Bryan Danielson recalls Hunter Pence leading a “Yes!” chant during the 2014 World Series Victory Parade for the San Francisco Giants.
Bryan Danielson, when he went to WWE in 2010, knew that one aspect of his performance he wanted to work on was character building and promo work. Bryan Danielson was always regarded as one of the best wrestlers in the world before he got to WWE, but he wanted to make sure he would be able to hang in all aspects of the game within the sports entertainment juggernaut.
Eventually, Daniel Bryan would begin obnoxiously chanting “Yes!” during his brief time as a heel in 2011, and eventually, those chants would become associated with his WWE run and took on a life of their own.
The “Yes!” chants, which Bryan Danielson says he took from UFC fighter Diego Sanchez, would eventually pick up steam outside of the world's WWE, and Hunter Pence even lead one of the chants, alongside Bryan, during the San Francisco Giants’ World Series Victory Parade in 2014. WWE didn't air footage of that on WWE Raw.
The belt!! The dream!! Thank you @WWEDanielBryan and @WWE! #Yes pic.twitter.com/u4X9fE4av8
— Hunter Pence (@hunterpence) October 31, 2014
Bryan Danielson spoke about Hunter Pence gravitating towards the chants during a recent appearance on Wrestling Observer Radio. Danielson says he doesn't understand why WWE didn't do more to run with the publicity they could have garnered from embracing that.
"Hunter Pence had no idea it was from me, let alone that I got it from Diego Sanchez. It wasn't like he was a big fan. He was like, 'Yeah, that thing is really cool. Thanks.' It's not like we exchanged numbers or anything. That was kind of all there was to it. The interesting to me about that is, you have the World Series Champions doing the 'Yes!' chant and they didn't really make mention of it on (WWE) TV, which I thought was a bit...there weren't many times where I felt like WWE didn't have my back, but that was one of the things where I was like, 'If the World Series Champions were doing John Cena's 'You Can't See Me,' you would see so much of it,'" said Danielson.
At the time, Bryan Danielson was away from the ring with injury and preparing to return for what would be the final run of the first portion of his career before retiring for 3 years. Daniel Bryan recalls being exhausted after being at the parade leading "Yes!" chants.
"Earlier that year, I had to have neck surgery, so that was during the time off. I had a conversation where it was like, 'We'd like to do, but then we'd like this to happen.' It almost felt like 'Oh,' 'Then you're just going to go back to being whatever you were before.' 'Oh, that's interesting.' People think that was my entire relationship with WWE and it wasn't I ended up developing, what I felt like was a close bond with Vince. A lot of it was the forced retirement and coming out of it, it was a lot of stuff for me, but also them. That kind of stuff brings you closer. I had a couple of those in that period where I felt like, 'they may be trying to suppress me getting over,' but then all of that kind of went away and it didn't feel like that at all anymore. That was one thing I really remembered from the parade, and my arms being very tired because I had to do the 'Yes!' chant throughout the entire parade and whenever I stopped, there was somebody there to nudge me on like, 'People want to see the Yes Guy do the Yes Thing, so if you stop raising your arms up and down,' do you know how hard it is to do this for an hour?"
These days, Bryan Danielson is in All Elite Wrestling and makes a conscious effort to not lead the audience in any “Yes!” chanting. Learn more about that at this link.
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