Why WWE Needs A NEW Pipebomb Moment

Punk didn’t defend the WWE Heavyweight Title in Ring Of Honor, nor in New Japan Pro Wrestling. He did, however, mobilise the taste-making portion of the audience. By shooting on the product, he shot a small hole in the company’s narrative fabric. The centre could not hold; by alerting the audience to the power in his hands, he in turn empowered them, which manifested as an atmosphere of discontent whenever WWE attempted to restore old paradigms.

Punk himself became a far bigger star than he was before, even though he was unable to reconcile the extent of that. Punk wasn’t the agent of change, but he was the catalyst.

Slowly, the landscape around him changed. Fans demanded workers of a higher in-ring standard - workers capable of grabbing the zeitgeist where there was no brass ring. Punk - alongside Daniel Bryan - was the very antecedent to Triple H’s NXT movement. Punk, in an indirect way, delivered the change he promised, insofar as WWE’s talent recruitment policy. What’s curious is that, prior to the Pipebomb moment, Triple H once considered Sheamus, very much in the McMahon mould, the future of the company. The Pipebomb detonated, Trips took to glad-handing the slighter, more fashionable Internet darlings Vince was blind to. In a circuitous way, Triple H grasped Punk’s point of view and turned his destructive office persona face in the process.

That’s why they call him The Game.

The Game, however, hasn’t yet assumed the controls. His NXT brand remains only a tantalising eidolon of the main roster’s future. We remain in Vince McMahon’s world, and increasingly, it is in dire need of that word again: Change.

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