen authority figure. He was named on-screen General Manager for WWE's Smackdown

While he was in this role, he continued to get testing done on his brain. Through that testing, doctors had seen enough progress being made, that they felt confident that Bryan was well enough to return to in-ring action. Which he was able to announce just a few weeks ago

After he was cleared, the next part of the story had to be "when would he return?" Which was something that Bryan addressed pretty quickly after that. Announcing a challenge to a pair of WWE Superstars to meet himself and Shane McMahon at Wrestlemania 34.

Which sets up to have the two biggest moments of Daniel Bryan's career to both take place in the same city, and the same event. By winning the Championship at Wrestlemania 30 in New Orleans, Daniel Bryan set a mark for his career to be remembered by. But now, with this return on the horizon, it would appear that he may be able to surpass that.