As previously noted, CM Punk made his AEW debut on the August 20th 2021 edition of AEW Rampage.
After the event, there was a media conference with Punk and he talked about his signing with AEW:
“So, again, now this kind of goes back to one of the appealing things about AEW for me, and it’s a bit of a bummer of a topic; Brodie Lee passes away. Right. Come to find out that he was sick, but nobody knew. Nobody said anything to anybody, because they knew Brodie, they loved Brodie. So, seeing that I was like, I mean there’s something about that, you know, like, if that was anywhere else, it’d be all over the internet. His poor wife would have to be dealing with that on top of already dealing with this tragic event.”
“We also don’t want to beat you over the head with it and lie. You know, I didn’t have them construct some fugazi pipe and drape and drive me in the United Center and hide me from everybody. I walked in here like a human being, and I was like, ‘hey everybody,’ meeting people walking through the hallway because I just think these people, again, nobody’s back here standing on their own dick. Everybody’s getting out of their own way. Just let stuff happen and having fun. Behind the camera and in front of the camera, people just having fun, and they just want to be a part of it, that’s it. So nobody’s trying to, you know, tweet and spoil stuff. Let’s just all have fun. So I think a lot of people back here were in on it. They knew I was going to be here but they weren’t sure, and man isn’t that fun? Isn’t that fun? Worst kept secret designed that way for a reason. You can criticize and say well, ‘they should advertise, maybe the ratings will be better.’ It’s about the moments. It’s about the moments and making people go ‘oh man, I can’t miss the show I don’t know what’s going to happen. This is fun and I want to be a part of.’”
