Amazing Red says every move he tried to get into his 2005 WWE dark match with CM Punk was vetoed, and that a friend watching from backstage told him it was being done on purpose.
Red discussed the match on Insight with Chris Van Vliet, and was careful throughout to frame it as his own read of the night,
The match was taped on May 10, 2005, at a WWE Velocity taping. It never aired. It sat in WWE’s tape library for close to twenty years until the WWE Vault YouTube channel released it in December 2024, and it circulated again this June ahead of Red’s return to TNA at Slammiversary. It remains the only match Red has had in a WWE ring.
He had originally been booked for something else that night and was moved.
“Somebody called me on my government name and said come here, and one of the referees said, hey, Red’s got something else coming up, so Red’s gonna be pre-show, and you’re gonna have a dark match. My cousins were there, and Jimmy Wang was there, and they were like, when they give you dark matches, that means they’re looking at you to get signed.”
Jimmy Wang Yang, a WWE and WCW veteran, was working for the company at the time.
Ricky Steamboat was the agent on the match. Red’s understanding was that the night mattered more to WWE for Punk’s sake than for his.
“Ricky Steamboat wanted CM Punk to get signed. He needed CM Punk to get signed, obviously. Right before this match, apparently, what I was hearing is that this was CM Punk’s last ditch effort to be signed. So that added more pressure to me.”
That is Red’s recollection, and he stressed twice during the interview that he was giving his own perspective rather than stating fact. The record puts Punk further along than a last-ditch tryout by that point. Punk had worked WWE dark matches going back to 2003, wrestled Val Venis on a Sunday Night Heat taping the day before the Red match, and signed a WWE developmental deal in 2005 before debuting on the ECW brand in June 2006.
Punk himself comes out of the story well.
“CM Punk respectfully tells me, listen, we’ll do whatever you’re gonna do.”
The problem was elsewhere. Red wanted to use his own moves, specifically because being on WWE television would establish them as his.
“The moves that I wanted to do, Code Red, my flatliner, my standing shooting star, I wanted to get that out in the world that I made this up, because once this happens, it’s officially yours. And every time I mentioned something, it came back and got vetoed. You can’t do a shooting star, Kidman does it. You can’t do Code Red because Rey does it.”
The two names in that answer are Billy Kidman and Rey Mysterio, both on the WWE roster in 2005 and both working a cruiserweight style. The Code Red, the move Red is credited with inventing, has since become a standard part of the move sets for high flyers.
“So Jimmy Wang is like my brother, and he’s not gonna lie to me. He’s coming up, and he’s like, they’re combating all your stuff, bro, purposely. It felt like no one wanted me with a job here.”
The match itself did not go well by his own account. Punk controlled most of it as the heel, and finished Red with a hammerlock DDT after avoiding a Swanton Bomb. What happened afterwards is the part he expects to draw criticism.
“Damn, I get so much heat for this,” he said, before telling it.
Red waited outside the room where Punk was being spoken to by John Laurinaitis, then WWE’s head of talent relations, hoping for a word of his own. Laurinaitis came out and asked whether he had worked a big ring before. Red told him All Japan, three months on and off, which landed because Laurinaitis had toured Japan himself as a wrestler.
“He was like, well, you look blown up, so we’ll give you a call. And I did the unprofessional thing of saying, I look blown up? I know what he means, because when we did mess up, we didn’t go to different positions right away. We kind of had this deer in the headlights moment. So I guess he took that as, you look blown up.”
“I said okay. Anything else I have to work on? He said, yeah, get bigger. He walks away.”
Red was billed at around 110 to 115 pounds at the time. Size had followed him through his entire career, and it is the reason most often given for why he never got a WWE run.
His friend’s verdict was the same as before.
“Jimmy Wang comes up to me and he goes, bro, you could tell wholeheartedly that was all him. You did all your stuff. You sold well. Everyone loved you in the back, and it sucks. That’s how it has to be.”
Red has no grievance with Punk over any of it.
“No hard feelings. A lot of my guys find the story out, like, oh, CM Punk. No, no, no, no.”
Punk signed with WWE not long afterwards and went on to hold the WWE Championship twice. Red never signed. He had a second WWE opportunity years later that also came to nothing, and a spot in the 2016 Cruiserweight Classic that he lost to a broken leg suffered in a video game motion capture session the week before the tournament began.
Red is a three-time TNA X Division Champion and the inventor of the Code Red. He returned to TNA at Slammiversary on June 28 in an Ultimate X match, his first appearance for the company in 15 years, and will be inducted into the TNA Hall of Fame alongside ODB and Konnan at Bound for Glory on October 11 at the Yuengling Center in Tampa, Florida.
