10 REAL Backstage Wrestling Fights You Didn't Know About

8. CM Punk Vs. Teddy Hart

Eddie Guerrero Hawk
Peacock/NBC

CM Punk aged exceptionally well as a pro wrestler.

Always great - this is a man who brought critical acclaim back to the US scene through his seminal Ring Of Honor trilogy with Samoa Joe in the mid-2000s - he at times refused to accept that he wasn't a high-level athlete. More than one match he worked in WWE crumpled under the weight of his own ambition. The John Cena matches were white-hot, which is just as well. On a technical level, they were patchy in the extreme.

By the time he arrived in AEW in 2021, his brilliance was underscored. He wasn't remotely self-conscious. Nothing he did even vaguely resembled clichéd acclaim-bait. Everything he did in his matches mattered and logically preceded the next beat of the story.

He also aged better as a real scrapper, which is just as well. Those years of expensive MMA training did not go entirely to waste. While he effectively handled Matt Jackson, he wasn't as successful with Teddy Hart when they brawled outside a restaurant back in the NWA:TNA days - at least according to Hart himself, and Paul London.

You'll never get to the exact truth with this one.

Teddy Hart is the most unreliable narrator in wrestling - he makes Hulk Hogan look like Lance Storm - and you suspect that Punk may have only been cast as the loser because many of the eyewitnesses, statistically, hated him.

Punk himself has never commented on the matter, which might tell its own story.

Contributor
Contributor

Michael Sidgwick is an editor, writer and podcaster for WhatCulture Wrestling. With over seven years of experience in wrestling analysis, Michael was published in the influential institution that was Power Slam magazine, and specialises in providing insights into All Elite Wrestling - so much so that he wrote a book about the subject. You can order Becoming All Elite: The Rise Of AEW on Amazon. Possessing a deep knowledge also of WWE, WCW, ECW and New Japan Pro Wrestling, Michael’s work has been publicly praised by former AEW World Champions Kenny Omega and MJF, and current Undisputed WWE Champion Cody Rhodes. When he isn’t putting your finger on why things are the way they are in the endlessly fascinating world of professional wrestling, Michael wraps his own around a hand grinder to explore the world of specialty coffee. Follow Michael on X (formerly known as Twitter) @MSidgwick for more!