Terrible Wrestling Names of Late

[Evil Vito]

Originally Posted by Fox And flipping Bryan Danielson's name into Daniel Bryan... I just don't even know where to go with that. What a pointless exercise in pointless exercises, changing a guy's last name with his first name because... why? What sense does that make? None. That's what sense it makes.

You can't copyright someone's real name, and WWE likes to hold copyrights in the event that the person ends up becoming a huge success and then later gets future endeavored, so they can't use that name anymore. Very rarely do WWE bring somebody in and allow them to use their real name unless they were already highly established by working under their real name (Benwho, Guerrero, etc.) and despite what you might say, no, Bryan Danielson was in no way, shape, or form as established as those guys were to warrant such a treatment.

That promo when Daniel Bryan was eliminated from NXT about "well Daniel Bryan may be done, but Bryan Danielson has a ways to go" was more or less a cocktease. NXT seems to be geared towards the IWC anyway, so referencing his real name is sort of just a "tip of the cap". Yeah I'd love to see him continue his worked shoot promos about how he "wasn't made by the WWE machine" and decide to use his real name, but it's not going to happen.

This practice of re-naming guys so that they hold the copyright seems to have come into effect in the past few years. Cena and Batista debuted under their real names, but Swagger and Ziggler didn't. It makes you wonder - if Cena were to debut nowadays, he may have been given a new name by default.