Look, y’all: I do not care what happens to Jack Perry and CM Punk in the aftermath of their altercation at All In. I am a huge fan of Punk (and have occasionally seen real potential in Perry), but if he receives a long-term suspension or quits or is fired, cool. I saw one of my favorite wrestlers come back as good as he ever was, and I got to see him wrestle in person on multiple occasions with and against opponents far more interesting than what a return program typically entails. I’ve had my fun!
But this is a major story and I have a fancy new website – it’d probably be negligent of me to not share my thoughts on the matter, so what I’ll say is this:
It could have been avoided.
Shocking, I know, but hear me out: this maybe wouldn’t have happened if All In’s booking had been tighter. I will concede that it also wouldn’t have happened without Perry making a point of the real glass windshield he was suplexed into, or Punk confronting him after the match, but the issue between the two reportedly began as a creative one, with Punk nixing an idea and Perry taking offense, so, uh, why set the stage for that idea to come to fruition with both men in the building?
Their respective philosophies on using glass aside, there shouldn’t have been an opportunity for Perry to call attention to his beef with Punk, as there shouldn’t have been a car involved in the match at all. Yes, Perry’s feud with Hook has involved a fair amount of parking lot violence, and his Rolling Thunder on Hook from the roof of the car to the hood was a legitimately great spot, one of my favorites of the night. It was a good match, too. Nothing special, but fun.
Generally speaking, I think Tony Khan is a good booker, but in the mad rush towards a pay per view it is often apparent that he’s stretched thin and either lacks a proper support system or isn’t listening to the one he has in place. It’s cool that wrestlers in AEW are given an uncommon degree of freedom in their promos and matches, that creativity is ultimately responsible for much of the company’s success, but if I am running a show featuring two wrestlers who have heat with each other over a spot involving a windshield, I would have, at the very least, not ordered the card in such a way that Punk would have been at Gorilla when Perry came to the back. I also wouldn’t have wasted a limo on the pre-show.
Would this have fixed things? No idea! Probably not! But it’s shocking, frankly, that someone would put Punk in close proximity to someone he was beefing with. If that seems childish to you, that’s fine. Maybe it is. But to me, it seems like a means of protecting your investment in both wrestlers, who represent pieces of the company’s short- and long-term future. Accuse Punk of having thin skin or being a Hoganesque tyrant, but an entire TV show was developed around him, and if you as a booker choose to jeopardize that by not taking a stronger hand in match structure or card positioning, you’ve failed before you take into account anything else about the incident.
Beyond accounting for ego, allowing a pre-show match to have a spot like a suplex through a windshield doesn’t make sense when you’ve also booked one of your marquee matches, and the feud leading into it, around parking lot brawls and broken glass.
This is nitpicking, as neither the Wembley crowd nor the PPV audience seemed to notice or care, but it’s a common issue with wrestling booking in general, and one that indicates a certain degree of creative carelessness, like having three Queen tributes on the show, or having Adam Cole try on a few occasions to beat MJF in a way that wouldn’t have given him the AEW World Championship, once directly after both men said they deserved an untarnished finish.
The great benefit that professional wrestling enjoys over other sports is that it is plotted out in advance. Every match on the card has a purpose, and every sequence in a match is designed to achieve it. AEW has historically treated its pre-show Zero Hour specials differently than most wrestling promotions, famously putting Bryan Danielson and Minoru Suzuki on YouTube for free because the opportunity presented itself to do so, but even then most pre-show matches are not special moments in time; they exist to give the arriving crowd and the audience of masochists tuning in an hour early something to watch other than video packages. Even if someone goes through a windshield, it’s just a match.
I feel like an old man when I complain about things like this, but spots like that are still extremely impactful when used effectively, and part of effectively booking dangerous spots is using them sparingly. Greenlighting this spot three weeks after Jon Moxley put Trent Beretta through a windshield isn’t booking effectively, especially when you’re going to involve a car and call back to that match during Stadium Stampede. Nobody went through the windshield of Sue’s van, but Perry doing so in the pre-show meant that even a tease would have felt like going back to the well.
<figure class=”kg-card kg-embed-card”><blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>IT’S SUE!!!
WITH A VAN FULL OF WEAPONS!
But we got what we got, and instead of it being memorable or forgettable because it happened in the context of a pre-show match, the issue between Perry and Punk now overshadows what was, by nearly every other measure, a total triumph for the promotion.
Is this a little thing? Yes, absolutely, but sometimes it’s the little things that bite us in the ass, and in this case not protecting a fairly uncommon and brutal-looking spot was the spark that set off a powder keg. Yes, Punk and Perry are responsible for their own actions, but part of being a manager is mitigating the risk that there will be conflict between the two parties, and allowing the exact spot that caused heat between the two men, regardless of whether or not you could predict Perry saying something about it, is plain poor management.
As a consequence, Tony Khan finds himself scrambling heading into his second PPV in two weeks, in Punk’s hometown of Chicago, no less. It’s been reported that Perry and Punk have both been suspended, and that this may be it for Punk in AEW in general. In any case Khan’s put himself in a no-win scenario where, to a hypercritical public, whatever happens following the conclusion of AEW’s investigation into the Punk/Perry altercation will indicate that he kowtows to either Punk or The Elite, as every controversy surrounding Punk inevitably circles back to. The noise around that subject will never go away – people will talk about this 20 years from now, if WCW is any indication.
Better booking probably wouldn’t have mitigated the issue entirely, but I believe that being meticulous about these details would have improved the card and could have circumvented an explosion many, many people were waiting for, if not actively egging on. AEW has needed to pay better attention to the finer details of its production for a while now. Here’s a good reason to start.