Other than the whiplash awful vibes of CM Punk’s WWE return promo, I’ve missed most of what is likely the coda of the career of one of the most important wrestlers to my conception of wrestling — bits and pieces on social media, nothing in full. I was never going to be the audience for this run, the surprise of which has more to do with the spectacular way his AEW tenure ended than his making amends with a wrestling promotion that always seems to find a way to make money amends with its biggest stars no matter how bad the breakup was, but any curiosity I had about how he’d fare completely dissipated when he said “I’m not here to make friends, I’m here to make money.” I don’t care about the state of CM Punk’s personal life, who he has or hasn’t made up with backstage, but when an artist says they’re only working somewhere for the money, I tend to take them at their word: forget about making friends, does this motherfucker want to make art?
I know the answer is “yeah, probably,” and if I ever go back to watch the Hell in a Cell match against Drew McIntire I’ll probably enjoy it, but I’m being honest when I say that I only watched CM Punk vs. Seth Rollins because I set up a new TV last night and have a borrowed Netflix password. Seth Rollins vs. CM Punk was never my dream match, but it held enough interest to see me through a television program that is completely alien to me, the Triple H era of Raw, now in tones of black and chrome as a rejoinder to the day Vince McMahon visited the Performance Center and smashed up NXT while Paul Levesque was in the hospital, jettisoning the black and gold in favor of the white and paint-spatter. It’s a perfect main event for this sort of thing, a wrestler Levesque championed against one he made good with and welcomed back amidst controversy. A healing moment for the denizens of Hell.
The friction you might expect from such a pairing has been the calling card of Punk’s WWE run thus far. 14-months in, fans seem much more willing to go along with his “I love this place and you guys” AEW babyface routine than they were at the start, but he was only in WWE because he was fired for fighting another wrestler before the biggest show in AEW history — you kind of have to acknowledge that. Maybe he’d be past this point without the injury he incurred at the Royal Rumble last year, but Levesque isn’t a booker who jettisons stories quickly, so here we are, a year into Punk’s mostly-quiet WWE tenure, and wrestlers who may or may not have legitimate personal/professional gripes with Punk are still acting as a sounding board, airing out tired grievances on behalf of a fanbase who maybe didn’t want him back at first but clearly does now. That material was a big part of Punk’s AEW run, most infamously during the build to Punk vs. Adam Page. That’s the point, and I know it only feels truly uninspired if you’re in the small sliver of the WWE Universe that watches AEW, but whenever you get to talking about a battle for WWE’s soul you have to ask yourself what WWE’s soul is, and I don’t think they’ve had one, kayfabe or otherwise, since 2014.
Still, it sounds nice, the story of a wrestler who used to idolize Punk finding himself wounded by his departure and rising in his absence, only for the fans to welcome Punk back with open arms nearly a decade later. A little ridiculous when Michael Cole is summarizing it as Punk going to “other companies” and “speaking harshly” about WWE, but no more ridiculous than trotting Hulk Hogan out on January 6th to repeat his routine from the Republican National Convention while Jimmy Hart waved an enormous American flag. The issue is that it’s a nice story for a wrestling promotion, and for whatever improvements WWE has made since the ouster of Vince McMahon, no matter how many times they say “wrestling” on the air now, WWE is more of a content mill than it is a wrestling promotion, and the hollowness of making content hangs over this match like a cloud, beginning with two plot points regurgitated from Punk’s feud against MJF: the “you’re just a CM Punk fan” line and the reemergence of his ROH ring jacket. Sure, Punk and Rollins both come from Ring of Honor other companies and Rollins’ tried out for the ROH Wrestling Academy CM Punk’s Wrestling School, but it’s an empty gesture pointing at the biggest problem here: neither man is particularly hungry for anything at this point in their careers.
Though it turns out to have not been great in the long-run, whenever Eddie Kingston or Adam Page or Jon Moxley popped off on Punk, there was a real edge to it, a conviction that gave each successive angle more bite, which made the matches feel like a real purging of emotion. Big CM Punk matches are often promoted as ideological battlegrounds as much as physical ones, but there’s an absurd number of moments you can pluck from the chaos of Punk’s time in AEW where there are no right answers to the questions he and his opponents posed, no certain outcome to the match itself, some real lightning-in-a-bottle stuff that will define this era of wrestling. Import those themes into WWE and the vibe is two guys doing business.
That said, business is pretty good. I’m not a fan of Rollins, but he is unquestionably capable, and Punk has lost none of his skill in structuring his work, particularly his TV matches. I doubt Punk will wrestle in many singles matches on free(ish) TV, let alone ones with build, so seeing him in a format he has absolutely mastered on WWE television is novel and fun, especially once they get past the meaningless melodrama between Rollins and the referee and let the wrestling tell the story.
The one they choose to tell, wisely, is less grounded in personal issues and battles for the soul of WWE than Michael Cole’s commentary suggests. For all the history between Punk and Rollins, this is their second-ever singles match, and in the decade-plus since Punk beat Rollins in his third-to-last WWE singles match, Rollins has emerged, at least in character, as the de facto in-ring ace of the company, the Best in the World if you will. To prove it, he needs to beat the guy who prints “Best in the World” on all of his t-shirts. It’s dead simple, exactly the right speed for the first actual match of the feud, and it allows WWE to execute its historically successful “first show a new era” playbook of going heavy on clean, feel-good babyface wins.
There’s a nice physicality between the two that’s established early on with Seth laying in some nice clotheslines against the ropes and shoving Punk hard enough into the pillowy barricades that aren’t displaying ads on the hard camera to make it count. Punk’s way of showing you how much this match means to him is to fly around a lot more than you think he would at this stage in his career, his not-quite-graceful use of dives and springboards upping the ante immediately after he takes a big spill and lending a sense of urgency to a brief visit to the front row with a barroom double axehandle off the barricade.
Back in the ring, Rollins goes after Punk’s neck, hammering at it to slip an early GTS attempt and pressing the attack in the corner with some mean bootscrapes that, unfortunately, results in more chatter between Rollins and Zapata. Punk explodes after that with a big boot and it’s off to the races from there, Punk busting out a top rope swinging neckbreaker. Punk is great in control just after that, measuring Rollins with kicks and jabs from probing distance, keeping himself far enough away from Rollins that he won’t catch one in turn, but keeping him close enough to sting Seth. When Punk picks a limb — the knee in one exchange, the neck for the most part — his attack is more precise and technical. It’s early, but you can tell based on temperament alone that Punk is just flat outwrestling Rollins.
Whenever it comes to the question of who is wrestling the better match, the answer is pretty handily Punk. Rollins is operating on emotion, and there are moments when that works in his favor, but wrestling matches like this one are less about a singular explosive moment and more about cumulative punishment endured over a significant length, and Punk’s strategy is more effective, less prone to slip-ups. He wants to leave no doubt as to who the better man is. Rollins maybe has a doubt or two. One mindset sees Rollins taunt Punk after hitting the GTS, the other sees Punk cover Rollins immediately after hitting a stomp.
The finish sees Punk depart from that game plan and get caught. Suckered into a strike exchange, Rollins quickly takes over and hits him with a buckle bomb/stomp combo for two, essentially leveling the field, first guy to hit something big takes it home. That ends up being Punk, who at this late stage is still with it enough to recognize that Rollins follows his superplex with falcon arrow, countering it with a GTS. Punk drops to his knees and Rollins rebounds off the ropes rather than crumbling to the canvas, stumbling into Punk and ending up draped across his shoulders as a consequence. The second GTS seals it for CM Punk, both a definitive victory and something of a happy accident.
I actually liked this match a little more my second time through — Zapata’s involvement minimizes itself when it doesn’t affect the finish, and even if I think that caring about WWE This Business and bringing the ROH battlejacket out is straight cornball bullshit, none of that baggage matters once the bell rings. In the end this isn’t about CM Punk speaking harshly about WWE some kid from Iowa taking on his idol, it’s a dude who said he was the absolute best the WWE had to offer for the past 10 years getting chippy with his betters and finding out that while he may be good, he’s not the Best in the World. These motherfuckers made art, and have given themselves the runway necessary to make something even better next time. Rather than taking any shine off of Rollins, the loss, is actually to his benefit. Now that it’s his honor in question and not WWE’s, there are real, relatable stakes, the kind that can animate a character for months, if not an entire year.
Rating: ****
