The Miz has shared new details about his legendary WWE Talking Smack confrontation with Daniel Bryan, which hits its tenth anniversary this month.
Speaking with Graham “GSM” Matthews on WrestleRant Radio, Miz revealed that he and Bryan had only a matter of seconds to talk before the segment aired.
The now-iconic promo took place on August 23, 2016. Earlier that night, Daniel Bryan and Shane McMahon unveiled the SmackDown Women’s and SmackDown Tag Team Championships, while Miz, despite holding the Intercontinental Championship, had been slotted into nothing more than a dark match.
Miz walked through the full backstory of the segment.
“I was mad at the fact I got taken to SmackDown and they weren’t using me, as the Intercontinental Champion, and they were like ‘hey, you have a dark match today’, and I go ‘wait, I’m not on the show?’ And they’re like ‘no, you’re the warm-up match.'”
“And I go ‘wait a second, what are we doing on the show?’ They’re like ‘we’re introducing two new titles’, what about this title? What about the title that has mattered to me since I was a child?”
“Then I went to Road Dogg and I was like ‘put me on Talking Smack’. He’s like ‘why do you wanna be on Talking Smack?’. It’s a brand new show. I was like ‘put me on Talking Smack. Daniel Bryan’s the General Manager, I’m going to take it out on him’.”
“Then literally Daniel and I talked for maybe like a minute. Not even, like 30 seconds. Hey, we’re going to do this. We don’t know what the finish is, let’s just go off and see what happens, and that’s what happened.”
During the segment, Bryan called Miz a coward over his safer in-ring style, prompting the then-champion to fire back with the promo that became the defining moment of that Talking Smack episode.
Two years later, after being cleared to compete again, Bryan finally met Miz at SummerSlam 2018, where Miz picked up the win.