10 Creative Triumphs Of WWE’s PG Era
2. CM Punk Circa 2009
CM Punk's straight edge shtick worked quite well in the WWE environment, against all conventional wisdom. He was addicted only to "competition" - a clever fusion of the take-on-all-comers babyface attitude and a cool, alternative aesthetic.
The Second City Saint got all the way over when he turned heel in 2009 at the expense of career-defining opponent Jeff Hardy, in a subverted take on the Ric Flair Vs. Ricky Steamboat series of 1989. Here, Punk was the straight-laced heel, incandescent with fury at the more popular Hardy, issues, excesses, warts and all. Punk had no such warts; he was pristine, the model after which humanity itself should aspire. The beautiful irony of the feud was that Punk was not "better" than Hardy. He had to cheat to best him while wittering on about his superiority in a series that channelled reality without exposing the inherent farce of wrestling at its mercy, as so many storylines had done previously.
It was plotted with perfect increments - each f*ck finish and insincere promo building to a searing full turn angle in which Punk beat the tar out of Hardy with a microphone (an appropriately devastating weapon in his hands). The matches were superb, once the alignments were fixed in place.
Punk capped off a seminal run when he cosplayed as the loser who left town, and while he was punished shortly thereafter for a backstage transgression, this pettiness could not detract from some blistering, fresh and believable episodic television.