AEW’s sudden injury bug has three of its biggest acquisitions of the past year — CM Punk, Bryan Danielson and Adam Cole — all dealing with injuries. Punk announced on Rampage last week that he was dealing with an injury that would keep him out of action, but the company is choosing to let him keep the AEW World Championship and crown an Interim AEW World Champion while he recovers.
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Per PWInsider, Punk will need to have surgery on his injured foot but there’s no word as to when that will be. The AEW Interim World Championship Eliminator Series will start this week with Jon Moxley taking on the winner of a battle royale in the main event of AEW Dynamite. The winner of that match will face the winner of Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Hirooki Goto from the Dominion pay-per-view at Forbidden Door on June 26.
“The bad news is I’m injured and I need surgery. A couple of things are broken. The biggest one is my heart because I love nothing more than performing for all of you, and I wanted to go on one hell of a run. That’s the bad news,” Punk said in his announcement promo, “The good news is, I can still do all that. I told you I was going to go until the wheels fall off. Well, the wheels are still there, they haven’t fallen off. It’s just that one of them happens to be broken. But I’ve come back from worse. I’ve felt better than I feel today, but I am here to tell you that I’ve also felt a hell of a lot worse. This is a bump in the road. It hurts. It hurts like hell. I want to wrestle for you.”
News that Danielson was hurt broke over the weekend when he was pulled from a fan meet & greet. The injury, per Bryan Alvarez of F4WOnline, occurred during Anarchy in the Arena at Double or Nothing last month but is not considered serious and he’ll only be out of action for one to two weeks. PWInsider then noted there’s no confirmation to the rumor that he suffered a concussion.
Finally, there’s Adam Cole, who was pulled from a 10-man tag team match at the Kia Forum but still appeared on Dynamite at the commentary table. PWInsider says he’s “banged up” due to a number of small injuries and the company opted to give him some time to heal up.
