CM Punk is coming back.
CM Punk is never coming back.
CM Punk is coming back.
The issues haven’t been resolved.
Maybe the issues have been resolved.
CM Punk is not coming back.
CM Punk's return imminent.
Hey look, it’s every wrestling website’s reporting since Labor Day!
Since deciding to do whatever this is again, I’ve been putting off writing about CM Punk because the rumors change from day to day, the vibe changes from day to day, and what the wrestlers themselves say changes day to day. Anything I can add is going to be pure speculation or me, a person with no knowledge of the inner workings of AEW outside of what they choose to show me on their fake reality show, telling grown ass adults how to do their jobs.
I don’t think most locker rooms have an HR department? Surely the companies themselves do, obviously AEW and WWE are massive companies with a lot of employees (excuse me, non-independent contractors), so I suspect there’s some kind of HR, but I assume they only get involved in the locker room if it’s REAL bad and the company stands to lose money.
I can’t imagine a job I’d want less than HR Manager, let alone HR Manager for professional wrestlers. There are a lot of egos, a lot of drama, a lot of hurt feelings, and a lot of self-policing. At the end of the day, wrestling is two or more people having to trust someone else with their health and safety. I’d have to be real close with someone before I let them hit me with a flipping piledriver off a ladder in the ring to the floor with only a couple catering tables to break my fall. That’s a level of trust that goes far beyond letting them water your plants when you're on vacation. So I can certainly understand the hesitation when two very big, very fragile egos don’t want to play nice with each other.
But come on already. It’s been eight months of this over some dudes going off on each other over… I’m still not sure what, exactly? CM Punk shouldn’t have acted the way he did at the All Out scrum press conference and whatever happened in the aftermath shouldn’t have happened either. Surely all of this can be chalked up to a guy who got burned really bad by his previous employer getting paranoid it was happening again by a start-up company still figuring their own shit out?
Say what you will about Vince McMahon (I have and will continue to do so), but this wouldn’t have happened on his watch. Edge was boinking Matt Hardy’s girlfriend and leaving her voicemails in the middle of the night and they turned it into a storyline! A good one! And Vince told them both if they tried going into business for themselves, they’d never work again. Edge and Matt Hardy have worked together on and off since then for damn near 20 years. Bret and Shawn hugged it out. Paul Heyman works with guys he probably still owes money to. Bruno Sammartino came back. Everyone comes back in wrestling - CM PUNK CAME BACK TO WRESTLING! And it was really great until it wasn’t, but why let one bad night ruin the whole thing?
Guns n Roses reunited. David Lee Roth reunited with Van Halen! Veruca Salt, whose breakup apparently made GnR look like a preschool fight, they reunited!
I’ve been hearing “well CM Punk and The Elite can’t work together, but maybe AEW will split the rosters on this new TBS show they’re working on…” no. No more roster splits in wrestling. If AEW is adding another show, okay neat, but we don’t need the AEW roster split between Dynamite, a new mystery show, ROH, and having folks still working Dark, Elevation, and Rampage. AEW is about to put 50,000+ seats in Wembley Stadium: they need a cohesive vision, not some guys here and some guys there and these guys down here, but also here. If CM Punk and The Elite can’t work together, you have two options: 1. Make them work together. 2. Don’t bring him back. That’s it. Those are your options.
“How do you make these egos work together?” MONEY! Give them money! There are a lot of things I haven’t loved doing that I have done for money… like working for the last 21 years. That has really fucking sucked, but ya know, I do it for money that I can exchange for goods and services that make me hate that aspect of my life a little less. Throw some money their way and make more of it with what will be the hottest storyline in wrestling since the nWo. Why? Because it’s real and that’s what we all want: to believe it’s real for 20 minutes.
Not bringing Punk back just feels like leaving bags of money on the table, not to mention eating the cost of what is surely a very hefty contract. Are you running the risk of him doing something like All Out again? Maybe! But not doing it is running the risk of losing metric fucktons of money. Temporary embarrassment versus a Scrooge McDuck vault of cash to swim around in doesn't exactly seem like a particularly difficult decision.
We’re human. We make mistakes, we lose our cool, we say things we don’t mean, we fight with people we love, we work with people we hate, occasionally we bite another man’s forearm. And us marks are chomping at the bit (pun intended) to watch them all hug it out or beat the shit out of each other. And if you claim you don’t want to see that, you’re lying. Sorry, you just are.
Let’s all crack open a beer (or a Pepsi) and enjoy the show.