How CM Punk first won over Vince McMahon

CM Punk was the Second City Savior in WWE but there was a time when he couldn’t get booked on the show. People in WWE just didn’t understand the Straight Edge Superstar.

 


 

Bruce Prichard opened up on his podcast Something To Wrestle With about what needed to take place in order for Vince McMahon and the rest of WWE Creative to come around on CM Punk.

“Everybody used to make fun of him because they didn’t understand him,” Prichard said. “They didn’t understand the tattoos. They didn’t understand his promos. And I would sit there because Punk’s a pretty even keel guy. And I’d ask him questions.”

“So one day I decided to go take a camera crew. Just me and Bubba Dean and we went up in the arena and I asked Punk to come up. And I essentially just interviewed him. I put the camera on Punk. I sat off camera and just asked him questions. ‘Man tell me about this tattoo,’ the Pepsi tattoo. And, he told me the story behind it. ‘Tell me about this tattoo, this other tattoo’ and he’d tell me the story about it. ‘What is the Straight Edge Society? What does that mean?’ And most people did not know what any of that s— meant. They didn’t understand why Punk was Straight Edge. They didn’t understand his adversity to drinking. Didn’t understand the life that he lived that made him feel that way.”

“So I just asked. I just kept drilling down, drilling down to get him to tell me what makes [Punk] tick. They took the footage, and they took it to the studio and the guys who were about that age group they listened to his interview and listened to his explanations and were like ‘this guy’s deep, this guy’s great!’ Then all of a sudden people were like ‘well, we gotta do something with him and Vince let him in.”

“But before that, he was just a goof that no one understood. They just thought he was a goof, but he was pretty deep in his thought and he was pretty deep into how he wanted to be presented.”

Credit for the quotes in this article goes to Something To Wrestle With Bruce Prichard with a H/T to Still Real To Us for the transcription 

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