One of the most influential wrestlers in WWE and AEW history could have turned it all down to work at Butlin’s.
Despite becoming a multiple-time world champion, Bryan Danielson – known to WWE fans as Daniel Bryan – admitted he would have been happy to ignore global fame and continue performing at holiday camps across the UK.
“I used to love doing Butlins tours with Brian Dixon.” Metro said exclusively. “I like to tell people, if Brian Dixon paid me a little more, I would never leave.
“I’d still be at Butlins now, just as if I were doing my job!”
Danielson’s wrestling rival, Nigel McGuinness, has previously spoken about his one-night-only appearance as Fake Kane at Holiday Camps, and Danielson recalled his early days in that ring.
“I’ve wrestled a lot of fake wrestlers on the Battalions tours,” he laughed during a chat in London before winning the AEW World Championship at Wembley Stadium in August.
He added: “I used to go out there most of the time, wearing the American Dragon mask that I first started with. And singing the American national anthem, but I forgot the words… It was so much fun!”
“It was weird, because the embarrassing things to me are the absolutely bad things,” he explained.
“While Nigel thought that playing Ken on Butlin’ was like, ‘Oh, this is the lowest point in my career’, if you had asked me to play Ken on Butlin’ I would have said, ‘Oh, that’s great!'”
“I had never done a 619 before, and just because I was wearing a mask, [Gangrel’s] “Hey, I bet they’d really like 619, give me 619,” he said.
“He was in the ring.” [when] That said…I didn’t know if I could do it. And go!
Danielson admitted that he was never “bothered” by moments that were “just fun,” but he would be more embarrassed by “really bad” times in the ring.
“A lot of his songs are about being on the road,” he explained. “It’s an internal feeling, like it meshes well with what’s going on in my heart.”
Although there are fond memories of his time in the UK over the years – including William Regal bantering before a match in Birmingham in 2011 – August was the first time he had performed in the country since 2019.
“In the UK, fans don’t want to say any better than that,” he said with a laugh. “Let’s just say they’re really fun.”
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