Secret Power Players Pulling Strings In Wrestling Today
2. CM Punk
CM Punk, if a deeply complicated man can be reduced to one word, is irresistible.
Fans believe in his rhetoric even when they know better. Promoters allow themselves to believe that his days as a sh*t-disturber are over even when they know better. As long as CM Punk is interested in wrestling, he will dominate the conversations surrounding it. His body might prevent him from doing that, but it seems fairly obvious that Punk isn’t in it just to wrestle.
He has an overt obsession with shaping the future of wrestling to come. He was intent on becoming a mentor figure in AEW. The very idea of mentoring is so sacred to him that he couldn’t sanction the idea that some aren’t interested in learning the trade through that philosophy. In what, really, is an incredibly bold gambit, he has immediately stationed himself in NXT in a similar role. He didn’t even try to be insidious about it. It took him no time at all. His intentions are clear: he wants to develop talent and, as was clear through his brief Collision stint, he wants to shape creative. This is a man who shadowed Paul Heyman constantly in Ohio Valley Wrestling to learn every facet of television production.
Bruce Prichard (and this could always be bullsh*t, obviously) recently let slip that Punk visited his house upon returning to WWE. He asked questions about booking over and and over again. There, he read the actual books of Paul Boesch - considered one of the most successful and influential promoters ever - and could not avert his gaze, treating them as sacred texts almost.
Punk isn’t exactly pulling the strings right now - if anything, by showing a willingness to go to WWE, he has lost his aura as the elusive one that got away - but he’s doing seemingly everything to work his way into that position. In yet another irony of the Pipebomb, Punk is trying to follow the path of the doofus son-in-law.
The permutations of pro wrestling’s future are impossible to predict - but in a new era where succession in WWE is at last a real thing, Punk is wrestling’s version of the untested yet untainted young “laptop” manager to whom a football club could turn when the pressure is on to make a fashionable, forward-thinking appointment.
Never say never.