During an appearance on Renee Paquette’s Oral Sessions podcast, CM Punk once again teased Daniel Bryan coming to AEW when talking about a potential tag team partner:
“I wanna wrestle the Young Bucks. I’ve gotta find the right tag partner for that. I mean, if we’re fantasy booking, it’s…when does this come out? Saturday? Okay…I don’t think it’s necessarily giving away spoilers, it’s just me putting my booker hat on. Of all the possibilities, I would do CM Punk and The American Dragon vs. The Young Bucks. It’s so obvious that’s what you do.”
Punk also talked about the timing of his signing with AEW:
“My conversations with Tony were very relaxed. They weren’t so business oriented. I think famously everybody thinks they know the story of like Tony having a third party reach out to me, and I was like, ‘The timing isn’t right. I need stuff done a certain way.’ I’m not saying I’m the prettiest girl at the prom or anything like that, but let’s sit down and talk. That never happened until Tony was like, ‘Yea, I want to sit down and talk.’ I sat, and I talked with him. Based on things he said, I took a wait and see approach. He said certain things that made me go, ‘Ok, I’ll sit back and see if this happens’, like the TNT deal. This is not a slight on Tony at all. This is a slight on every other person every six months of my entire wrestling career who came around and was like, ‘We got money. We got a backer. We got a money mark brother, We got TV and we’re going to use all the old ECW guys. We’re bringing it back.’ My entire career prior to WWE literally was that every 6 months. There’s a guy named John Collins who famously did time for bouncing checks to not just me, but a whole bunch of guys. So I was like, ‘Well, I’ve heard it before.’ I’m not one to rush into stuff now. I’m older and wiser. So really I just took the backseat approach. To me, timing is everything. Eventually it got to the point where it was like, ‘Man, this feels right.’ Then the pandemic hit, and I was just like, ‘Well, now we just have more time to sit back and wait.’ I thought coming back with no fans would have sucked. Hats off to every single person who worked in front of nobody. To me, that’s the whole juice of the art of professional wrestling is getting those people invested. Without that there, that had to be so hard.”
“Then there’s a series of happy accidents where I’m like, ‘I’m glad I waited. I’m glad it happened this way.’ Timing is just everything. It was just the perfect storm.”
