8 Radical Ideas To Save CM Punk
2. Building A Better Tomato
Returning to pro wrestling doesn’t necessarily mean wrestling, of course. Few people understand the business of wrestling - the nuts and bolts, the booking, the money, the production side, the craft and the art of working a crowd and milking an angle - better than CM Punk.
He was already a natural at the art of the work before he signed with the WWE and you only have to watch his masterful promos in Ring Of Honor, particularly his legendary turn to kick off the first Summer Of Punk, to understand that. But his time in OVW saw him studying with wrestling’s premier mad scientist Paul Heyman. If you want to be the best, you have to learn from the best.
Heyman himself chose not to have anything to do with TNA when they attempted to recruit him to book the company in 2010. He made it clear to them what he’d need from them in order to agree to take on the job, and it was more than they were prepared to give:
“...if I was going to do it, I wanted the Dana White deal. I wanted complete control, I wanted a piece of the company and I wanted the ability to, when the time was right, to take it public. I wanted to do the programming completely different than the way they had been doing it and Spike TV signed off on it” - Ring Rust Radio, August 2014
More than simply establishing his terms, however, Heyman established something else with his demands: that TNA wasn’t willing to move beyond its position in the market and in the perspective of wrestling fans, as Diet WWE. In 2010, TNA was perfectly happy to be a long, long, long distant second in the US, to slavishly copy the moves of WCW and the WWF/E, whether successful or not. That proved to him that TNA wasn’t worth his time.
In 2016, TNA isn’t that company anymore. That’s not to say they’re firing on all cylinders and catching up all that lost ground, but there’s clearly a desire there now to be something different. Perhaps they’d be willing to offer Punk the kind of terms that Heyman sought in 2010.
It’s a perfect time for a new broom - one with Punk’s creative and intellectual gifts, and one who still has a bit of a chip on his shoulder - to come in and book TNA to be something smart and fun and fresh, a genuine alternative to WWE’s monolithic complacency.
And what would Punk get out of it, a man who’s been very vocal in the past about seeing TNA as just another indie promotion? He could be instrumental in potentially building something great. That’s pretty damn good for the ego.