Joseph and Colette Discuss Triple H vs. CM Punk

Testing the very limits of our patience.

WWE

I’m gonna be honest: I think Joseph and I were being nice when we gave this match, respectively, *1/2 and 1/2*. I messaged Joseph about this, saying that I maybe should have given it zero, the promise of the match’s first three minutes feeling more and more like a cheat as I thought about just how bad its plunge into self-parody was — the peril of assigning grades! But I gave it what I gave it, and so did Joseph, and here we are, with the crown jewel of Hunter Month, a complete embarrassment of a match in service to nothing, a failure even in satisfying Triple H’s ego, let alone his desire to knock Punk down a peg. In the following conversation, I play the role of “aggrieved CM Punk fan” and Joseph plays the role of “levelheaded critic.”

Next Up: Our Triple H retrospective comes to its merciful conclusion as he battles The Undertaker. If you thought we were going to be fair, you’re totally wrong: it’s 2018 Triple H vs. 2018 Undertaker, baby, at a point in their respective careers where they’d get like a 92 Overall rating in Madden out of respect for their legacies, which they do not have the same respect for!

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Joseph Montecillo
Some newer fans might not be aware of what WWE 2011 felt like. The Pipebomb gets talked about to death because it felt bigger than itself. Mainstream news outlets picked it up, lapsed fans came back to follow it, and anecdotally, I had family who cared nothing for wrestling asking me about it in conversation. The build up to MITB '11 and the eventual match might have been some of the most lively and must-see television I've ever encountered as a fan.

Triple H and CM Punk (But Mostly Triple H) Bury a Good Match

All of that makes the follow ups to Punk's all the more frustrating and infuriating. We'd already seen him lose the title to Del Rio at SummerSlam, and now this is the big follow up where the WWE seem to continually be unsure about just who they want to be the hero and the villain of this particular story.

Did you happen to watch this particular match unfold in real time?

Colette Arrand
Yeah, I did. It was a really crazy time, especially if you’d been a fan of Punk’s up to that point. Like, at the risk of exposing myself once again as someone who didn’t watch indie wrestling back then, the minute I saw him in ECW, I knew he was my guy, and I was obsessed. He’d already been the focal point of some of my favorite TV (his feud against Regal, which may not hold up, the Straight Edge Society run, which absolutely does), and while I was in a headspace in 2011 where I could find reasons to like whatever was on in the six hours of WWE I watched a week (even Alberto Del Rio), I was a massive Punk stan. I love John Cena and did them, but I wanted Punker to bathe in that dude’s blood at Money in the Bank. It was ascendant. It immediately shed the stink of the New Nexus and the Corre and a million other things that linger in the back of my horrible, encyclopedic brain for this particular era, and that win is still frozen in time for me like a championship belt in a refrigerator.

If I Go to Hell, Triple H vs. CM Punk Will Be Playing On a Loop

And then WWE decided that maybe they didn’t want to produce compelling television and fucked it all up. Back then I found it heartbreaking — my favorite guy, cast aside for the sake of ego — now it probably informs a lot of the cynicism with which I approach modern wrestling booking, which I think, in a way, has managed to shield me from burning out too hard. The exceptions are when wrestling somehow manages to be worse than it is here, and, hurrah, several of those moments involve Punk.