History Behind the Scenes

In which Kevin Owens holds a grudge against CM Punk for a couple of decades.

So Kevin Owens is the number one contender against the Undisputed WWE champion CM Punk, huh? Well, well, well. At last, a chance to break out my favorite Office gif.

Gather ‘round, it’s time… for some Lore.

It’s important to begin this deep dive into a complex history by noting that by many, many accounts, C.M. Punk has been a pleasure to work with since “coming home” to WWE. A lot of the people who feud with him by bringing in old personal grudges are probably fine with him backstage at this point. I don’t presume to judge the heart of Phil Brooks. But his history with Kevin goes back twenty years, though some extremely weird twists and turns, and Kevin will probably not be able to reference much of it directly as they feud because A) WWE assumes no one is interested in much that happened more that ten years ago (other than the Shield, bless their angsty socks) and B) It all took place in promotions WWE refuses to mention directly. 

So I’m hoping to take some of your time to explain why Kevin Owens, maybe even more than most people, hates CM Punk’s fucking guts.

2004: A Beginning

We start 22 years ago, October 2004, in New Jersey, where two very young kids from Montreal are just starting to break into the American wrestling scene. Kevin Steen (not yet Kevin Owens) and his friend El Generico (not yet Sami Zayn, though I call him that in this history) are wrestling for Jersey All Pro Wrestling. It’s their fourth ever show in the States, and they’re still getting their bearings. While they wander around town, they cross paths—for the first time, but definitely not the last—with two slightly older kids from Chicago: CM Punk and Colt Cabana. As Kevin remembers it, Colt and Punk were notably chilly  to the two eager young Canadians. Not a great start.

The next week, Sami and Kevin go to a Ring of Honor show in Massachusetts, and bring with them a VCR tape of their work to share with the ROH booker, hoping to get some work with the promotion. 

The only problem is, they don’t know who the booker is. 

So they ask one of the few ROH wrestlers they know at the time, even fleetingly: CM Punk, who directs them to Gabe Sapolsky. And their hopeful VCR tape seems to have done the trick, because Sapolsky starts booking them for ROH shows when the promotion was within driving range of Montreal.

And yet something seems to be off, though they don’t fully realize it at first. Kevin and Sami don’t always make the best first impression, and over time I think it becomes clear that they have made a terrible first impression on CM Punk, a bad beginning that will only get worse, especially for Kevin.

2005: The Summer of Punk

Kevin and Sami’s first run in Ring of Honor was an unmitigated disaster. 

They were wrestling separately, not as a team, and not against each other, at a time when they shone best when in the ring together. They were scrabbling around at the bottom of the card, losing in lackluster matches (between the two of them, they had a 1-15 record in the six months they were there). At the top of the card was CM Punk, during the white-hot Summer of Punk, where he won the ROH championship after signing with WWE, teasing all summer that he was going to take the championship with him when he went. Kevin and Punk couldn’t have been further apart on the locker room totem pole. You would think Kevin would have been utterly beneath Punk’s notice.

And yet.

At the time, Punk liked to stop by and do commentary sometimes. As a heel, every wrestler got some mockery and disdain from him. Yet he saved some of his most pointed barbs for this nobody kid from Montreal. He honed in on Kevin’s finisher, the package piledriver, turning it from a brutal move to a joke. As I explain in Fight Forever:

He dubbed Kevin’s package piledriver finisher the “Mr. Peepers Driver.” It was a reference to an SNL character, a scrawny half-monkey subhuman who wore a singlet-looking red shorts and suspenders and enjoyed dry-humping people. Considering the package piledriver always began with the opponent’s head jammed between Kevin’s legs, the nickname was a brilliantly savage belittling of Kevin’s intelligence, appearance, masculinity, and humanity, all in one fell swoop.

Most famously, he also took serious offense at Kevin’s desire to wear a t-shirt. In ROH at the time, wrestlers wrestled bare-chested if they had the physique for it, and in a singlet if they didn’t. Kevin wore a singlet, but disliked it, feeling more comfortable in a t-shirt. Struggling to connect to the audience, unable to get into character, one night he asked the ROH booker if he could wear a t-shirt to the evening’s match. Word of the request got out, and while Kevin was warming up in the ring later, Punk’s voice boomed out over the PA system for all to hear: “Kevin Steen, this is God. You're a pro wrestler. Don't wear a t-shirt.”

Mortified and angry, Kevin wore his singlet to the match and had a truly awful showing. 

Kevin came to the back winded from the match, sweaty and exhausted and miserable, and he made a terrible decision. He met Punk’s eyes and said “Are you happy now?”

Kevin claims he meant it as a joke, but if he was still out of breath and defensive, it’s pretty likely it came out as more of a snarl than a quip. Whatever the tone, mouthing off to a wrestler so much higher up in the hierarchy was a breach of locker room etiquette, and Kevin knew immediately that he would have to be put in his place. (Fight Forever)

And CM Punk did so, tearing into him in front of the whole locker room, a savage dressing-down that left Kevin smarting, wishing he could fight back. But he swallowed his pride and accepted the harangue. Punk has said on Twitter, rather sharply, that he and Kevin have absolutely no hard feelings about the incident, and Kevin has said the same thing (less sharply). And maybe that’s true, and maybe it’s not, but Kevin has referenced the moment now and then, from posting a picture of himself in a t-shirt main eventing WrestleMania against Steve Austin (at a time when Punk had notably failed to main event Mania) to going out of his way to toss specifically Punk’s t-shirts off a merch table backstage:

Kevin’s always been careful to keep that grudge on simmer, in part because I think there’s more to it than just Mr. Peepers and the T-Shirt Incident.

Near the end of Kevin and Sami’s disastrous first run in ROH, they finally got a match against each other—a dark match, but a match! A chance to really shine! By this time, they were anathema in ROH. No one in the locker room was really speaking to them (except maybe Colt Cabana, but we’ll get to him later). And yet CM Punk, the tippy-top of the ROH hierarchy, personally sought them out before the match to, as I say in Fight Forever, “magnanimously impart some words of wisdom.”

As you might be able to tell from the dryness of my tone, I’m dubious that CM Punk decided out of the goodness of his heart to give these two kids some kind advice. What he told them, according to Kevin, was “I want you guys to do good, but… have a brain.” The warning was clear—don’t show off, know your place—and after six months in the Ring of Honor locker room they knew that when the champion gives you some “friendly advice,” you follow that advice. 

They did. And they had a perfectly fine, safe match, but nothing like we know they can have. Shortly after that ROH stopped calling and their first run there ended in total failure. They were away from ROH for a year and a half. When they were finally brought back, they instantly caught fire in a blistering feud with the Briscoe Brothers and soon were incredibly over. But then, by that point CM Punk was in WWE and not in the ROH locker room.

Is that a coincidence, that Kevin and Sami could only succeed in ROH once Punk was gone? I have no idea, I don’t know jack about locker room politics. But I do feel certain that Kevin believes it wasn’t a coincidence, and that Punk had deliberately torpedoed their chances in Ring of Honor. 

But in 2008, Punk was gone to WWE, and no one ever expected Kevin and Sami would ever be there (except maybe Kevin and Sami). So that’s where it ended.

2016-2021: Ripple Effects

Ha ha, no. No, it did not end there, it just got very fucking weird. So buckle up while we do a whirlwind tour of Punk’s feud with WWE, his run in AEW, and Kevin’s very odd role in all of it.

OK, so the incredibly abbreviated version: CM Punk went to WWE and was super over, was world champion, did not main event WrestleMania, had horrific medical issues that WWE did not do enough to help with, eventually walked out of WWE in 2014 and refused to go back, leaving hordes of disappointed fans to chant his name whenever they didn’t like the product.

After leaving WWE, Punk went on the podcast of his very good friend Colt Cabana and complained about the medical misconduct he witnessed in WWE. This led to both him and Colt getting sued by a WWE doctor in 2015. As their friendship started to fray from the legal, financial, and psychological pressures of the lawsuits, Colt apparently… went to a pizza party.

According to Dave Meltzer (so, you know, whatever grains of salt you care to take it with), Colt attended a pizza party, probably to celebrate three people getting called up to the main roster of WWE: Kevin, Sami, and Neville/Pac. He’d become good friends with Kevin and Sami after they came back to ROH, even becoming an integral part of their masterpiece 2010 blood feud. To Colt, he was just being happy for friends. To Punk, locked in mortal combat with WWE, this was fraternizing with the enemy. It seems to have been one of the final straws in their friendship, and the long-term effects of that pizza party would end up threatening the existence of a promotion that didn’t even exist yet.

When Cody Rhodes was also fed up with WWE, in 2016, he went to Kevin for advice on how to succeed on the independent scene. Kevin gave him a piece of advice that would change the landscape of professional wrestling forever: he told him to get in touch with his good friends, Nick and Matt Jackson, the Young Bucks.

The Bucks went way back with Kevin and Sami, sharing time in ROH and even more in PWG, where they and Kevin had a blast fighting each other and teaming up.

Nick and Matt absolutely adore Kevin. So when Kevin sent Cody Rhodes their way, they eagerly entered into the partnership with him that would eventually result in the creation of WWE’s greatest competitor, All Elite Wrestling. Joined by Adam Page and Kenny Omega (himself a very good friend of Sami’s), they created the longest-lasting alternative to WWE that has ever existed in North America. 

And in 2021, AEW coaxed CM Punk out of retirement after 7 years.

At first, it was an alliance made in heaven: the hero that had turned his back on WWE working with the mavericks who dared to challenge its monopoly. But things eventually began to sour, and the one of the major curdling points centered on AEW wrestler Colt Cabana, part of the group of friends that included Kevin, Sami, and AEW founders the Young Bucks.

There’s no way I can fairly or accurately describe the lead up to the 2022 AEW PPV All Out and the remarkable events that night that came to be known as Brawl Out. There’s just too much we’ll probably never know, and my position as a huge Kevin and Sami fan means I can’t give an unbiased take. A very simplified version:

At the media scrum after All Out, Punk was asked a variety of questions about his relationship with Colt, the Bucks, Kenny Omega, and Adam Page. Suspecting correctly that he had just suffered an injury that would put him on the shelf for months, he was already in a bad mood, and responded by losing his temper, going on an absolute rant about how Colt “didn’t want to see [him] at the top,” how the Bucks were unprofessional posers who “couldn’t manage a fucking Target” and how they “spread lies and bullshit” about him having a vendetta against Colt. He closed by complaining that “I'm hurt, I'm old, I'm fuckin' tired, and I work with fucking children.”

Backstage after this outburst, the Bucks and Omega went to Punk’s dressing room to confront him and, well, all hell obviously broke out, although it’s no good sifting all the accounts for the truth of who instigated what. Suffice to say that both fists and a chair were thrown in what is probably one of the most momentous backstage fights ever in wrestling, competing with the one Punk then got into a year later backstage at AEW’s All In with a different wrestler. For a while AEW teetered on the edge of imploding over the interpersonal craziness, only righting itself when Punk left the promotion and made his way back to WWE at last (where Kevin had, one notes, become a world champion and multi-time Intercontinental and US champion, and main evented WrestleMania twice, all while wearing a t-shirt). In the meantime, Cody Rhodes had also left AEW (under less explosive conditions) and come back to WWE as well.

Note how Kevin haunts all of this chaos, even while having literally nothing to do with it. It was Colt’s friendship with him that accelerated the breakup with Punk. It was Cody’s friendship with him that led to the creation of AEW. And it was the Bucks’ and Omega’s involvement with Cabana (and thus by extension Kevin) that almost cracked AEW in two. Somehow Kevin has managed to create and almost destroy WWE’s biggest competitor while barely lifting a finger, and it’s all been intertwined with Punk as well. There’s no way Kevin hasn’t been itching for a chance to feud with Punk since the instant the Second City Saint walked back through WWE’s door, yearning for a chance to interact with the man who he knows tried to destroy his career before it could even get started.

There’s no way WWE can reference all of that. They will never have Kevin and Punk talk at length about locker room politics from 20 years ago, or events that happened in another promotion entirely. 

Uh, well… I don’t think they will? But then, both Punk and Kevin are anomalies, wrestlers that have a nearly unparalleled ability to merge truth and fiction, to make the story seem real and reality seem like a story. If they are given anything close to free rein, it is likely to be a very wild ride indeed to Kevin’s long-awaited championship shot. And we’ll let Kevin have the last word for now: