Punk, the Elite and Wrestling With the Cult of Personality

That partial passage from Living Colour’s “Cult of Personality” arguably hits the hardest, but it also accurately sums up our relationship with idol culture on the broader spectrum. Much more narrowly in the little box we call professional wrestling.

Let’s use a recent example.

Over the last year the dominant conversation in AEW circles has been the fallout of Brawl Out. To sum up the situation in case you found a really good underground den to sit inside since Aug. 2022, summarily a cowboy accused a punk of getting someone fired. A couple of whippersnapper-like young bucks and company allegedly leaked information/stories to a guy with stars in his eyes, the punk called out the starry-eyed man and the bucks for being terrible department store managers while eating muffins. This led to their posse waltzing up to the punk’s locker room where they delicately knocked it down/asked politely to enter. A scuffle ensued, a man was bitten by another man, and through it all, a dog was saved.

(That makes Kenny Omega the relative hero of the story, by the way. Just saying.)

No one was truly in the right following the All Out 2022 scrum where CM Punk lambasted the AEW EVPs and Hangman Page, and by extension Tony Khan. Nor were the Elite in the right for what some members are alleged to have done, if they ever did at all. And even then there’s common ground in the reality they didn’t need to approach the incident how they did. Everyone was wrong–except Kenny, clearly–in this situation, and yet over the last 11 months fans on either side of the issue have drawn lines in the sand and sided with one or the other.

Have I trivialized the situation? Yeah, and if you’re going to take up arms against the notion of all being in the wrong then you’ve proven the point. If the social media discourse and general fan reaction in arenas over the last year has shown us anything it’s that wrestling fans are all too willing to side with their favourites with reckless abandon without actually, carefully considering the situation. That has frankly been emboldened more so when you factor in Dave Meltzer very factually peddling scarcely less than 100% negative press toward CM Punk to his hundreds of thousands of listeners and readers. For better and worse, some fans do take what he says seriously. Further forward, when what he “reports” is so heavily skewed in one direction that it affects the perception of the narrative, you therefore can argue public perception leans more toward siding with the Elite amid this entire mess AEW found itself in.

Let’s take fan reactions at arenas since Punk’s return for example.

How did Chicago respond? Dumb question. How did they treat the Elite? Not well.

Let’s jump to Forbidden Door. While you can argue the reactions to Punk were much more balanced, they definitely were still more negative in Toronto. Whereas the Elite got the response you’d expect. Now, shifting over to Saskatchewan, Punk was openly cheered from the start of that episode of Collision until the end when he pinned Samoa Joe.

The questions we need to pose though are simple. Does Punk deserve the hate when he was previously so beloved? Do the Young Bucks, Hangman and Omega (yes, he saved a dog) deserve unwavering adoration? Are the key third parties culpable for not adequately defusing the situation? The answers are no, no, and yes. And yet the narrative for nearly a year has been so heavily skewed and monotonic in one direction. When the truth of the matter is that CM Punk, the Young Bucks, Kenny Omega (dog-saving notwithstanding), Tony Khan, Dave Meltzer and a complete host of other wrestlers and commentators across ALL companies thrive upon self-serving promotion in the public eye. And at fandom’s upper levels of that phenomenon those people can do no wrong, are infallible, are in the right, correct and wear the white hats. And in accepting only the positive while sweeping away the negative we cultivate conditions as wrestling fans that invite greater degrees of tribalism even within a single company’s fanbase. That doesn’t need to be the case, but in taking sides alongside people we don’t know and whose primary interaction with us is financially-based, we’re butting heads in a butthead-like fashion where the interactions between you and I for example could be more volatile than between the wrestlers or personalities themselves. If it’s civil, that’s one matter, but if it turns contentious or even toxic like so much discourse can, what purpose does that serve and who does that help? Backing the “winning team?”

They are all flawed people who could have ended any issues between them months prior but instead chose grandstanding which then spiraled into the All Out presser. Hangman Page. The Bucks. Meltzer. CM Punk. Tony Khan; they needn’t have allowed the situation to go that far, an event which has partially divided some of AEW’s fanbase. They are not white hats, they were all antagonistic and made mistakes last year that we’re still seeing the reverberations of right now with the roster being unofficially, fluidly split between Dynamite and Collison. And depending on where we sit in the spectrum we react accordingly however we choose. But the flaw in that subjective reaction is problematic depending on its source.

For example, do you hate CM Punk because he’s a knob outright and perhaps always has been, or do you hate him because he wronged your favourites? If you’re in Chicago–since it hasn’t happened elsewhere yet I believe–are you chanting F— the Elite because you actually hate the Elite, or because they’ve wronged your “Second City Saint?”

The cult of personality is a very real phenomenon. We see it in how we blindly support Vince McMahon despite his transgressions. Tony Khan despite his shortcomings. We see it on how Meltzer is placed on a pedestal of online journalism when his practices betray the title. We see it in how Jim Cornette can spin a few phrases to make fun of wrestlers he doesn’t like, and then have that filter down through the people shortsighted enough to buy into his schtick via his podcast or other multimedia platforms. Take the recent spat between Cornette and Matt Hardy where the former’s recent comments toward Hardy are an example of unnecessary and childish comments in the public space. Conversely, did Matt Hardy need to namedrop Cornette in his initial tweet about the Elite vs. Dark Order match? The answer is no, even conceding Cornette is a decidedly toxic wrestling commentator. He didn’t need to, did, and in turn birthed news for the cycle.

We are not children, never mind the adults who waltz and strut onto our screens. Everyone needs to be better, more even-keeled and less recklessly subscribed whole heartedly to the smiling, flawed faces on your TVs.