CM Punk Says WWE Roster Was Waiting For Him To Get Fired After Pipe Bomb Promo

CM Punk’s Pipe Bomb Promo was a legendary moment in WWE history, and it also caught a lot of people off-guard at the time. It turns out that a majority of the WWE roster also believed that Punk was shooting for real and they expected some big fireworks to go down afterward.

AEW Unrestricted podcast recently spoke to CM Punk about his famous WWE promo. He explained that the thought went through his head afterward that he can’t exit to the back through the curtain. Instead, he went around the side to maintain the sense that this was a very real situation.

When CM Punk got backstage he said that nobody was around, because all expected him to exit through the Gorilla Position where a fight was likely to take place between the Second City Saint and whoever he happened to run into.

“No, I don’t think so, and I always tell this story, too. When I was done with that, I remember walking back up the ramp on the fly, thinking, well, I can’t go through the curtain because I just did this promo. If I go through the curtain, kayfabe-wise, I’m fist fighting somebody. I went side stage, which was just another little tiny thing that made people go, hmm, that was weird. And when I got into the back, there was nobody anywhere.”

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“Backstage is normally just buzzing with people in the hallways. It was empty, and I remember looking around like, ‘geez, what’s going on?’ And I walked past the curtain through Gorilla and everybody in the company was jammed into the tunnel, waiting to see me come through Gorilla because they figured the same thing. They were like, ‘oh man, this is gonna get real.’ And the first person I see is Chef Robert Irvine because he’s there with Gail Kim. And he just looks like he just got through like a Dorian Yates chest workout, and he’s just like, [Punk makes a jacked guy sound] ‘That was amazing!’ And he’s all fired up.”

“He’s a guy that maybe doesn’t necessarily watch a lot of pro wrestling, but it resonated with him. And then I saw Chris Masters, and Chris Masters looks at me and goes, ‘Did you just hear what Punk said?’ And I was like, ‘Chris, it’s me,’ and he was like, ‘Oh, it is you. You’re gonna get fired, dude,’ and then I just walked up. It was a weird scene. I didn’t know it was gonna become as big as it did, but I knew just based off those reactions, we had something.”

CM Punk pulled a huge stunt with the Pipe Bomb promo that fans are talking about a decade later. We’ll have to see if he has anything similar up his sleeves in AEW, but the Pipe Bomb promo might be hard to top.

What’s your take on this story? Sound off in the comments!

Thanks to Wrestling Inc for the quote