CM Punk has been with All Elite Wrestling since his arrival on the Aug. 20 episode of AEW Rampage. And while he already has an 8-0 record and two pay-per-view wins to his name, the former WWE Champion still hasn’t stepped in the ring with most of AEW’s top stars and only very recently (as in, this past week’s AEW Dynamite) indicated he wants anything to do with the AEW World Championship. But his current feud with MJF has already managed to build up some hype, and while speaking at a panel at the C2E2 convention this past weekend he addressed how the company has used him so far.
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“I think that’s one matchup that everybody wanted to see,” Punk said (h/t SEScoops). “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.”
