During an appearance on the AEW Unrestricted podcast, CM Punk discussed the backstage reaction to his 2011 WWE “pipebomb” promo:
“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 fistfighting somebody’. So I went sidestage, which was just another little tiny thing that made people go, ‘Hmm… this is weird’. And when I got in the back, nobody anywhere. Backstage is normally buzzing, people in the hallways. It was empty. And I remember looking around like, ‘Jeez, what’s going on’. And then 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, ‘Ah 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 looks like he just got through a Dorian Yates chest workout, and he’s just like, ‘(flexing noises), That was amazing!’, and he’s like all fired up. He’s a guy that maybe doesn’t necessarily watch a lot of pro-wrestling, but it was just like 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. 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, I knew we had something.
I think everybody back there has gamefaces on and they wanna no-sell stuff. But I had texts from some pretty lofty people in the business that I looked up to and respected, so I knew I did some good television, let’s just say that.”
