The 29th annual WWE Summerslam pay-per-view will be taking place this Sunday from Brooklyn, New York. Recently, the SmackDown Live general manager Daniel Bryan took part in a question-answer session with Yahoo Sports to promote this upcoming event.
Earlier this year, the former World Champion had to retire from pro-wrestling due to medical reasons. When asked about his desires to get back into wrestling, Bryan revealed that he still gets an itch about it :
“It’s kind of hurt it. It’s not the traveling part of it … I was doing OK, right. I was like, OK, this isn’t my jam anymore, I can’t do this. Until they had me sit out by ringside for a couple of matches and it’s just like, c’mon, I’m ready to go. That’s the hard part. Or when I go out to the arena and get such a great reaction. That’s when I want to wrestle.”
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Apart from the duties of being a general manager, Bryan is also the host of the WWE Cruiserweight Classic. This is the first time when he has been involved in a broadcasting role. During this interview, Daniel mentioned his biggest challenge as a commentator :
“For me, it’s trying to keep my voice up. So [last] Wednesday, there was an amazing match between Cedric Alexander and Kota Ibushi. We filmed three tapings in a row that day and that was the main event of the first taping. I was so excited calling the match that I lost my voice completely and then I had to do two more hours of calling matches. Mauro [Ranallo] is great because he’s trained to do that. My voice isn’t trained for it. I can only talk for so long before my voice just goes out. That’s been the hard part but the “Cruiserweight Classic” has been a blast.”
Although he is a ‘small’ wrestler, Bryan had huge success in the company. Still, he doesn’t consider himself as a reason behind the recent success of the smaller wrestlers in WWE :
“I think it was a natural evolution. I think what’s happened is there’s so many hours of TV that’s put out there that people who are more exciting in the ring are going to be the ones that become more popular. Because of “RAW” being three hours and “SmackDown” two hours, there has to be more matches and longer matches. Smaller wrestlers are built for more exciting matches.”