CM Punk’s Controversy Erased From AEW History

CM Punk’s ill-fated time in AEW has seemingly been wiped out of the company’s history.

CM Punk lit the wrestling world on fire in 2021 when he joined AEW. This ended Punk’s self-imposed exile from pro wrestling that lasted over seven years after he walked out of WWE in 2014.

But if Punk’s return to the ring lit things up, he was soon burning them down.

At All Out 2022, just minutes after CM Punk captured the AEW World Championship, he was involved in a backstage brawl with The Young Bucks and Kenny Omega that led to everyone being suspended. Punk had also suffered an injury in his title match, and he only returned to the ring when the new Collision launched in the summer of 2023.

Punk ruled the roost on Collision, going as far as to ban AEW’s Head of Talent Relations from the building as he was kept far away from The Elite, who only appeared on Dynamite. In reality, Punk was a ticking time bomb, and that bomb went off at All In 2023 when he assaulted Jack Perry backstage.

CM Punk Issues Ignored In AEW Book

CM Punk was then fired by AEW, bringing his tumultuous time in the company crashing to an end. A few weeks later, he put his past issues with WWE behind him and made his return.

Now, a book has been released entitled This Book Is All Elite: The Inside Story of All Elite Wrestling, written by Keith Elliot Greenberg. Speaking to Features of Wrestling, Greenberg explained his decision to avoid discussing any of the controversy surrounding Punk:

Some people have brought this up. Whenever I write a book, I’m always going to be criticised… One of the criticisms I telegraphed in advance, and I even discussed this with AEW, was that people were going to be unhappy that I don’t talk about whatever chicanery occurred backstage that led to the departure of CM Punk.

This is a tribute book. If I wrote a book about the New York Mets… I would talk about the two World Series runs, I would talk about their marquee players, but I wouldn’t talk about the fact that the owners at the time were supposedly investors with Bernie Madoff… I was asked to do a book that is a tribute to AEW during the first five years, and that doesn’t belong in a tribute book, because really, we’re just talking about one or two incidents.

Greenberg maintains that there is still enough backstage content to keep even the most ardent AEW fan entertained:

There’s a lot of backstage stuff in it, and a lot of positive backstage stuff in the book… So it’s not like it’s all surface stuff, there’s deep stuff that you wouldn’t know about, and I don’t think the book suffers at all from not mentioning an unfortunate incident backstage.