Former WWE Star Changed Match Finish To Prevent CM Punk From Getting Pinned

CM Punk is always a hot topic in the world of professional wrestling and right now everyone’s talking about CM Punk’s big return to WWE. Former WWE star Maven Huffman recently talked about what it was like to work with Punk on his YouTube channel and he shared an interesting story about Punk’s early days with the company.

Maven teamed with Simon Dean to face CM Punk and Russell Simpson in a match that aired on WWE Heat on April 17, 2005. According to Maven, CM Punk was easy to work with, but he pointed out that management wanted Punk to be pinned. Maven also added, “For whatever reason, I have no clue. I mean, he wasn’t even a signed talent at the time, but he already had heat in the company. There were already feathers he had ruffled.”

While talking about the match Maven noted that Simon Dean wanted to give CM Punk a chance, so he went out of his way to make sure that Punk didn’t get pinned during the match.

“Simon was always a good gauge of talent. He also might have known that Punk, for whatever reason, had heat backstage. And he was just doing everything in his power to protect him knowing that if there was any trouble to be had it was going to fall on us and by us, I mean Simon,” he adds. “So the question remains, how do we then not get in trouble for disobeying direct orders? Therein lies the genius within Simon Dean. Simon knowing they wanted the pinfall to be on Punk, also knew that during this time, we were going to have time cues to hit.

“So by telling Punk, ‘When I hit you, roll to the floor, rather than standing up on the apron so you can be tagged back in.’ If you’re on the floor, we’re going to have to go with the flow. We’re going to have to finish the match. Thus, being able to get the slam and finish on Russell Simpson protecting us once we got backstage because we could look at them and say, ‘Hey, we had 30 seconds. We knew we had to go home. Russell was right there we had to get the 1-2-3 on him because Punk was on the floor.’ So to management, it looks like a miscommunication and improvisation by us when in reality, it was all thought about ahead of time by the creator of the Simon System.”

CM Punk will be appearing on Friday Night SmackDown this week, and it’s also been confirmed that he’ll be appearing on next week’s episode of Raw as well. Stay tuned for updates.

H/T Fightful