After being fired by AEW in September 2023, CM Punk wasted no time in making his WWE return just two months later at Survivor Series: WarGames. This run has proven to be a huge success, and he'll headline SummerSlam next month in a match against World Heavyweight Champion Gunther.
You'll recall that the Second City Saint walked out of WWE after the Royal Rumble PLE in 2014, but made a shock return as a correspondent on FS1's short-lived WWE Backstage show. Punk was employed by FOX, not WWE, and had free rein to comment on the WWE product without ever appearing on the likes of RAW, SmackDown, and NXT.
There were rumblings at the time that Punk might have been in talks with WWE about stepping back into the ring. Instead, he later signed with AEW, and the Best in the World has now confirmed that he did indeed meet with former WWE Chairman Vince McMahon.
"I think the Twitter and the internet perception is I tried to go back to WWE, and they didn’t want m,e so I went and did the FOX show. That’s not what happened at all," Punk told Robbie Fox. "I had a hilarious, clandestine meeting in the Borgata in Atlantic City with Vince [McMahon] and Triple H. I don’t even know now. What is it? It’s 2025. This has to be 2018 or ‘19, and it’s just because Vince just started [calling]."
"I had agents, they were telling me, 'Hey, they wanna talk to you' and I was like, 'Whatever, I’m not interested,' and then Vince just started calling me. He was like, 'Hey! I’m eliminating the middleman,' and I was just like, 'This is insane,' and it just so happened that, 'Oh, well, I’m gonna be here.' 'Alright, we can get there.'"
"We had a meeting and we had a handshake agreement and then he ghosted me," Punk revealed. "So, that’s why it didn’t happen. Unbelievable. I’m gonna write a book someday."
Despite McMahon dropping the ball on what could have been an incredible return for Punk, he still credits that meeting with being the first step in mending fences with Triple H (who was responsible for bringing him back in 2023).
"It’s a great story. It’s a fantastic story. Yeah, that would have been probably the first time that me and Triple H probably started chipping it away at any problems or drama that we had in the past," he shared. "That was the first instance. Yeah, [I was open to a return at the time]."
"I was very much just like, 'Yeah, okay.' Pay me, whatever. I took some stuff personally. Like, years have gone by. Alright, I’m over it, recognized that it’s a business. You don’t want me to take it personally? Just pay me," he added.
It's always fun to think about what might have been, but things probably worked out for the best, as we can't imagine Punk being overly happy with working under McMahon again (and WWE in the late 2010s/early 2020s was not good).
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