The Self-Destruction Of CM Punk In AEW | Wrestling Timelines
September 7, 2022 - The Post-Brawl Out Dynamite
Jon Moxley postpones an approved vacation and cuts one of the best promos of all-time on Dynamite. His “Give me the ball” promo is life-affirming, but not even that is good enough to lift the mood for long. AEW is broken.
AEW, almost immediately, feels like the death of a dream. With a face-melting quickness, there are four significant problems facing AEW. Two of them are insurmountable for years.
Firstly, CM Punk*, Kenny Omega and the Young Bucks are indefinitely suspended. This is hurriedly announced by Tony Khan with minimal explanation. AEW is bereft of star power.
(*This wouldn’t change much; Punk suffers a torn tricep in the main event of All Out. Ironically, since Punk showed disdain towards Hangman for not following veteran advice, he had failed to take his own. He urged everybody to stop doing a suicide dive a year prior, since Darby Allin’s was so good, but executed one himself).
Secondly, AEW has lost its trust amongst the fanbase. Tony Khan has marked an important email unread and buried an important document down the back of his drawer. Nobody knows what is happening, which is a profound distraction, and because Khan has mismanaged the situation by ignoring it, nobody believes it can be adequately resolved through his leadership.
Thirdly, the real-life feud between CM Punk and the Elite is so shocking and endlessly compelling that not even the greatest booker in pro wrestling history could hope to craft a fictional story as good as it. AEW Dynamite is a good TV programme, and will maintain that standard until mid-2023, but everything on it just feels like fake, boring wrestling compared to the incredible, contrasting descriptions of the backstage brawl. What do you mean, somebody was bitten in a room with a dog in it, and the dog didn’t do it?
The best story in AEW is Occam’s razor versus Punk’s unshakeable conviction and hypnotic, ferocious delivery. The circumstantial evidence does not flatter CM Punk. Nor will his subsequent pattern of behaviour in 2023. But his delivery is so convincing that he could convince you the earth is flat.
The fourth, at least, is not a problem of Tony Khan’s own making - but it’s the most concerning. WWE is back. Vince McMahon’s product was never particularly acclaimed, during the monopoly years, but it reached a new nadir from 2018 onwards. It was an inscrutable, chaotic, lame mess: WCW 2000-tier. It was so bad that AEW was able to exist in a snobby TV landscape as a result of its alienating, increasingly unpopular awfulness.
In July 2022, Vince is gone, having resigned in disgrace in the wake of a deeply disturbing sexual assault scandal. He’ll make a bid to return, but he is out, replaced by Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque.
WWE enters a critical and commercial resurgence at the worst time imaginable for Tony Khan. This was never once considered even a remote possibility, even if the incredibly effective booking of Cody Rhodes should have raised concerns.
When WWE gets hot, all others suffer - and WWE is getting white-hot.