AEW's Christopher Daniels Comments On Never Winning The TNA World Heavyweight Title
Daniels’ peers AJ Styles and Samoa Joe both lifted TNA’s top title
Feb 18, 2022
Christopher Daniels was one of the most popular stars during TNA’s ‘golden era’ thanks in part to the matches he put on against rivals Samoa Joe and AJ Styles.
However, unlike Styles and Joe, Daniels never lifted 'the big one', and in conversation with Chris Van Vliet, ‘The Fallen Angel’ reflected on the one time where it could have happened:
“There was really only one point where I thought it made better sense than what they decided to do," said Daniels. "There was a moment in time where Jeff Hardy wasn't able to go to the UK and I thought to myself, 'I had a match with him before we went to the UK and then we weren't going to have a world champion in the UK.' I thought, what if, instead, they put the belt on me and then I went to the UK, I could lose the championship in the UK and make a big moment for the gentleman who ended up becoming world champion at that time. It would have been a great moment. At the same time, I feel like they were building for Jeff to lose the belt to that particular person at that time. It was just a different idea. not to say my idea was better than that, but I could have seen it work.”
Unfortunately for Daniels, he said it was simply never on the cards for him to be World Champion:
“At that point, it was already sort of written," Daniels continued. "They were going in that direction and they didn't want to change it. That's fine. I don't think there was ever a moment in TNA… there was a groundswell of support that happened for me in Ring of Honor, there was never really a moment in TNA where that happened. There was a time where I would come back and have good matches and they'd put me in the ring with someone like AJ who had the belt at the time, a lot of the time, but there was never that moment where the crowd was like, 'the crowd reaction could see me getting the belt at this time from this person,' I don't think there was ever a moment where the powers that be thought 'this is where Chris Daniels should win the belt.' That's how it is. I feel like every promotion has their idea of the best path for the championship to travel. It just happened to be away from me or around me the entire time in TNA.”
H/T: Fightful