CM Punk says it was enough to make him return to wrestling, so he thinks people should take a closer look at how unique All Elite Wrestling really is.
CM Punk was on ESPN’s SportsNation on Tuesday and spoke with Arda Ocal and Charly Arnolt (formerly WWE’s Charly Caruso) about what made him come back to wrestling. Ocal noted how Punk’s return feels like he’s bringing other fans back to watch, or it at least makes it feel like wrestling is a little ‘cooler’ again. Punk explained how he knows that a good portion of his career was with WWE so he knows it’s going to come up, but he’d rather focus on the positives that are in front of him.
“I am right now trying focus and keep stuff positive heading into my first match in I don’t know how long… I understand that I can’t really talk about my entire life and career without talking about WWE, but sometimes it’s just, ‘if you don’t have anything nice to say,’ and I don’t have a whole lot of nice things to say. To me, as a guy who everybody saw as down on the business—depressed, sad, whatever—on something that I loved and I had to leave,” Punk explained, “me coming back and it being with AEW, I think should show everybody how special this place is. If it got ol’ CM Punk off of the couch, I think it’s something that you want to invest your time in.”
Punk also talked about a big factor in him deciding to join AEW in the first place was how the company kept Brodie Lee’s health issues a secret and out of the headlines.
“The wrestling world lost Brodie Lee last December, and his sickness and everything that came with it was known in the company, but they kept it so secret. Wrestlers will always tell you that ‘the boys are a big family’ and ‘we care about each other.’ The wrestling business—none of that is entirely true, but to see everyone in the company band together just to keep a secret about somebody’s health, I was blown away by that,” Punk stated. “I was blown away that wasn’t plastered all over every single website and it was just kept secret. It just made me go, ‘Well, there’s something to that locker room.’”
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