John Cena and CM Punk’s rivalry helped define WWE during the early 2010s. Their match over the WWE Championship at Money in the Bank 2011 established Punk as one of the company’s top draws and the matchup would happen again on either TV or pay-per-view six more times before Punk’s sudden departure in 2014. The last of those matches officially turned 10 years old this weekend. The bout took place on the Feb. 25, 2013, episode of Monday Night Raw at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas.
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By this point, Cena had already won the 2013 Royal Rumble while Punk saw his 434-day reign as WWE Champion come to an abrupt end when he lost to The Rock that same night. This set the stage for Cena vs. Rock at WrestleMania 29, a rematch from the “Once in a Lifetime” bout a year prior. But even though Punk failed in his rematch against Rock at Elimination Chamber, fans were still hoping to see him get added to the WrestleMania main event and make it a triple threat. WWE played into this idea by having Punk challenge Cena for his spot at WrestleMania on Raw, which Cena accepted.
The match clocked in at over 26 minutes and is best known for Punk nailing Cena with a Piledriver despite the company quietly outlawing that move years prior. It’s also the bout where Cena broke out a Hurricanrana, then delivered an Attitude Adjustment for the win. Punk would go on to face The Undertaker at WrestleMania in what many consider to be the last truly great WrestleMania match during “The Deadman’s” undefeated streak, while Cena would win the WWE title from Rock in a passing of the torch moment.
Punk would later admit on WWE Backstage that his February 2013 match with Cena is the one WWE match he’s the proudest of. That was mostly due to the fact that he was seriously ill while wrestling that night.
“Ironically enough for a guy that calls himself the ‘Best in the World,’ I don’t like talking about myself,” Punk said at the time. “But off the top of my head, I remember wrestling John Cena in [Dallas]… and it was kind of thrown together last minute and I was told that it was going to be for a shot at The Rock at WrestleMania. Becky [Lynch] is sitting here talking about chips on her shoulders, being hot, being cold… Michael Jordan had the ‘flu game,’ I had the flu match. I was deathly ill for this. And I remember just laying on the floor being like, man I felt like I ran another marathon and I get to the finish line and I’ve got to hand the baton off to somebody else who runs the last .2 miles and gets to cross the finish line.”
“I was just like, ‘Man, I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.’ And John was like, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ And I just said, ‘I want to give you a piledriver, John.’ That was it, that’s all we had,” he continued. “We went out there and I think the crowd certainly helped us because I was so sick that that I just… it was really hard to care, and they made me care. I went out there and I felt their energy and we gave to them something that I think stands the test of time.”
