WWE Raw star CM Punk recently appeared on O’Shea Jackson’s “No Contest Wrestling” podcast. Punk is currently on break from WWE TV but he is expected back in time for Survivor Series in November. Punk has also been helping out with the younger talent at the Performance Center in Orlando.
Punk said, “NXT, the way it’s set up, is just like a college sports program. They have everything in-house. I walk in there and everybody is happy to see me. I’m happy to be there and see them. They’ve got six rings. They got PT, massage, like everything you can possibly have. It’s just like a college program. There’ll be kids laid up, laying on the floor. They got the Normatec boots on. There’s somebody’s getting worked on. There are people getting dry needled. Somebody’s rehabbing an ACL over here. They have everything at their disposal to be the best that they can possibly be, multiple weight rooms, everything. To me, it’s Disney World for an athlete and that’s why I love going down there. To me, it’s the Fountain of Youth because I walk down there and I’m just like, this is great. I’m Wilford Brimley from Cocoon. I want to get in the pool, you know, I feel young again. I’m around all these people. I’m inspired by their passion to get better.”
He goes on to say, “I don’t want to be one of those old guys shaking a stick at them. I want to be like, ‘No, this is great.’ I don’t want to be like, ‘Oh, turn the AC off and make them suffer.’ No, no. Like, good, good. This is what it’s supposed to be. This is what I wanted. This is what we should have had and now that it’s here, I ain’t penalizing anybody for it.”
CM Punk talking about Paul Heyman mentoring him while they were both in OVW:
“Heyman would fly into Louisville at 9 or 10 PM on a Tuesday. I would pick him up at the airport. We went right to the Davis Arena and I would either watch him just write TV and format it, and he did it like it was, you know, it was like me making a cup of coffee. It was just second nature. He’s doing all this stuff. He slides it over to me. He’s like, ‘What do you think? What don’t you understand? What is this?’ I learned how to format a show. I learned how to time out a show, half second in, half second out for commercials. I learned all this stuff. He’s just like, ‘What do you think of this idea? What would you do?’ He starts asking me questions. The next thing I know, like, that’s on the television show. I’m like, ‘Am I writing the television show?’ The business being the way it was, I did not want anybody to find that out because that would just have been more heat on me. We’d do TV Wednesday night, and then I would spend all Wednesday night in this little closet of a room with Danny Davis and Paul Heyman editing the show. So I learned how to edit it. I would just sit there and they’re screaming at each other, two school dudes yelling at each other. I just tried to learn as much as I could. So that was my first experience with Paul Heyman, but I learned very fast that I was like, oh, well, he’s down here because other people don’t like him either, and so me becoming a Paul Heyman guy was more of a scarlet letter on me than anything else. It was just like, ‘Yeah, we don’t like Punk. Oh, Heyman likes him? Now we hate him.’”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit No Contest Wrestling Podcast with O’Shea Jackson with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
