10 Most Old School Wrestlers Of WWE's Modern Era
3. The Professional
Way back before he signed with WWE, CM Punk was one the iron men of the indies, making it a point of pride to wrestle longer, harder and more often: to outdo everyone else in the business.
It was about being defiantly old school, at a time when old school was considered old-fashioned, when ‘sports entertainment’, shoot interviews and the death of kayfabe had made being old school seem passé.
Fiercely old school veterans like Harley Race loved Punk - loved his attitude, his laser focus, the respect he showed the business and the history that it came from. Although from all reports Punk wasn’t always an easy guy to get on with, he had the respect of his peers.
Even after he became a cog in the WWE machine, Punk obsessively learned everything he could about the business from this fresh, corporate perspective. Mostly, he learned something that the old school guys had known decades before: that he needed to protect his name value, because as far as the office were concerned, if you’re not main event you’re just making up the numbers.
He’s continued to maintain an old school mentality even after quitting WWE and retiring. People have formed this bizarre impression that Punk is constantly crying and moaning about his former employers, when he maintained radio silence for ten months before delivering two podcasts venting his spleen that he insisted weren’t ‘shoot interviews’, and then clammed up again.
In the two years since then, he’s conspicuously tried to avoid talking about professional wrestling at all: he replies tersely to questions with the air of a man keen to change the subject. Clearly, as bitterly as his WWE experience ended, he still considers it beneath him to stripmine that experience for gossip.
And he might not be a world class UFC fighter, but few exhibit that hardbitten old school toughness more than CM Punk. Plenty of other wrestlers are drug free and teetotal, but Punk’s straight edge lifestyle prohibits painkillers of any kind to cope with injuries or rehabilitation. When asked how on earth he could function as a workhorse wrestler without them, he’d deadpan, “I take a lot of naps.”
Near constant napping apparently allowed him to get back in the ring two months after fracturing his skull in a match in 2002, after being told not to even exercise for a year. Yeah, sometimes being old school means you’re dumber than a bag of knees.