Navigate / search

Home » CM Punk

Bring It Back: WWE Halftime Heat

Flipping through channels on Super Bowl Sunday is an exercise in futility. Unless you’re a fan of “counter-programming” like the Puppy Bowl or the Lingerie Bowl, odds are that, if your TV is on tonight, it’s tuned in to CBS. Advertising, football, glimpses of the summer’s upcoming tentpole blockbusters, it’s all kind of a drag. Tomorrow, an endless stream of articles will go up collecting the best advertisements, .gifs, Tweets, and plays from the game and the clock will reset: another year until the next Super Bowl, Puppy Bowl, Lingerie Bowl, and round of Doritos ads. It’s audacious to suggest that more networks run original content against the Super Bowl, but if Animal Planet has the guts to do it every year, why not, say, the USA Network?

When Beyoncé took the field to perform during the Pepsi Halftime Show tonight, USA Network was halfway through an episode of an interminable marathon of NCIS episodes. In 1999, with the WWF at the zenith of the Attitude Era, they aired Halftime Heat, a 20-minute special that butted heads against Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Stevie Wonder, and Gloria Estefan, an odd hydra of acts that served as a “Celebration of Soul, Salsa, and Swing.” The Super Bowl halftime show has  grown in size and scope since then, becoming a celebration of whatever company shells out the most cash. Running a wrestling match against Beyoncé sounds like a daunting proposition, but as evidenced by Aaron Rodgers’s “discount double-check” championship belt move, scads of athletes mimicking John Cena’s “You Can’t See Me” hand gesture, and The Rock appearing in multiple Super Bowl commercials this year, the crossover potential of World Wrestling Entertainment has never been more apparent. With The Rock, Brock Lesnar, John Cena, and CM Punk on the roster, the time has come for Vince McMahon to once again sell the general television audience on the brilliance of sports entertainment. It’s an easy, three step process.

1. The Commercial

As crazy as it seems, the WWE has, at this point in time, as many unique characters as it did during the Attitude Era. Sure, Daniel Bryan, Damien Sandow, Brodus Clay, Antonio Cesaro, and The Shield aren’t as immediately recognizable as Kane, Mankind, or Sable, but they’re different from just about any other characters on TV, and against a sea of bro-celebrating beer ads, slow-mo car commercials, and This Year’s GoDaddy.com Advertisement, the WWE’s stable of characters would pop out against the mundanity of the modern Super Bowl commercial. This year, the cost of a Super Bowl ad was roughly four million dollars. That’s a lot of scratch. But an ad next year would be in prime position to promote the 30th edition of WrestleMania, the further involvement of guys like Lesnar and Rock, and perhaps Triple H and The Undertaker. It’d get the lesser-known guys before the largest television audience of the year, once again establish the WWE as a purveyor of unique pop culture moments, and legitimize the company in ways that direct-to-DVD movies, wellness policies, and celebrity cameos during WrestleMania ultimately can’t.

2. The Competitors

If The Rock vs. Steve Austin was the feud of the Attitude Era, The Rock vs. Mankind ran a close second place. At Halftime Heat in 1999, that feud was chosen to represent the WWF during their version of the Super Bowl halftime show. Though the resulting empty arena match was hardly among the best Rock/Mankind encounter that happened between Survivor Series 1998 and WrestleMania XV, but The Rock’s charisma and Mankind’s ability to withstand tremendous abuse were important things to showcase going forward, and 2/3 of the era’s triumvirate of big stars were put before a large audience in an important match.

For a rebooted Halftime Heat to work, that’s the template the WWE would need to work with. In 2013/2014, the three most important men in the WWE are The Rock, John Cena, and CM Punk. Despite his popularity, The Rock is no longer as emblematic of the WWE as he once was. Cena and Punk, whose feud in various permutations defined the bulk of 2011 and 2012, are the obvious choice for a halftime wrestling match. There are no two men on the regular roster who have the same effect on the crowd as Punk and Cena, nor is there a better main event combination going.

3. The Match

Say what you will about the empty arena match, but it signified everything about the Attitude Era, good and bad. Vince McMahon, while never the greatest announcer in WWF history, was at the peak of his abilities in terms of his evil boss character, and when he wasn’t shilling for the company, his cheerleading for The Rock is among the match’s highlights. My favorite exchange happens relatively early in the match, after The Rock whips Mankind into a bunch of chairs and incapacitates him with a barely protected chairshot to the head. With The Rock extolling his virtues to the crowd, Mankind’s Mr. Socko-clad arm rises from the wreckage like Jaws’s fin from the ocean. As Rock keeps speaking, McMahon notices the approaching Mankind and alerts his champion just seconds before the deranged challenger shoves a sock down his opponent’s gullet. Rock’s muffled screams through the play-by-play headset are great. McMahon complaining that Mankind interrupted The Rock’s “eloquent” speech is even better. In combining the brutality and comedic aspects of the WWF at the time, it’s the Attitude Era in a time capsule.

To get it right in 2014, the match would need to be taped before a live audience. Rock/Mankind taking place in an empty arena makes sense within the context of its being another in a series of increasingly crazy gimmick matches designed to test the unbreakable will of Mankind and the cunning intellect of The Rock. There’s nothing the WWE is more proud of right now than their ability to connect with their fans, who are collectively referred to as the WWE Universe and who have the ability on any given Monday to dominate the trending topics on Twitter. It’d be unreasonable from a budgetary standpoint to air the match between CM Punk and John Cena live, but an audience is almost necessary. Best case scenario, film the match in Chicago and get a crowd something like this:

If the match between the two is even half as good as their Money in the Bank 2011 match, then you’re talking about a contest that’d immediately qualify as one of the best of the year. Furthermore, it’d be a match that showcases two sides of the WWE’s product, the two they most emphasize during any given broadcast. In John Cena, you have the larger-than-life, PG, kid friendly specimen of masculinity, the unquestioned face of the company. In Punk, you have the emblem of the WWE’s so-called “Reality Era,” a dangerous man whose offense is a combination of realistic submission holds and strikes and classic wrestling showmanship.

Every Monday, the WWE produces a number of PowerPoint-style bumper graphics that promote the company as a pop culture juggernaut. They trumpet the virtues of their various public relations outreach projects, big events, and bigger personalities. With five TV shows and the occasional pay per view card, they sometimes do this six times a week. They are preaching to the choir. Signing The Rock and Brock Lesnar are good steps to entice casual fans and snakebitten diehards to watch the product again. Putting Snooki in a WrestleMania match ensures that the media continues to cover professional wrestling like the freak-show it’s been perceived as since the rock ‘n wrestling era. It’s beyond time for the WWE to marry those sensibilities and reach out to casual fans in a way that it hasn’t in over a decade. It’s time to bring back Halftime Heat, to do it bigger and better than before. The company has little to lose, and the USA Network has the time. John Cena vs. CM Punk during the Super Bowl would be a once in a lifetime event, something wrestling fans would talk about enough to distract from the ridiculous plays, overproduced pop concerts, and potential power outages the big game provides. To me, it’s not a question of when the WWE will put on another Halftime Heat, but why the idea has gone untouched for fourteen years.

And if John Cena hits CM Punk in the head with a gigantic bag of popcorn, so much the better.

TV Review: WWE Monday Night Raw (10/22/12)

In WWE, the episode of Monday Night Raw before a pay-per-view is colloquially referred to as the “go home show,” the company’s last opportunity to embellish the storylines going into the weekend’s big matches. For me, that description has never worked for any episode of Raw besides the one before WrestleMania, which is, of course, the show, the one that events like this Sunday’s Hell in a Cell serve as a pyrokinetic PowerPoint presentation for, building up a year-long resume for the evening’s stars before the Monday after WrestleMania, where everything resets in order to build up to next year’s show. Regardless, this is the internet, and once nerds like me catch glimpse of phrases like “go home show,” every episode of Raw is evaluated not in terms of entertainment or plot, but in terms of how well it sells the upcoming pay per view.

On that level, tonight’s episode of Monday Night Raw was a puzzling mishmash of bizarre elements, the WWE’s signature brands of comedy and mock seriousness colliding with the otherworldly realness of “Best in the World” C.M. Punk and angry, glowering giant The Big Show. As a sales pitch, Raw is perhaps shackled by the fact that Hell in a Cell offers as its main attractions three first-time encounters in an environment that calls for the end of long-standing beef, but in the business of live, active entertainment, you deal with the cards you’re dealt, and the WWE had been given fan indifference in the face of another Sheamus/Alberto Del Rio encounter, and an injury to John Cena just as his feud with C.M. Punk began hurtling towards finality. The lead-in to Hell in a Cell and the pay per view itself have felt like a shuffling of the cosmic deck. Substituting for John Cena is Ryback. The Big Show has been called in as an audible for Alberto Del Rio. A tournament led to the establishment of a tag team division so that one new tag team could battle another over the tag team championships. This Sunday promises a few return bouts—Kofi Kingston vs. The Miz, Alberto Del Rio vs. Randy Orton, Eve vs. either Kaitlyn or Layla, and perhaps Antonio Caesaro vs. Justin Gabriel—but despite how good those match-ups have proven to be (Kingston/Miz and Caesaro/Gabriel have been pleasant surprises, as has Eve’s run as queen jerk of the WWE Divas), they’re afterthoughts to the ongoing championship reigns of Sheamus, Punk, and Team Hell No.

Stacked up against a presidential debate, Monday Night Football, and Game 7 of the NLCS, the approach taken to building these confrontations, with the exception of Punk/Ryback, played like the WWE’s oft-belittled writing staff throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks to the pre-match hype video. The prime example of this ethic is the story between Team Hell No and the Rhodes Scholars, a feud that’s been simmering since before Cody Rhodes and Damien Sandow won the tag team tournament, way back when WWE let the fans christen Daniel Bryan and Kane “Team Hell No,” as opposed to the meme-worthy “Team Friendship. On the good end of this feud, Daniel Bryan and Kane both had and lost matches due to one dynamic of their partnership or the other: Bryan’s insecurity and Kane’s goofing around in the case of the excellent Bryan/Dolph Ziggler contest, and the Rhodes Scholars vulture-like mentality during Kane’s umpteenth encounter with The Big Show. Less impressive was WWE’s spin on The Newlywed Game, which promised a game of wits between the two tag teams and, instead, served as a platform for WWE afterthought Matt Striker to wish harm upon Team Hell No before getting chucked across the stage by The Big Show. The WWE has oddly succeeded with bits of anti-comedy like this before—as proof, look up their version of The Price is Right—but The Newly Tag Game, awkward name and all, was executed like something thought up on the fly and scratched during the commercial break. Luckily Rhodes Scholars closed out the tag team tournament with a strong match against Rey Mysterio and Sin Cara, so there’s still plenty off intrigue.

This schizophrenic approach has also permeated the issue between The Big Show and Sheamus, but to better effect. Sheamus is an interesting fellow, a big, tough, amiable champion who has grown leaps and bounds in the ring but whose reliance upon broad-stroke comedy has ranged from awkward (Irish stereotypes) to uncomfortable (Mexican and Jewish stereotypes). Against The Big Show, Sheamus has employed a simpleton’s logic: Daniel Bryan beat the big man 45 seconds into his reign as World Heavyweight Champion, Sheamus beat Daniel Bryan in 18 seconds at WrestleMania, therefore the outcome is clear. He’s joked around with Show, grappled with the futility of his Brogue Kick finishing maneuver against a man much taller than any of Sheamus’s prior opponents, and generally goofed around as The Big Show glowers, punches things, and reminds Sheamus that he’d best be serious if he stands a prayer of retaining his title. Tonight, in a clip that’ll just kill me if it sees any further airtime, Sheamus shilled his new Brawlin’ Buddy toy, which was quickly punched across the state line by The Big Show. Luckily, Show’s involvement in Sheamus’ lumberjack match against C.M. Punk did the job of building towards this Sunday’s championship bout.

Speaking of the lumberjack match (and I’ll probably speak more about it this weekend, as the “Wrestling Worth Watching” feature returns to cover individual matches from the week in a way that’s not appropriate in a regular review), it was billed as the largest such match in history, boasting some three dozen men surrounding the ring. I didn’t count them, but that sea of humanity was there for one reason: to part like the Red Sea before an incoming Ryback. It was an impressive image, the WWE Universe vacating one side of the ring to make way for the challenger to C.M. Punk’s title, and Punk’s attempt to get away from Ryback, only to be fed back to the ring by a cadre of good guys for one of Ryback’s impressive power moves, begs the question of what will happen when the two face each other in the cell, which is exactly the question the WWE wants you to ask.

What they don’t want you asking, hence the reshuffling of the deck, is why, exactly, John Cena gave up an opportunity to face Punk mere weeks after insisting, sling and all, that Hell In A Cell was the only way for C.M. Punk to validate his lengthy WWE Championship reign. While serving as Ryback’s cheerleader, Cena wound up being interrupted by Punk, who (in typical heel fashion) claimed it was evidence that Cena had come around to Punk’s overall superiority. Not so, said Cena. He just wasn’t medically cleared. It was incredibly confusing—Cena advocating one moment for the change Ryback represents, then claiming he only did it because he wasn’t cleared—made more confusing when Cena flexed his mighty arm, touting that he’d been cleared and was ready for a fight right-the-hell-now. Naturally, the match didn’t happen (Paul Heyman to Punk: “You don’t fight for free!”), and Cena was quickly called elsewhere, his presence for Hell In A Cell’s main event no longer required.

That “elsewhere” happened to be the ongoing saga of A.J. Lee, the WWE Diva who went from nerd-baiting background occupier to the most popular woman in WWE not named Kelly Kelly to oddly-written authority figure through a dizzying array of personal relationships, uncalled for attacks, and strange business decisions. This week, before her home town (never a good place for a wrestler to be, C.M. Punk excluded), she unceremoniously resigned from the post of Raw General Manager amid rumor that she’d been fraternizing with the boys in the back, namely one John Cena. A.J.’s resignation was one of the more odd, strangely affecting segments in recent WWE history, a curious mix of A.J.’s real history and the bizarre turns her storyline had taken. With her thanking the fans and hugging Vince McMahon (nobody hugs Vince McMahon!), it was a moment simultaneously real and unreal, something that could either go nowhere or herald A.J.’s long-awaited reentry in the Diva’s division.

Instead, she’s now caught up in an alleged affair with John Cena, who has made a habit of appropriating elements of other wrestler’s storylines. After WrestleMania, it was Cena who went against C.M. Punk’s sworn enemy Johnny Ace. It’s Cena who’s taken to the occasional “YES!” or “FEED ME MORE!” chant. And now it’s Cena with A.J., a woman who once carried the promise of being the WWE’s first autonomous female character who now finds herself loosely tied to the affections of another of the WWE’s titans of masculinity. Cena’s constant refrain—he and A.J. had nothing more than a “business dinner”—was as inauthentic as the thought of his being romantically entangled with any of the WWE Divas, and heaps an unnecessary amount of drama onto the role of General Manager, a position that’s best when the character occupying it is conniving and sly, or otherwise invincible. Sure, there are other elements to the story, and Cena needs something to do until his elbow is fully recovered, but none of those elements are clicking, and this isn’t it.

Rating: 

Stray Observations:

  • I mentioned it in the post, but the feature “Wrestling Worth Watching” will be returning this week, sometime after the conclusion of Hell In A Cell. There’s a vast difference between the narrative structure of a television show and the merit of an individual wrestling match. Of note here, for the interested: Rhodes Scholars vs. Sin Cara and Rey Mysterio, Dolph Ziggler vs. Daniel Bryan, and the C.M. Punk vs. Sheamus lumberjack match.
  • Daniel Bryan, on Kane: “You love rainbows!”
  • Bryan’s reaction to winning The Newly Tag Game was great, a return to his bombastic celebrations as World Heavyweight Champion, but the crowd just wasn’t buying the segment.

TV Review: WWE Monday Night Raw (10/15/12)

For weeks now, the narrative of WWE Monday Night Raw has been this: to cement his legacy as an all-time great champion, CM Punk would need to defeat John Cena within the confines of Hell in a Cell, WWE’s steel cage warzone that’s seen its fair share of company defining moments. On one level, this makes sense: many of the company’s top feuds, from The Undertaker’s battles with Shawn Michaels and Mankind to Triple H’s beefs with Chris Jericho and Cactus Jack, have wound up there, and Cena/Punk is certainly worthy. On another, it’s a complete mystery: Punk’s been involved in two Hell in a Cell matches and hasn’t outright lost to John Cena since before last year’s WrestleMania. The cell has mostly loomed in the background as another specter of WWE past, taunting the long-tenured WWE Champion like Bret Hart, Mick Foley, Jim Ross, and Vince McMahon have over the past few weeks. Tonight was billed as the night CM Punk chose between John Cena and Ryback  as his eventual challenger, and also as an evening during which Vince McMahon would potentially choose Punk’s opponent. In a move unsurprising to folks who follow injury reports but inconsistent in terms of overall narrative, neither Punk nor McMahon chose who would be stepping into Hell in a Cell, but John Cena, who abdicated the ring and led the audience in Ryback’s chant of “FEED ME MORE.”

This swerve came despite Cena telling Vince McMahon that he was ready, if need be, for the challenge of the Cell. Despite weeks of him telling Punk that respect and a lasting legacy would only be his if he agreed to the match. Obviously, Cena’s elbow is still an issue, but stepping away from a fight he was previously begging for is something completely outside his character, even when he was a white rapper of questionable associations nearly a decade ago. Ryback, fortunately for the WWE, is an able substitute. Listen to the response he gets, even after failing to lift up the monstrous Tensai for his finishing maneuver a week ago. There is no hotter act in wrestling. The only thing the WWE has to fear is that Ryback’s luster is diminished by a loss, or that a championship victory is too much, too soon. It’ll hurt the narrative a little, but not enough to seriously damage Vince McMahon’s unsinkable ship.

Ryback, love him or hate him (I’m a fan), is the best example of the WWE’s seemingly newfound ability to turn its new stars from awkward newcomers into characters worth investing time into over a short period of time. The law of diminishing returns has effectively caused the Funkasaurus to go extinct, but acts like Damien Sandow and Antonio Caesaro have done well for themselves; Kofi Kingston, The Miz, Cody Rhodes, and Sin Cara have gotten a new sense of purpose; and the much maligned Tag Team and Divas divisions have had an energy to them that has been largely absent for years.

A lot of this, oddly, has been a side-effect of Jerry “The King” Lawler’s heart attack and subsequent hiatus from the broadcast position. That night forced play-by-play announcer Michael Cole to drop his evil ways and return to simply reporting on matches, rather than actively picking favorites. He’s been joined at the table by Jim Ross and John Bradshaw Layfield, both of whom are gifted analysts with whom Cole has tremendous chemistry. Layfield was not on Raw tonight, but Ross has a way of connecting with wrestling fans that, as an announcer myself, is both enviable and hard to describe. Cole, sitting beside him, is tremendously effective in making Ross’s points digestible to the WWE’s young demographic. If the aim of broadcasting this format is to make the wrestlers in the ring look as good as possible, few recent matches have befitted as much as the one between Kofi Kingston and The Miz, which was meant to hype a title fight between the two on WWE’s new Wednesday night show. I’ve been disinterested in Kofi Kingston for some time and have never really been a fan of The Miz, but listening to Ross talk about Kingston’s history and Cole put over The Miz’s accomplishments, it really felt like their match meant something. Considering that the issue sprung from an incident where Larry King’s wife through water in The Miz’s face, that’s saying a lot about both the commentary and the match itself.

Similarly, the WWE has found a way to make The Big Show a compelling character again: a disgruntled carnival strongman with a right hand that’s literally lethal, facing down a grinning goofball Irishman whose most compelling argument for success is that a mutual opponent once beat Show in 45 seconds. Tonight, The Big Show demanded to face Daniel Bryan in a match so he could “erase the memory” of his 45 second title reign and handily defeated the WWE Tag Team Champion. The match achieved the dual purpose of establishing Show as a legitimate threat (something that’s proven hard in the past, despite the man’s size) and further gelling the team of Bryan and Kane, the unlikely champions who belittle each other but are growing into a semi-functional unit. The odd man out here is World Heavyweight Champion Sheamus, who would probably be one of my favorite wrestlers were he not involved in a mind-boggling amount of lame sketches that’ve resorted to bullying, racial stereotyping, and grand theft auto, none of which have utilized his natural charisma, nor the size and strength that make him so impressive.

The result of this episode of Raw is that the Hell in a Cell pay-per-view is now much more full, though it remains unclear as to what matches will actually end up in the cage. There’s Punk and Ryback, as mentioned by Vince McMahon, and I presume Big Show and Sheamus will also end up there. Daniel Bryan and Kane may face the winners of next weeks Rey Mysterio/Sin Cara vs. Damien Sandow/Cody Rhodes encounter in Hell in a Cell, but that’d be three first-time matches taking place in a structure formerly reserved for the end of a long-standing conflict.

In this regard, give CM Punk and manager Paul Heyman most of the credit for selling the upcoming show. Punk, as always, has really taken to the role of smarmy jerk, and if anybody deserves to go through the crucible of Hell in a Cell, it’s him. Punk has been through two such matches, as previously mentioned, but neither of them were classics. Paul Heyman, though, was a big part of one of WWE’s best such brawls, a bloodbath between his client Brock Lesnar and Hell in a Cell staple The Undertaker. He may be pivotal two weeks from now, worrying outside the cage as his man stares across the ring at a young challenger with nothing to lose, unheard of momentum, and an unbeaten record. The vitriol aimed at Punk since he attacked Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on the thousandth episode of Raw crossed into the realm of reality last week, when Punk punched a fan, retaliating to a hostile crowd trying to push him down a flight of stairs. The WWE Universe is out for his blood, meaning that there was no bad choice for Hell in a Cell. If only that choice had followed the WWE’s already established logic.

Rating: 

Stray Observations:

  • Raw General Manager A.J. Lee has become less and less essential to the show since she was given power and granted a last name, but they’re still portraying her as an emotionally unstable woman who doesn’t like the word “crazy.” This resulted in an odd verbal gaffe by Michael Cole, who noted that he shouldn’t “call A.J. the ‘C-word.’” That’s a basic rule of thumb for all women, Mr. Cole.
  • Vince McMahon’s reply when Ryback said “FEED ME PUNK?” “I’ll take it under consideration.”
  • Paul Heyman is perhaps the greatest slimeball manager in wrestling history. The way he tries warming up to Vince McMahon while also setting him up for a match against Punk was great. His response to Vince when McMahon said he’d only take a match against Heyman (“That’s not what I pitched! That’s not what I pitched!”) was golden.
  • I like Wade Barrett a lot, but I can never tell if he has a new theme song, or if they’ve just given him something that bland and generic. Considering how many times they changed Barrett’s music when he was a member of Nexus and The Corre, I wouldn’t be surprised if they just haven’t settled on one generic rock song or another. Entrance music is a big part of professional wrestling (for one, it lets the audience know exactly how to respond the moment a wrestler enters the arena), and Barrett’s considerable mystique would only be enhanced by something recognizable.

DVD Review: CM Punk: Best in the World (2012)

If you’re even remotely familiar with World Wrestling Entertainment, just one look at CM Punk on a Monday Night Raw telecast will tell you everything that makes his narrative so compelling: in an industry built upon and carried by Herculean physiques, CM Punk doesn’t fit the mould. If you are familiar with WWE, familiar enough, perhaps, to’ve seen one of their many retrospective documentaries, then the difference between Punk and men like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, and John Cena are even more clear cut.

The documentaries chronicling the rise of your typical ten-time world champion all make the same point: becoming a legend in professional wrestling from the outset of one’s career is as unlikely for Ric Flair as anybody else. But many of the narratives pushed by the WWE are remarkably similar, involving men of uncommon drive and ambition who were standout college athletes, second- or third-generation performers, or who had the luck and good fortune to see the workaday, bingo hall grind of territory day wrestling pay off in the most unimaginable, improbable way. They all say something along the lines of “I wasn’t supposed to make it,” but, for whatever polish a man like John Cena lacked upon his debut in the big time, it’s hard to not look at his story—and most stories like it—with a sense of inevitability. Some men were born to be superstars.

A particular subset of wrestling fans will tell you that CM Punk was destined to be a superstar, and to some extent, that’s true. Wrestling has shrunk and grown, grown and shrunk, and otherwise mutated since Vincent Kennedy McMahon ended the territory system by taking the World Wrestling Federation national on the back of Hulk Hogan, but the cyclical nature of wrestling almost dictated that the territories would come back. They have in the form of independent wrestling, and if CM Punk had never been signed by the WWE, he’d almost indisputably be the biggest wrestler in the world not employed by McMahon’s corporate juggernaut (a slot currently occupied by Punk’s best friend, Colt Cabana), the best independent wrestler in the world. But the WWE is given to signing buzzed-about talent, and in 2005, few men had as much buzz as CM Punk. His story would be unusual enough were it to end there, the land of giants inviting a small, scrappy punk into its fold, and had anybody with the power to hire wrestlers to contracts known what they were getting into with Punk, it’s likely that his story wouldn’t have made it that far. But Punk’s an odd character, a man driven to make it despite his apparent flaws, a man confident enough in his abilities to recognize those flaws as a potential strength. Punk doesn’t fit the WWE’s mould, and he’s just fine with that.

Best in the World plays a lot like a typical WWE DVD release, with a documentary feature on the superstar in question and a collection of his best matches spanning two discs. The difference here, however, is that Punk did not come up through the modern WWE Superstar’s usual channel (the various promotions WWE has used to develop its future talent), nor are any of his classic independent matches part of the WWE’s mammoth video library. In direct contrast to the company’s “Don’t Try This” PSAs, Punk began his career in a friend’s backyard, a kid with a shameless DIY aesthetic that led him to become one of Chicago’s most successful independent wrestling promoters before seeking proper wrestling training. The nature of Punk’s career and the WWE’s obsession with charting the rise of its most bankable stars necessitates the video libraries of entities like IWA: Mid-South and Ring of Honor—promotions most members of the WWE Universe would be forgiven for not knowing—and interviews with indie wrestling luminaries Ace Steel, Colt Cabana, Bryan Danielson, and Chris Hero, not to mention WWE personel, midcard fixtures, Punk’s friends and surrogate family, and punk musician Lars Fredrickson. That Punk’s early story is supplemented with footage of his contests against Cabana, Hero, and Samoa Joe is an unexpected bonus, something that has the potential to open a WWE fan’s world to a different kind of wrestling in a way that never existed before now.

It’s a unique line-up of talking heads, all of whom do an exceptional job of telling the story of WWE’s least-likely company figurehead. The “wrestler who wasn’t supposed to make it” storyline is personified by Punk to the point that it should forever be retired. Here’s a guy who is too small and too different to make it (his Pepsi and G.I. Joe tattoos are regularly left off his action figures and video game likenesses), but a man who is nevertheless too vocal, too passionate to submit to a role less than the one he currently occupies. Though Vince McMahon does not appear on this DVD (the Chairman is likely being saved for a a sequel somewhere doen the line), he is very much the authority Punk rages against, even if it’s clear that Punk’s eventual breakthrough in 2011 was good for his company’s bottom line. The WWE version of the Summer of Punk—the 2011 saga that saw Punk give unbelievable speeches about the state of the WWE, threaten to beat John Cena for his WWE Championship on Punk’s final night with the company, then leave with the title—was largely borne from Punk’s frustration with his position on the card and the overall direction of the WWE, a theme that’s being revisited even now as Punk angles his way towards yet another confrontation with Cena over the title the two have come to define.

If Punk has beaten the odds placed before him—and WWE creative and corporate figures like Michael Hayes (of 1970s and 80s Freebirds glory) and Triple H will be the first to tell you that he has—it’s due to his willingness to barge into McMahon’s office and ask (or demand) for something better. It’s not surprising to learn that the Straight Edge Society—Punk’s messiah-like play on cults and his own straight edge lifestyle—was his idea, but it’s practically unheard of for a wrestler to drop 14 weeks of television on the boss’ desk, even rarer for that plan to be carried even partially to fruition. Best in the World shows Punk at his best in the ring, but its greatest pleasure is in detailing the way CM Punk thinks about the business. To that end, Best in the World doesn’t mythologize its subject, as most WWE documentaries attempt to. This is a quieter, more intimate portrait of a wrestler, something along the lines of WWE’s recent Steve Austin documentary and its earlier efforts focusing on Chris Benoit and Eddie Guerrero. It doesn’t offer much for those who aren’t wrestling fans, but for those who are, it’s an impressive look at one of the medium’s smartest, most gifted performers, a surprisingly strong argument in favor of viewing professional wrestling as art.

Rating:

CM Punk: Best in the World. Directed by Kevin Dunn. A documentary featuring CM Punk, Colt Cabana, Chris Hero, Daniel Bryan, John Cena, Triple H, Michael Hayes, Paul Heyman, and others. Released October 9, 2012, by WWE Films. Extras include documentary footage and matches across Punk’s career.

TV Review: WWE Monday Night Raw (7/24/12)

At times, last night’s episode of WWE Raw felt like it was being piped in from several alternate universes, which, I suspect, is just the nature of the “family reunion” style of show the company is fond of putting on when it meets and eclipses certain milestones. If, like me, you have an oddly (sadly) precise memory for the goings-on of World Wrestling Entertainment, things like the Degeneration X reunion—which saw Triple H and Shawn Michaels join forces with X-Pac and the New Age Outlaws for fifteen minutes of passable, PG jokes about how old the quintet has become—are head-scratching affairs due to giant, gaping holes in continuity. Yes, the Triple H/Shawn Michaels configuration of the group wore the same t-shirts as the Triple H/X-Pac/New Age Outlaws iteration, but Michaels had considerable beef with those dudes once he was ousted from the group, and said beef was never satisfactorily resolved. Read more