If you’ve been a fan of WWE for a while, you’ll know that the company has a little tendency to stretch the truth and rewrite history. After all, history is only ever written by the winners, and when the person with the pen in their hand is someone like Vince McMahon who literally bought his biggest competition at the start of the 21st century and ruled over wrestling like some deranged overlord, the past is always going to look favorable on WWE.

WrestleMania 30 is a prime example of this, because WWE has made it very clear that Daniel Bryan walking out of New Orleans with the WWE World Heavyweight Championship was the culmination of a two year story… except it wasn’t, not even close.

The tale WWE likes to tell is that Bryan lost the World Heavyweight Championship to Sheamus in 18 seconds at WrestleMania 28, and started his redemption arc almost overnight. The “NO!” chants that were lobbied at him were a response to the “YES!” chants that Bryan had been doing, but they organically became positive chants over time that resulted in a movement which took Bryan to the pinnacle of professional wrestling. What actually happened is very different. Bryan was always seen as a solid hand, but never a main event star. He was seen as a “internet darling,” a term WWE liked to use for anyone the fans cheered for because they worked in Ring of Honor or in Japan, rather than the fans cheering for them because they liked the wrestler’s work.

Because of this, Bryan was always positioned in and around the title picture, but was never actually going to be given the ball. It got to the point where Bryan’s “YES!” chants were what WWE thought was over and not the man himself, so the company tried to give the chants to someone they wanted in the main event scene, The Big Show. The whole “B+ Player” mantra was the one thing that was actually true about the whole thing, and let’s be honest with ourselves; had it not been for CM Punk walking out of the company, Bryan would have never won the big one at WrestleMania 30. If you need evidence for this, Punk still has the original rundown of what WrestleMania was going to look like, and he was going to face Triple H while the main event was going to be Orton vs. Batista. Where was Bryan? Wrestling Sheamus of course!

WWE has toned down on the rewriting of history somewhat in recent years as they realized that people could probably just do their own research and find out what the past actually looked like. With that said, it’s still frustrating that this is one of those situations where they bend over backwards to tell you that the company “listens to its fans,” when in reality, WWE would have bent over backwards to keep Bryan as far away from the WrestleMania 30 main event as humanly possible.