Posted in: AEW, Sports, TV | Tagged: aew, cm punk, wrestling

CM Punk Talks Signing with AEW, Being an AEW Guy

CM Punk made his AEW Debut on Friday at AEW Rampage: The First Dance, creating an all-time great emotional moment for fans. You can read a full transcript of Punk's return promo here. After the show, Punk answered questions from the media, and he discussed his deal with AEW, how he came to sign with the company, and how the backstage atmosphere is different than in WWE.

"ve been talking to Tony for probably a year and a half about this," Punk continued. "Some girls are easy to get into bed. I am not. I need to be wined and dined, and that's not a, 'oh, I need more money and less dates,' and, 'oh, I need this and I need that.' It was literally just talking to Tony and getting to know him. And the more people that he employed that I knew, I'd ask questions. They'd tell me things. I've been in the game for a few minutes, so I've seen and I think I traced it back to, especially since the downfall of ECW, every six months to a year, somebody pops up. 'I have money. We're gonna have TV, and we're gonna use all the ECW guys.' This is not a slight on Tony at all. It's more of a slight on me being a paranoid, neurotic, anxiety-ridden, very careful person. And I wasn't in a hurry. And the pandemic kind of helped that out. I knew I couldn't debut if there's no people in the building. I always say timing is everything, and there were a lot of happy accidents along the way that made this possible."

PUnk said that it wasn't necessarily about AEW proving themselves to Punk, and gave credit to Renee Paquette for getting him to return to WWE Backstage and showing him that working in wrestling could be fun again with the right people.

"Who am I?" said Punk. "Nobody has to prove anything to me, you know what I mean? It wasn't about them having to prove anything to me. It was about me being open to the idea, and then it wasn't gonna be, "well, I'm just gonna jump in the pool right away. No, I had to dip my toe in, you know what I mean? And see how things are going to be. Actually, this is all Renee Paquette's fault. Honestly, this is all her fault because she's the one who got me to come back and do the Backstage thing, and it opened my eyes to, like, 'OK, this is fun. She's a good person. I like working with good people.' And that's really all it was. Nobody had to prove anything to me, but I did take a wait-and-see approach and I wait and I saw and I like what I saw."

"When I say happy accident, I mean, nothing was forced," Punk elaborated later during the Q&A. "You know, it was very relaxed. I don't even want to call it a negotiation, it's just like one of those things when you're talking to somebody, and you say the same thing at the same time, and you're just like, yeah, that's it."

You can read more about CM Punk's return to wrestling at AEW Rampage here.

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