Bret Hart Crowns Current AEW Star As Best Overall Pro Wrestler

Bret Hart recently spoke with CBC Radio shortly after being honored as a new inductee into Canada’s Walk of Fame. During a rapid-fire segment, Hart was asked to name who he thinks the best overall wrestler in the world (besides himself) is. Hart surprisingly didn’t answer with any WWE star, but rather with AEW’s CM Punk. The pair briefly interacted back in 2012 when Punk was on his 434-day reign as WWE Champion (and recent heel turn), though the two never actually faced each other in the ring. 

Punk was a member of an AEW panel at the C2E2 convention in Chicago this past weekend. On top of saying he believes he has five years worth of great matchups in the young promotion, he discussed some of the criticism about how he’s been used so far. 

“I think that’s one matchup that everybody wanted to see,” Punk said. “Before I even came back, I always heard about ‘oh, I want to see MJF and CM Punk go back and forth.’ A lot of people think I am off to a slow start and AEW doing certain things a certain way. But to me, just like Adam Cole just said, there’s five years worth of stuff with all these interchangeable characters and players. MJF is definitely somebody I wanted to share a ring with. I think now that we’re getting to it, people kind of can maybe see the bigger picture. And they can trust AEW as a whole for like the direction of where stuff goes.

“The fans I understand they want to know the behind the scene stuff. They want to peel back the curtain. Everybody’s an armchair booker. I am. Everybody’s an armchair coach or quarterback or whatever. That’s human nature. You watch sports and you’re like, ‘ Oh come on, why did you put that guy in? Why is he in the bench? Why is this guy a healthy scratch? Why didn’t you do this? blah, blah, blah. And it’s no different than I think pro wrestling and the fans,” he added. “To me one of the best things about AEW is we enjoy payoffs. We like making the fans happy instead of just for some reason making them miserable. Doing stuff just to piss them off. Sometimes the happiest outcome is the most obvious one. We don’t really feel the need to beat anybody over the head with switching it just because they figured it out first, you know? I enjoy making the fans happy. The juice for being a pro wrestler is getting reactions out of the crowd. When it comes to me and him, without me trying to say anything too positive about him — you ain’t seen nothing yet.”