10 Ridiculous Wrestling Booking Decisions Nobody Can Explain

4. Cooling Wrestling's Hottest Commodity, Part II

Cesaro Mania XXX
WWE.com

Every now and then, a pitch demands the inclusion of well-covered ground, the insights into which barely qualify as such. It's just as well, then, that you could dig up the earth to find the logic behind the mishandling of CM Punk circa 2011 and still fail to locate the corpse of the Straight Edge Superstar himself. The character, and his momentum, was buried that far below the surface.

It was an anthology of pure sh*te. You could write books on the subject, so for the sake of a bearable word count - and to avoid digging up the same old same old - let's just focus on one deeply strange artefact as a distillation of how drastically wrong WWE got it.

By October, we had somehow reached a point at which The Miz - a complete WWE thoroughbred, apologist, company man, etc. etc. - was somehow positioned as a renegade union leader. This was a role to which only Punk was viably suited, but by then, he had stopped raging against the machine. He was a scab subsumed by it, prattling about with Triple H - with whom he'd just feuded - as part of his sycophantic skeleton staff.

A victim of the most convoluted burial ever seen in wrestling, Punk was either insidiously targeted or definitively botched. Folk are still working it all out - but since the television was so putrid and un-re-watchable, we may never receive an answer.

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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!