During a recent episode of “ARN”, Arn Anderson spoke on Vince McMahon firing Daniel Bryan for choking someone with a belt during the Nexus debut segment. Here’s what he had to say:
Just knowing the way things are and the way things were, those guys were given carte blanche to go and destroy everybody and everything, including the ring. Now, you’re thinking about this. This is a television, and if you tear up the announce tables and you tear up the ring, you’re gonna have some serious dead time, right? Trying to repair all that to have the rest of the show. But I’m sure these guys, and Daniel Bryan included, were told, ‘Go out there and get yourselves over. Be a vicious p*****.’ No one said — because at that time, and to this day, there’s no such thing as choking, and we know why. Don’t need to go back and relive this, but choking, a guy can fall off the top of a ladder on top of another guy, and blow that ladder that’s underneath him in half, risking getting impaled and anything else. But you can’t choke a guy. Like the audience is going to give you this tidal wave of backlash that it reverts back to something in the terrible past. I don’t think anybody puts that two and two together to make four. That’s just me.
But the second it went down and no one pre-warned the guy, I’m sure he wasn’t thinking about it. Choking had always been something that had been part of the heel’s repertoire. It just always was, and if done properly, it’s vicious. So, that went down. Before anybody knew it, the guy in the big chair [Vince McMahon] saw it and probably went ape-**** because there wasn’t — it was clear that not even grabbing a guy with one hand by the throat was allowed. But it was too late in his mind. So, I think the firing was a shoot.
This was not an angle. I think he got fired off of the choking because of the PG product and what he thought — this was a preventive strike. Vince thought there was going to be this windfall coming, so he fired the guy. And the only reason Daniel Bryan was brought back was because it was such a lousy thing to do, for him to be held responsible and lose his job over that when nobody told him not to do it. Most guys weren’t even aware that that rule existed. They were all told, but it wasn’t something that was right in their pre-frontal lobe every minute of every match, it could’ve happened, and it did happen. And I think the only reason that Daniel Bryan was brought back was because of the groundswell of the audience that were pulling for him, legitimately pulling for him. They knew he got screwed, and they wanted him back, and that’s the reason he came back and the only reason.
I never thought about it. I was sitting in the back. But when I saw things melting down in gorilla, I was backstage and from a distance, I was eyeballing this thing. I could see that it was a serious deal. And he blank look on Daniel Bryan’s face told me he had no idea that he had done anything wrong. He had certainly not done anything wrong on purpose. He was just sitting there with his eyes bugged out of his head going, ‘What did I do? What did I do?’ He wasn’t saying that, but if a VH1 bubble popped up in his head, that’s what it would say. ‘What did I do wrong, I just did what I was told.
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Credit: ARN. H/T 411Mania.
