The Best Moveset

Kevin Owens, CM Punk, the package piledriver, and some details of a very old grudge

On Dec. 14 2024, Kevin Owens attacked Cody Rhodes after their match on Saturday Night’s Main Event and delivered a package piledriver to him.

The package piledriver was Kevin’s finishing move before he came to WWE, when he was still Kevin Steen; a move that won him a lot of titles and concluded a lot of feuds.

Seen here being used to murder Jimmy Jacobs, Tyler Black/Seth Rollins, and El Generico himself.

Later, Kevin crashed the Netflix kickoff event to hold aloft the winged eagle belt he had taken from Cody and announced himself as the true champion. As the self-proclaimed champion strutted out and Michael Cole informed everyone that Kevin had “dropped Cody Rhodes on his head,” Kevin gleefully said to the camera, “He’s just jealous of my moveset. I have the best moveset!”

A throwaway line—but also, almost certainly, a little jab at CM Punk, who had just a few days before that chastised Peter Rosenberg for using the term “moveset,” saying “it’s garbage. If you use that you’re an idiot.”

Punk’s line, in turn, had most likely been a jab at AEW’s Hangman Adam Page, who three days before that had tweeted (in response to rumors that Logan Paul would be quitting wrestling), “I hope the next person they give half my moveset to is at least kinda cool.”

The whole set of exchanges is an intricate Russian nesting doll of snark, a delicious turducken of spite. Page’s bitterness toward Paul is recent and well-documented. Punk’s disdain for Page is only slightly older and even more extensively covered. But Kevin’s issues with Punk stem from events that happened almost two decades ago—ancient history, in wrestling terms. And while some aspects of their shared dislike are pretty well-known, others are more obscure.

This is an attempt to clear up a little of that obscurity, especially now that the package piledriver is back on the scene. Because Kevin’s resurrected finishing move is actually a central piece of the story.

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The tale starts back in 2005, when two Canadian kids in their early twenties, Kevin Steen and El Generico, first started doing shows with Ring of Honor. 2005 was the “Summer of Punk” (the first one), where one of the most compelling storylines in wrestling was Punk’s becoming ROH champion right after signing a contract with WWE, then threatening all summer to take the title with him when he departed for the “big leagues.” While that was happening, Kevin and Generico were having a disastrous run in ROH, filled with lackluster booking, no storylines, and (for Kevin) vitriolic go-home hatred from a lot of ROH fans. The two of them struggled to fit in with the ROH locker room—they didn’t know the culture, they didn’t have the right physiques, and they had a high opinion of themselves that came across as arrogance.

The most well-known story about the friction between Punk and Kevin is “The T-Shirt Incident,” in which… well, it’s a little convoluted, but it involves Punk criticizing young Kevin for wearing a t-shirt and then berating him in the locker room when Kevin snaps at him about it. I’ll let Kevin tell the full story:

It’s important to note that Kevin says it was no big deal, though the story does add a nice snarky edge to Kevin going out of his way to knock specifically Punk’s t-shirts off a table during a backstage segment:

But I’m not here to talk about t-shirts. I’m here to talk about package piledrivers.

CM Punk did stints on commentary here and there in 2005 ROH, and while he was in general a heel who mocked everyone, a lot of his vitriol for Kevin seemed particularly pointed, especially considering Kevin was at that time the bottom of the bottom of the card, struggling just to be on the roster. In one match, noting that Kevin’s opponent had been personally picked by Samoa Joe as a tag partner because of his impressive athleticism, Punk laughs, “nobody picked Kevin Steen to be in that tag tournament.”

But the most devastating thing he did on commentary, in front of the fans, was re-name Kevin’s package piledriver, calling it the “Mr. Peepers Driver.” You can hear him correcting Dave Prazak’s call of the move here (ironically—or maybe not—during the exact match that set off The T-Shirt Incident):

Now, if you’re not well-versed in late-1990s SNL lore (like, uh, me), you may not remember Mr. Peepers. He was a Saturday Night Live character that appeared 12 times from 1996 to 2002, and the conceit of the character was that he was a small subhuman monkey-boy who spoke no English and liked to dry-hump people while wearing an outfit that looks… kind of like a singlet, actually.

So dubbing the package piledriver—which, it must be noted, starts with Kevin jamming his opponent’s head between his legs—the “Mister Peepers Driver” combines an attack on Kevin’s intelligence, verbal ability, and physique with a piquant dash of early-2000s homophobia. It’s getting a lot done in just one term.

And it caught on, too. Eventually Kevin and Generico found themselves with no ROH bookings and retreated to Montreal to regroup, focusing on PWG, Japan and Europe through 2006. During a PWG match in England early that year, Kevin and Generico are tearing it up and the crowd is super into it when you can hear a sudden voice call out: “Do a Mr. Peepers Driver!”

Kevin stops and swings toward the voice. “That doesn’t exist,” he complains.

“CM Punk says it does!” the fan answers.

“CM Punk is full of shit,” Kevin says, and gives Generico a vicious kick for emphasis.

By this time, Punk is gone from ROH, soon to debut in ECW and kick off his WWE career. He’s left any beef with Kevin far behind, but he also left behind a little parting gift: a demeaning nickname for a finishing move that Kevin needed to be seen as devastating. Kevin’s talent was such that he probably didn’t have to work terribly hard to re-position the package piledriver as killer move, but I think you can hear anxiety nibbling at the edges of his “That doesn’t exist” in February of 2006. Because if it were to catch on—if people were to start chanting “Mister Peepers” at him—that would be the kind of thing that could sink an entire career.

Kevin and Generico would come back to ROH in 2007, and their second run would go much, much better than the first, setting in motion the events that would to the two of them becoming tag champions, the two of them winning WON’s Feud of the Year in 2010, and Kevin eventually becoming ROH champion. Whether that’s because CM Punk was no longer on the roster or for other reasons, who knows? Getting over with a crowd, getting along with a locker room, is a complicated thing. The “Mr. Peepers Driver” didn’t stick, but it’s clear from Kevin’s “moveset” comment in 2024—right after the reappearance of the package piledriver, gone for more than a decade—that he hasn’t forgotten it.

Because Kevin never forgets anything.