7 Greatest People's Champions In Wrestling History

7. The Voice Of The Voiceless

Like Paige in today€™s WWE, CM Punk€™s heroic characters often end up being a little, well, douchey. Too much of a sarcastic jerk to be really, truly popular as a babyface, CM Punk was over despite this. He was cheered by thousands upon his WWE debut in June 2006, because everyone knew he was that damn good, and we needed something new, fresh and that damn good to come along. He turned heel in June 2009, playing the holier than thou straight edge a**hole. It made him step up his game and he was like hot fire in the ring and on the mic for the next two years. Then, on 27th June 2011, at the conclusion of a run-of-the-mill episode of Raw in Las Vegas, he cut that worked shoot promo, and everything changed. The fans - the real fans, not the casual fans who didn€™t follow the product - were narked with WWE, fed up with the same old same old and desperate for a change. The real-life Phil Brooks was also narked with WWE, and he let it show in spades. For a while, CM Punk, mouth like a runaway train, said what we were all thinking, what we were all saying. Except he said it louder, funnier, and straight to Vincent Kennedy McMahon and Triple H€™s faces. It lasted a year, probably half that actually, given how badly he was booked after the second Summer Of Punk turned into autumn. Punk turned heel again at Raw 1000, and he was bloody brilliant, but it wasn€™t the same and it didn€™t come back when he turned babyface yet again the year after that. Still, for a few months, CM Punk was the voice of the voiceless. That€™s why you still hear €˜CM PUNK€™ chants here and there from smark-aleck crowds on boring-ass episodes of WWE TV, two years after he left the company. It€™s an echo of a time in 2011 when one p***ed off guy said what so many of us were thinking, then when they shut off his mic came back two weeks later with a goddamn loudhailer so that they couldn€™t do it again.