How Bruce Prichard Helped CM Punk Get Over With Vince McMahon

CM Punk is now a UFC fighter and reality television star. But he will always be the Second City Savoir for most of us. We couldn’t imagine a day when CM Punk wasn’t over, but Bruce Prichard recently said there was a time when it was hard for him to get a shot with WWE creative.

Bruce said nobody in the office understood CM Punk. He used to do mannerisms with his hands nobody got the reference to and turned people off. Then one day, Bruce got the idea to take Punk aside and see what was underneath the surface of his unique exterior.

“Everybody used to make fun of him because they didn’t understand him,” Prichard said. “They didn’t understand the tattoos. They didn’t understand his promos. And I would sit there because Punk’s a pretty even keel guy. And I’d ask him questions.”

“So one day I decided to go take a camera crew. Just me and Bubba Dean and we went up in the arena and I asked Punk to come up. And I essentially just interviewed him. I put the camera on Punk. I sat off camera and just asked him questions. ‘Man tell me about this tattoo,’ the Pepsi tattoo. And, he told me the story behind it. ‘Tell me about this tattoo, this other tattoo’ and he’d tell me the story about it. ‘What is the Straight Edge Society? What does that mean?’ And most people did not know what any of that s— meant. They didn’t understand why Punk was Straight Edge. They didn’t understand his adversity to drinking. Didn’t understand the life that he lived that made him feel that way.”

“So I just asked. I just kept drilling down, drilling down to get him to tell me what makes [Punk] tick. They took the footage, and they took it to the studio and the guys who were about that age group they listened to his interview and listened to his explanations and were like ‘this guy’s deep, this guy’s great!’ Then all of a sudden people were like ‘well, we gotta do something with him and Vince let him in.”

“But before that, he was just a goof that no one understood. They just thought he was a goof, but he was pretty deep in his thought and he was pretty deep into how he wanted to be presented.”

Bruce says a lot of things on his extremely popular podcast, “Something To Wrestle With.” But this recent revelation adds, even more, value to Bruce Prichard’s legacy. He was able to see Punk and figure out a way to best present him on television. He just had to convince Vince that Punk was making the right move just being himself.

If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit “Something To Wrestle With” with a H/T to Still Real To Us for the transcription.