10 Wrestling Storylines That Were Much Darker Than You Think
4. MJF Vs. CM Punk
As stated in the intro, in the morality play that is North American pro wrestling, in a functional promotion, good triumphs over evil and the crowd is sent home happy.
The hero often lives long enough to become the villain, and back again when they're too entertaining to jeer, which rather undermines the premise - nobody ever learns the lesson around which the entire, flawed enterprise is based - but that's what it is because that's what has always worked.
The seminal MJF Vs. CM Punk feud went deeper than that.
At first, the dynamic was timeless, and incredible for it. MJF was with mouthy, pr*ck of a heel, CM Punk the hero prevented from getting his hands on him. The tone and pacing of the programme was superb. Over the holiday season, Punk chased MJF around the entire hard cam side of the arena in a fun physical comedy bit, but when the time for levity was over, those repeated references to Roddy Piper paid off when Punk - in an incredible line - asked MJF to be his Valentine with a dog collar in hand.
The story took an astonishing twist when MJF revealed that he first extended his hand to CM Punk, in a beautiful mirror of the moment that sparked his journey into wrestling, because he idolised him as a young fan. Punk was his haven from a tormented life in his formative years.
Even after MJF revealed himself to be a snake, it was difficult to receive him in quite the same way. At his core, he is still a troubled innocent fated to be a monster. This was dark, because you didn't watch a villain receive his comeuppance; you watched a bullied child masquerading as a villain as a defence mechanism.
It was as thought-provoking as wrestling gets; the idea of comparing the medium to a prestige drama is a meme on social media in 2023, but it never got closer to it in 2022.