Oli Davis rounds up the biggest professional wrestling news in his daily WrestleTalk column…
Daniel Bryan and Brie Bella have won the most prestigious mixed-gender tag division prize: a human child!
Brie gave birth to their daughter Birdie Joe Danielson on Tuesday night at 11.58pm, weighing in at 8 pounds, 10 ounces and standing at a fearsome 21 inches. To put that into context, she’d be on 205 Live, not the main roster.
Brie told WWE: “I can’t even express the overwhelming joy and love that Bryan and I are feeling. Now we know what parents mean about the love you feel when you first meet your child.”
Grandpa Vince McMahon wished the couple well on Twitter:
Congratulations to Brie @BellaTwins & @WWEDanielBryan on their beautiful daughter and newest addition to the @WWE family.
— Vince McMahon (@VinceMcMahon) May 10, 2017
Sounds like you’ve signed her to a contract, Vince. That’s weird.
Daniel and Brie aren’t the only people Vince has been congratulating online, as he also tweeted a former WWE star on Tuesday.
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15 years ago today, @WWE unleashed The Animal @DaveBautista on the WWE Universe. Happy anniversary, “Drax.”
— Vince McMahon (@VinceMcMahon) May 9, 2017
The way he puts “Drax” in quotation marks makes me suspect Vince McMahon doesn’t know what a Guardians of the Galaxy actually is.
But it was Big Dave Batista’s reply that got everyone rather excited. And not just because he used a cussword:
I still have a fuck ton of unleashing left in me! Thanks for showing me the world boss! #DreamChaser https://t.co/ufoXLcdtWL
— Dave Bautista (@DaveBautista) May 9, 2017
This echoes what “Drax” told Chris Jericho on his recent Talk Is Jericho podcast appearance. Although he doesn’t miss the backstage “bulls***” of WWE, Batista revealed he’s asked Vince, Triple H and Stephanie McMahon about an in-ring return:
“I said I would come back and run a whole program with Hunter. That’s the only thing I’m interested in doing. They’re just not interested in it, you know?… It would be what I would go out on.”
Batista’s real-life best friend forever Shane McMahon has also recently appeared on a wrestling podcast, sitting down with Steve Austin on his imaginatively titled Steve Austin Show.
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In it, Austin asks about the sometimes tense atmosphere backstage in WWE, with wrestlers walking around on eggshells, afraid to try anything new – which Shane seemingly confirmed:
“I’m sure there’s some of that. The freedom to kind of try things is limited…with the territory days drying up, they never had the ability to go try it somewhere else so they don’t know…”
This is something Shane identified in the mid-00s, and tried to address with WWE relaunching the ECW brand.
“That is originally what we wanted ECW to be when we purchased it. I wrote a business plan just to be that Triple-A system because we needed guys.”
This, of course, is now called NXT. But to an extent, it’s also what Shane has fictionally created with his onscreen role as the commissioner of Smackdown Live.
“SmackDown has a lot more spontaneity than Raw. I think it’s because it’s not as regulated as much as Raw.”
Check back on Flickering Myth every day for round-ups of the biggest professional wrestling news…