9 Times CM Punk Bounced Back In His WWE Career
Punk made a career out of going from the outhouse to the penthouse. Can he do the same in UFC?
This past weekend, CM Punk was handed a decisive defeat in his MMA debut against Mickey Gall at UFC 203. Punk would submit after 2:14 in the first round, in what was his first outing in the world of legitimate combat sports, having initially signed with the organisation some 21 months prior.
To some, Punk's involvement represented an incredible show of guts and determination, while to others it was an affront to the sport. Either way, it didn't produce the kind of result that the former WWE Champion would've hoped for.
But fear not, Punk fans! This isn’t the first time he’s had to deal with coming back from adversity over the course of his career. During his days in WWE, Punk was no stranger to roadblocks and hurdles on his path to success.
Granted, pro wrestling is a whole different kettle of fish compared to the competitive realm of UFC and, granted, that sentence may still qualify as the understatement of the year. But all the same, in the spirit of scraping the barrel for positives, this article looks back at a number of occasions in which CM Punk bounced back during his tumultuous WWE career.
9. Ohio Valley Wrestling
CM Punk first signed for the WWE in the summer of 2005, and yet he didn’t make his main roster debut until a good 12 months later. That’s because he was immediately shipped off to OVW (at the time the company’s developmental territory) and he wasn’t best pleased about it.
In his Best in the World DVD, Punk says he was “sent to Louisville, Kentucky and I really didn’t want to be there” and describes the situation as a “dark cloud”. Paul Heyman then goes on to admit that Punk came in with a massive chip on his shoulder, making it all too apparent that this was not where the former indie icon saw himself belonging.
Rather than sulk on the sidelines, Punk knuckled down and grafted away at the job at hand. Instead of seeing this as a dead end, he embraced the opportunity to learn from Heyman’s tutelage and soon treated his spell in OVW just it was intended to be, which was a chance to develop himself as a performer.
In less than ten months he’d performed a complete 180, winning the OVW Heavyweight Championship, the OVW Television Championship as well as the OVW Tag Team Championship, making for a rather tidy turnaround.