Ahead of his pro wrestling return on AEW Rampage, Sam Roberts interviewed CM Punk on the Notsam Wrestling podcast.
Punk and Luke Hawx talked about working on Heels and Punk talked about his ROH summer of Punk in 2005.
Here are some highlights:
CM Punk talking about the details that went into ‘The Summer of Punk’ in ROH in 2005:
“I remember talking to Gabe (Sapolsky) and he said, ’You’re going to sign (with WWE). You’re gone.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. We’ll see what happens.’ I was doing dark matches. There was this listlessness I had that summer where I felt like I’ve done everything. I felt like I helped build a good place in Ring of Honor where guys could not only come and learn to work, but make good money doing it. I’m always that guy that’s looking for the next sunrise while still being present and enjoying what I’m doing, but knowing eventually it’s going to get old for me, and I need to move on. The best thing about territory wrestling back in the day was that guys could go to other places, they would be fresh, and it was constant. Territories would have their top 8 guys. They have a top tag team, two babyfaces, and the four guys they work with. Then you filter guys in and out. I’ve already done everything in Ring of Honor. I didn’t know what else I was going to do, and it’s kind of like how I felt we were handed the Joe-Punk trilogy, because number one, I was like, ‘We’re going to do a 60-minute draw.’ That was simply because there was nowhere else for us to go.
Joe had hit a wall when it came to his opponents. There was nobody else for him to work. I was literally wrestling Joe because I was the only guy that Joe hadn’t beat, and if I didn’t say, ‘Hey, we’re going to go 60 minutes’, Joe would have just beat me. I’m very much a guy that looks at, what’s a different way to do something instead of him just beating me? It’s not about him not pinning me, and me not trying to get beat. It was more or less, how do we draw more out of this? Let’s go 60 minutes, and then we can always revisit it if we need a main event down the road. We were literally at that point where our backs were against the wall and we needed main events. Everybody loved the idea. We did it. It sort of worked, and then we fell into that. It was more natural. Same with Summer of Punk. I fielded a phone call one day. I took a job. I told Gabe, and Gabe said, ‘Well, what are we going to do?’ I said, ‘Well, fortunately, this is going to leak, and that’s a good thing.’ I think you have to think outside the box a lot of the time. Knowing it was going to leak, and knowing the way people think, ‘Oh Punk signed with WWE. That means it’s immediate.’ What they didn’t realize is that I said, ‘I’ll sign, but I need to work out the rest of my days.’ I don’t know what they do know, but they used to be good about that, letting people finish up their dates at some places. I knew I had ‘x’ amount of time. I said, ‘Let’s do this. The people won’t know when I’m gone. If I say I’m signed, they are going to think this is my last show, so let’s shock them.’ It wasn’t let’s swerve them just to swerve them. It was, let’s swerve them because they’re literally not going to know what’s going to happen. They’ll think they know, but we can keep them on the edge of their seat, and from show to show, you book it like it’s a television show. You end shows with question marks. What happens? Well, I have to tune in next week. I have to go to the next show. I have to find out what happens. I’m not going to say it was easy coming up with the creative for that, but you work with what you got. That landed in our lap, and I felt like that was the right thing to do. It was a lot of fun too.”
