CM Punk Interview Pre-Collision “Caused A Lot Of Controversy” In AEW
A new report suggests that a CM Punk interview that he did before his AEW Collision “caused a lot of controversy” within the company.
It was one week ago on the Friday before the June 17th Saturday night debut of AEW Collision when ESPN released an interview with CM Punk ahead of his return to AEW TV for the first time in over nine months.
In that ESPN interview, CM Punk talked about his issues with “Hangman” Adam Page, who Punk beat to become the AEW World Champion for the first time in May 2022 at Double or Nothing. Prior to that match, Page made unscripted comments that infuriated Punk. In the ESPN interview, Punk also said that Page “poisoned everything” and Punk was worried that Page was trying to hurt him.
“And I proceed to have what I think is a garbage match because I’m trying to protect myself on stuff instead of actually just working and trying to put on the best performance I can.”
“I’m keeping an eye out. He chopped me in the mouth one time, and I’m just like, ‘OK, did you do that on purpose?’ You chip my tooth, and I’m like, ‘All right, should I give him a receipt?’ It changes the dynamic. It poisoned everything for me, and it made it all really, really ugly, and that was what set all of this off, and here we are over a year later and ain’t s**t been done about it.”
In this week’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter, Dave Meltzer wrote that CM Punk’s interview caused a lot of controversy behind the scenes in AEW, specifically as it relates to what Punk said about Hangman Page.
“One day before the debut of Collision, the interview heavily talked about in the AEW dressing room on 6/14 in Washington, with Punk and ESPN’s Marc Raimondi was released. The interview caused a lot of controversy behind-the-scenes for a multitude of reasons.”
“First, the fact an interview that had not been released having its contents or potential contents talked about to the point it became news was noteworthy enough. There were issues having to do with the damage control attempts that we wrote about last week.”
“And there’s the obvious issue of the contents not only talked about internally before the story came out, but it being heavily reported how Punk went after (Adam) Page, and had complained about the idea of whether Page was shooting on him in their match at the 2022 Double or Nothing show in Las Vegas ended up being reported on before ESPN’s story came out.”
In another story regarding CM Punk, Dave Meltzer commented on how one AEW wrestler believes the situation is a “ticking time bomb” that could lead to some more chaos in the company.
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