CM Punk vs. John Cena, WWE Night of Champions 2012 (9/16/2012)

This was for Punk’s WWE Title.

Since we last spoke about this entire story, the WWE brought in Bret Hart to try and get Punk over as a heel, but since he spent his segment lying and saying things like Jerry Lawler never ran from a fight and Shawn Michaels stood for something but CM Punk doesn’t, it didn’t really work out. John Cena then recapped the booking of the WWE Title for the last ten months, as if it was CM Punk’s fault he didn’t get to be in pay per view main events with it and claimed that he lied to the people when he wanted to change and like he was some kind of fraud because he paid tribute to Bret Hart recently with his gear and because he stood up for himself. I’m recapping this because, to this day, it’s some of the most infuriating stuff the WWE’s ever put out there and I’d like you all to be as mad about it as I am whenever someone mentions it to me, or I have to watch it in a video package.

The thing though is that in spite of the terrible writing — and it is so bad that, at one point, I claimed that John Cena was secretly a heel from the summer of 2012 through SummerSlam 2013 because it made more sense than the actual booking of his character as an intended babyface — John Cena is such a likable guy that the match still works in spite of all of that.

This often falls under the radar, and the biggest reason for that, besides having a non-finish, is that it simply can’t live up to Money in the Bank. And that’s alright. That’s not a knock against the match. It feels very silly to me to penalize a match simply because it isn’t quite as good as a match that I’m not sure isn’t the defining pro wrestling match of an entire decade and very possibly the best match of all time.

While it can’t quite live up to that, this is such an incredibly interesting match. What people talk about when they talk about this match outside of the finish is the great little touch of CM Punk wearing a navy and pinstripe attire for a match in Cena’s hometown of Boston, but that’s deeper than simple heat getting. CM Punk put more thought into gear than many people put into their most important matches. At SummerSlam, the Bret Hart tribute gear wasn’t just a thing he thought was cool. Bret Hart had a reputation at one point as Mr. SummerSlam, it was a statement both on being the underappreciated workhorse of the company as well as being habitually screwed over. Frustrated wasn’t the god damned word for it, and all of that. Here, yes, it’s about telling Boston to eat shit. It’s always a worthwhile pursuit to tell America’s worst city to eat one. But also, “you are the New York Yankees” is something that immediately comes to mind. Tacitly, it’s Punk now saying that he is The Man.

To their credit, the match reflects that entirely in the first half.

Money in the Bank, and SummerSlam 2011 to some extent, saw CM Punk working as the underdog. He was largely working from underneath and with a sense of desperation, trying to say that he deserves this and belongs here. It’s the difference between fighting to get something and then fighting to keep it. Here, he puts on one of the more effective heel top guy performances in the history of the WWE. Don’t talk about Hunter and Foley to me, because Punk comes at this not in the sense of big bumping and insecurity, but complete and total confidence.

Punk is prepared for every single thing John Cena does for almost all of this match. He has a counter for everything, and this time, he’s incredibly confident about it. He’s an absolute shitheel yet again, and even if the build up hasn’t been all that good, CM Punk practically moves heaven and earth to put people against him. He’s despicable enough here that if you don’t want to see him eat shit after the first five minutes of this match, there’s not a match in the world that you’d root for CM Punk to lose (hi! hello! yes, you rang?). Beyond that, it all looks so good. He’s mean as hell, it’s all just completely airtight, and he forces John to step ENTIRELY out of his wheelhouse in order simply to have a chance in the match.

And when I say “step ENTIRELY out of his wheelhouse”, I don’t mean some PWG Jawn bullshit. I mean to do something rare and absolutely goddamned wild. I mean a John Cena tope suicida.

That goddamned happened.

From there, they go into the big epic run. Nothing all that wrong with it, but it simply isn’t as interesting to me as what came before it. That isn’t a slight on the performance of either man or this match, so much as it is the style.  They do well enough with it though. There’s probably near a hundred WWE matches in the last eight years and counting since this happened that are like this and are a thousand times worse. It’s not entirely just because of how good these two are constructing matches like this, it’s also because how much this seems to matter and how much they seem to care.

The most interesting thing to me, and the most memorable, is how until the end, this emphasizes the need to do different things against each other. They can land their big finishes, but otherwise, a bunch of counters. Most importantly, they’re new counters. In addition to new counters, they have to change the usual way they do things. After constantly having his showboating before the Five Knuckle Shuffle met with a takeover or kick from the ground, Cena simply runs off and hits a regular ass fist drop. It’s just a fist drop, Ted DiBiase did a million of ’em, but when you never see something, it’s incredibly important.

Each man kicks out of two finishers each. It’s A Lot, but there’s a parity to it that I really appreciate. They go back to some older things like Punk’s crooked Moonsault that don’t quite work or even connect, or in the case of John Cena, something new that he’s never done before and doesn’t quite know how to pull off correctly. He stops Punk on the ropes, and manages to German Suplex him off of the top rope. It’s enough to pin CM Punk, it’s enough to pin anybody, but John Cena is playing with magicks he doesn’t quite understand and he hasn’t tried to do a bridge in a million years. Cena’s shoulders are down too, and the champion keeps his title on a draw. One of the all time great CM Punk performances, and the only real glimpse we ever got of him as WWE’s top dog against a worthy babyface challenger. It’s as much a great match and an example of one of the great rivalries of all time as it is a glimpse into what could have been.

You leave this match feeling like, yes, this is obviously the WrestleMania main event. CM Punk got a little bit lucky, John Cena got a little bit sloppy, and there is absolutely no reason for this not to wrap itself up six months later in the main event of the biggest show of the year.

Of course, there will always be a reason.

It doesn’t diminish the match. The ending fit in well enough with the way the match unfolded and the larger scheme of things that it doesn’t bother me all that much, but this is the first part of a story that never quite got the ending it deserved.

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