CM Punk vs. MJF will finally happen on the Feb. 2 episode of AEW Dynamite, emanating from Punk’s hometown of Chicago. Punk started off a promo on this week’s Dynamite saying that he was tired of talking, and after successfully defeating FTR, Wardlow and Shawn Spears he finally wanted a fight with MJF. Friedman walked out and declared their match would finally happen next week, then claimed Punk would quit after he lost. After mentioning him leaving the WWE and his infamous podcasts with Colt Cabana from November 2014, MJF promised Punk would prove how he really only cares about himself.
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Punk disputed all of those claims, then continued to dare MJF to fight him tonight. Friedman instead sent out the rest of The Pinnacle, who beat down the former world champion before Wardlow powerbombed him onto a steel chair. Friedman then sat cross-legged on Punk’s chest and declared his career in AEW would end the same place it began.
Punk talked about the storyline while on a panel at the C2E2 event in Chicago back in mid-December, weeks after Friedman and his first war of words went viral.
“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.”
