During his latest interview with SPORT1 Wrestling AEW superstar and former WWE champion CM Punk once again spoke about his famous pipebomb promo from 2011, and all of the behind the scenes details of putting it together, which included WWE Chairman Vince McMahon asking the Chicago Savior to add a line about his daughter, Stephanie McMahon. Check out the highlights below.
How much of the promo came from him:
“All of it. I had to make an outline for Vince and I didn’t say anything I wrote in the outline, I just know that I needed him to agree and then I went out there and said whatever I wanted. I knew what I wanted to say, I knew I wasn’t stepping over the line and I knew nobody was going to be pissed at me. The thing with live television is, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. If I would have asked him to say all that stuff, he would have been like, ‘Don’t mention Brock, don’t mention Paul Heyman.’ Those guys, at the time, were persona non Grata. He would have been like, ‘What the hell is Ring of Honor? Don’t mention New Japan.’ I knew to make it the special piece of art that I wanted it to be, I had to go out there and say all of that.”
Says McMahon asked him to add something about Stephanie:
“I wrote up a mock draft of it and he said, ‘Yeah, this is great.’ He asked me to add something making fun of Stephanie. I was like, ‘Okay.’ I went out there and I did it and it was good so it doesn’t matter.”
How WWE is a content company:
“They are a content company. It’s a lot and when you have that much, quality slips. It’s constant. You have to be on everything. When Rock came back on the first Raw, I was on like eight segments on that show. That’s oversaturation with a capital O. To rely on me that much and then to say that I wasn’t really that good is a little bit ridiculous, but they like their revisionist history. I think there’s a happy medium somewhere that we’re finding with AEW where everybody doesn’t need to be on every show and we have tons of main event talent that can fill those other gaps.”
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)