9 Times CM Punk Bounced Back In His 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.