If I Go to Hell, Triple H vs. CM Punk Will Be Playing On a Loop
If I Go to Hell, Triple H vs. CM Punk Will Be Playing On a Loop
I'm terribly sorry, everyone.
I did this to myself.
When I floated CM Punk vs. Triple H to Joseph as a candidate for a four match Triple H retrospective, I knew the score. The Kevin Nash feud, the Miz/R-Truth storyline that posited them as the most dangerous men in WWE history, Triple H’s victory, and WWE’s steadfast refusal to not just let wrestlers like Punk win the WWE Championship, but thrive with it. I also remembered, and still frequently complain about, where this went after the fact, which was an interminable segment on Raw where the whole roster went on strike because Miz and R-Truth scared them, the only wrestler brave enough to join Triple H in crossing the picket line being future SAG-AFTRA member CM Punk, because WWE loves running anti-union angles during labor disputes in sports. This match and the dynamic between CM Punk and Triple H is, in short, everything I hate about WWE, and I am a woman given to hate. That’s how I pitched it, y’all: a war between philosophies, where ours was crushed under the boot of some prick it was going to be fun to mock for a month.
I fucked up.
I’ve been in a bad mood about wrestling for about a year or so now, which has probably been evident if you follow me on Twitter. The vibe, for me, has been rancid since All Out 2022. The seeming eternity that passed between then and All In, after which CM Punk was fired for a backstage altercation with Jack Perry, was a veritable feast of everything I hate about this industry: shoddy journalism, concern trolling, parasocial relationships, and thousands of people playing armchair wrestling promoter, endlessly arguing over who should have been fired, for what, and when, none of which is what I watch wrestling for. To be frank, the occasional artistic triumph and positive live experiences I had last year aside, wrestling in 2023 made me depressed. But at least it couldn’t get any worse than it did in August!
Then CM Punk returned to WWE at Survivor Series and cut the most bewildering promo of his career on Raw.
What does this have to do with Triple H vs. CM Punk from Night of Champions 2011? Everything and nothing. Punk’s return hasn’t been marked by much in-ring action yet, mostly promos, social media clips, and comments from the likes of Paul Levesque and Shawn Michaels. At the Survivor Series press conference, Levesque noted, of the return, that the call was made to bring him back in part because the company, and people, are capable of change. Regardless of what you think of Punk’s AEW tenure, that’s a pretty astonishing thing to say of a wrestler who was fired for fighting a co-worker minutes before opening the biggest show in company history. Another way of putting it is that CM Punk learned his lesson.
I have tried my best to avoid most CM Punk in WWE stuff — Punk is one of my favorite wrestlers, easily in the top five (with 1,000 other guys), but I have no interest in seeing him soullessly reprise his early AEW run while the goons in the WWE Universe chant “You’ve still got it” at him. When I do catch glimpses of this nightmare, I find the whole thing infantilizing. Every promo he cuts, every vignette he does for WWE socials, and every inorganic interaction he has with wrestlers whose legitimate beefs with Punk will soon be turned into flavorless pap makes me sad, if I’m being honest. No matter how much money he makes, no matter what history says of him, right now, in this moment, it feels like I’m watching Punk humble himself for the emptiest possible cause: World Wrestling Entertainment. Finally, the goal of Night of Champions 2011 has been realized.
Until now, the thing I hated most about this match was that it deprived me of a legitimate dream match between Punk and Kevin Nash. Nash’s return to WWE was weird, and he was in over his head on the mic against Punk, but I am one of his biggest fans, and Punk, devotee of Bret Hart that he is (he lifted liberally from Bret/Diesel in his match against Wardlow), might have been able to pull a rabbit out of his hat and get something good out of him.
Recently, Kevin Nash revealed that the plans for that match were scrapped because Triple H wanted to humiliate Punk himself. I have no reason to believe that Nash would lie about one of his closest friends in the business, so, taking him at his word, this match fails in its ambition from jump: a loss to Nash after running laps around him in a roundly reviled feud would have done the job much better than having an executive defeat an employee in a convoluted match — fans would have accused WWE of holding Punk down regardless, but it’s much harder to hide the evidence when the literal COO of the company is the one scoring the victory.
As savvy a political animal as Triple H is, the match is overbooked to the extent that it’s impossible to tell what agenda he’s advancing. Having a bad match against a semi-active wrestler isn’t embarrassing in and of itself, some wrestlers just don’t gel. But the way this match is set up doesn’t even allow for this to be a curio — the only way you go back to revisit this match is if you’re punishing yourself for an unpardonable sin by rewatching Johnny Ace-era WWE, or if you write for BIG EGG. I am one of two people who write for BIG EGG, so I suppose I must continue.
First, a note of praise: Punk and Hunter really take it to each other to start this match, hints of the real animosity between them flaring up as they batter each other around the ring. It isn’t uncommon for WWE brawls to begin with one wrestler attacking another during an entrance, but this was a rare appearance for Triple H, whose matches often peak when he sprays water onto the front row while he flexes, and Punk’s smile as he waited for one of the literal embodiments of everything he stood against to hit the ring pays off. Hunter yelling “You want to talk about my wife?” while stomping Punk out has an air of authenticity to it, too.
Then they get some space after each counters their finish on the announce table, and they stare each other down, and a half-hearted “CM PUNK” chant goes up from the crowd as The Game, The Cerebral Assassin, plays Mind Games with the Second City Savior, or just takes his sweet-ass time getting to the ring. They keep the fight up, there’s some especially spirited punches in the corner, but the fans aren’t biting anymore. Triple H’s second Pedigree attempt, usually a reliable pop if nothing else, is met with silence. On commentary, Michael Cole has lost his voice, leaving Jerry Lawler as the lead announcer. He goes on record several times to say that he has no idea what to say. He and Booker T try to put Triple H over as the de facto face, protecting the integrity of the company. Occasionally, Cole croaks something closer to the truth of the storyline, which is Punk’s justified rebellion against the stodginess that will soon become the point of about four years of WWE television.
The vibes are off, and I’m not just saying that because I was sour before going into the match. I was an active fan in 2011, and Triple H vs. CM Punk was a match you could gussy up to be a dream match, but right around the time when Punk misses a flying knee and goes out to ringside, it’s apparent that Triple H isn’t ring ready, this being his first match since WrestleMania XXVII — Tri is sucking wind hard, y’all.They try to get the flavor back with some crowd brawling, and it works to some extent, but they can’t maintain the pace they started with, and the fans continue sitting on their hands. The Night of Champions set rules though.
Finally, the crowd comes alive when Punk hits his best Macho Man elbow drop through the announce table. It’s the kind of thing that, were God to show mercy to poor wrestling fans, may have turned the match around, but instead it’s the cue for The Miz and R-Truth to hit the ring. The Miz, who enters the ring in his trunks and a licensed WWE shirt, is one of the most miscast wrestlers in WWE history here, playing a man who hates WWE, which is somehow less believable than him being an active threat to Triple H and CM Punk. The Miz and R-Truth pioneer NXT acting when Triple H kicks out of a Skull Crushing Finale after a minute of the two of them fucking standing there, Miz in particular exhibiting the skills that landed him the leading role in three installments of The Marine. Then they fuck around some more, leading to The Miz getting punked out by Scott Armstrong, who, as an Armstrong, probably has the best punch of anybody in the ring.
It somehow gets worse from there. John Laurinaitis comes out and stops a referee from getting into the ring to end this match after a sudden Pedigree. R-Truth pulls Punk out of the ring when he covers Hunter after a GTS whose place as a false finish was so obvious that he struggled to keep his body in the ring. “What are we witnessing here tonight?” shrieks Jerry Lawler, and though I have typed 1,624 words to this point, many of them an exact description of the events as they happened, I have no idea. This sort of thing happened in CM Punk matches at an alarming rate, WWE constantly hedging their bet on him while mainstream media hailed him as the best thing since “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, and it only worked once, at Money in the Bank, when they had the good sense to let CM Punk and John Cena have their match before reminding the audience that they’d prefer it if you were into Alberto Del Rio. By contrast, a major beat of this once-in-a-lifetime pay-per-view main event is Johnny Ace sending a text message to Kevin Nash. “That’s my big homie!” Booker T says when he hits the ring, easily the best part of the match.
Like so much WWE fare, Triple H vs. CM Punk is a match without soul, without so much as a spark of life. It doesn’t matter that Triple H won, it doesn’t matter that Kevin Nash interfered, and it especially doesn’t matter that The Miz and R-Truth got involved — things here happen as they do here less because there’s a lack of faith in Punk, or even because Triple H wanted to humble him, they just have to hit their beats to continue the story of Hunter Hearst Helmsley: Corporate Executive. For it to have even a chance of succeeding, you need to throw out everything that happens after about the three minute mark and then rethink the way WWE sees itself, which is, first and foremost, that WWE, and not the wrestlers themselves, is the draw.
They didn’t succeed in killing off Punk’s mystique, but the cynicism that marks this contest only grew from here, to the extent that Vince McMahon had to be ousted in a sex scandal to reignite fan interest over a decade later. Small nods here and there to what fans want aside, it’s still the way the company operates, twisting itself in knots to avoid taking any real risk — little wonder given that Levesque, the biggest beneficiary of WWE’s creative cowardice, is in charge of television now.
It’s little wonder that Punk would go back, either. Bruno, Warrior, and Bret did, but not while they could still wrestle, and as Punk said, he’s in WWE to make money. We’ll see how he feels about being under the thumb of Vince McMahon’s doofus son-in-law in a year or so, but in the meantime maybe they can run this one back in Saudi Arabia.
Rating: 1/2 *