No match better sums up AEW in 2021 than this one.
First of all, it is so god damned cool that this got to happen.
Of all of the many weird and wonderful matches that AEW booked at a breakneck pace in the last third of the year, this is the weirdest and most wonderful. A genuine fucking dream match. It’s not like a Bryan Danielson vs. Dustin Rhodes or an Eddie Kingston, either people who had been in a shared space for a while at one point or met up before. They haven’t shared a locker room (or a commentary booth) since June of 2005 and had never shared the ring before this match. On top of that, they’re perfect for each other. Two of the realest people in the history of professional wrestling who have many of the same gifts and strengths, and whose best work succeeds for many of those same reasons. There’s also just enough history to create something real based around that with Punk as a Chris Hero friend on top of Eddie’s point about Punk spending 2004 IWA Mid-South shows on commentary being very mean to a lot of people who had bad gear or were fat or anything else that didn’t live up to his standard.
As a feud, the build up to this was as great as a feud thrown together in a few weeks can be.
It’s very classic sort of storytelling that usually results in the best and most realistic stuff, with neither man seeming totally incorrect. Naturally, the root of that problem comes from some real shit, and works on the classic rule of con work, which is to start with something we all know is true and go from there, calling everything into that beautiful grey area that pro wrestling can hit when it’s done right and that both Punk and Kingston have been able to hit with more regularity than just about anyone else in the last twenty years.
“I know this is all bullshit but this specific thing might not be entirely bullshit.”
It’s a funny sort of thing here, as from someone who’s watched almost every single IWA-MS show from 2003 through 2008, Punk was nowhere near as harsh to Kingston on commentary as he was to a lot of others, and those criticisms of Kingston weren’t entirely unfounded, as a clearly talented guy but also one who didn’t immediately do all that he could have to live up to that. At the same time, CM Punk was really a dick in 2004 and 2005, clearly being the King of the Indies along with Samoa Joe in a way that few others (Bryan Danielson, Kevin Steen, maybe El Generico, and The Young Bucks alone can say the same thing, really) ever have been, and throwing his weight around a lot. The famous criticism being that Punk was the “HHH of ROH”, which has grown to be so much funnier in the time since it was a criticism first levied. Everyone’s heard the Kevin Steen story from ROH, but IWA-MS shows are full of little moments where he’s a real shithead on commentary to wrestlers who were real young, as if he wasn’t in those same duct-taped-together filthy rings three or four years earlier in basketball shorts.
At the same time, Eddie Kingston is being an asshole about it in 2021.
Barging into Punk’s interview time, being a shithead to him without much provocation in the last fifteen years, and generally acting like a crazy person. As characters, nobody is really wrong. Punk’s correct to take offense to Eddie being a maniac like he was at the start, Eddie’s correct to get mad at Punk once again seeming like he’s big leaguing him by demanding an apology, and both cross lines in the ways that they always have with everyone else they’ve ever come across. An old grudge explored through the needling of newer sore spots, exploding in the ways it always has when either one of these two is involved, despite the efforts of both men in recent years to change.
Cheer for who you’d like, but there’s no high ground here to be found.
Despite only lasting three or four weeks (or perhaps because of that), it really may be the best feud AEW’s ever run. Nothing happens that doesn’t make sense, no part of it feels fabricated, and more than any other convoluted way to get to a match, it feels like the natural reaction that both characters would have to these circumstances.
The match itself is incredible.
A genuine work of beauty, and a near masterpiece.
If not for a major Bryan Danielson performance in a capital-i Important Match on a gigantic show, this would easily be the best AEW match of 2021. It’s still great enough that if someone wants to put it at #1, I am absolutely not interested in fighting them on it. Fair enough, they earned it.
From start to finish, it is a fight. A wrestling match that feels like a war, a genuine and major conflict, and just about every moment of it is perfect in every sense from the mechanics of the thing to construction to how everything fits the story.
Before anything else, both men are so incredible here in the ways that they adapt their offense to something more dirty and guttural like this. CM Punk wouldn’t springboard in a fight, and so his big clothesline spot comes first desperately off of the middle rope to stop a charging Kingston, and then later off the apron to the floor. It’s hit in two different ways than usual, both tinged with a kind of panic and desperation that makes it mean more than the usual comeback spot. They’re also able to fit in a lot of big match trademarks like repeat finisher spots and a strike trading sequence in ways that fit the tone of this perfectly.
This is a match that not only whips ass, but that totally sums up the feud and the characters and just about everything else, and it wastes no time in doing so.
Eddie Kingston strikes first, probably objectively wrong, but so charming that it doesn’t matter all that much. There’s a moment here in which King has Punk up top and strikes at his back over and over with such vigor that he wears himself out and has to lean on Punk to stay up, and I don’t know if you can find a better Eddie Kingston thing all year than that. Where Eddie’s spite comes out in these moments that seem to land 50/50, like trying an unnecessary Piledriver outside, only to eat shit, Punk’s comes out in a different way, and sometimes feels even more hateful as a result. Be it his use of the John Cena sequence in response to parallels drawn to the famous feud there, using the Three Amigos as equal part earnest tribute and equal part sly little reminder that Punk got to wrestle Eddie Guerrero, or responding to a moment when the crowd 100% goes for Eddie by raining down blows more excessively than he needed to in that moment, Punk just has more success in his more hateful moments.
Beautifully, this is the real statement of the match.
While Eddie Kingston’s hate makes impedes his progress, CM Punk is actually better in the moments when he gives into his own spite, and proudly displays the all-time huge chip upon his shoulder.
It’s a beautiful contrast between the two that’s spelled out in the match as well as it has been throughout the individual careers of each man, with Eddie Kingston first focused on making a point and beating up CM Punk, putting that before winning to his detriment on a small and large scale. CM Punk, on the other hand, is focused on his own survival, but unable to resist the temptation to get down in the muck with Eddie Kingston when provoked, getting just as petty in all these different ways.
They have different aims, but ultimately when thrown together like this, both make each other worse, boiling each other down to their ugliest elements.
As went the feud, so goes the match.
In addition to drawing the figurative first blood to open the match, Eddie then draws actual first blood and cuts Punk open for the first time since returning to wrestling.
Punk happens to be one of the great bleeders of his generation, and this is no exception to that. After getting posted, he quickly hits a gusher and while it’s not a cut that stays flowing for the duration of the match, it’s one that immediately pays off by adding to the already ultra-tense atmosphere. Kingston’s entire thing here has been about taking Punk down a notch, bringing him down with the rest of them, and there’s no better way to prove someone’s human than by leaving a mark like this. He bleeds like the rest of us.
Or, in other terms, Eddie shows that his arms are just long enough to box with God.
Unfortunately, part of the match going as the feud did and perfectly exemplifying these characters and wrestlers is that, once again, Eddie Kingston falls short.
It’s not like All Out or his match against Bryan Danielson.
Eddie Kingston isn’t a victim of circumstance here, but entirely a victim of his old destructive tendencies, tragically reverting to the guy CM Punk and Bryan Danielson and others used to criticize as always getting in his own way instead of the guy he’s spent the last year starting to become. Genuine tragedy, some of the best stuff in pro wrestling in years and years and years, frustration mounting and mounting until a heartbreaking reversion to form, the most relatable thing in the world.
At the moment when Eddie probably has this won, after emphatically winning a strike exchange, Eddie cannot help but steal Punk’s pre-finisher taunt, before making the classic jerk off motion. It’s a beautiful, hateful, and unbelievably petty gesture. It’s also one that allows Punk the time to recover and hit a desperation Go to Sleep.
From that moment on — and really from the moment where Eddie finally gave in like that — it’s over.
Eddie isn’t immediately beaten, fighting up again, but Punk dodges the Backfist to the Future this time. Like so much of this match, it works on more than just one level, serving both as this beautiful spot that shows that Punk’s won the match before he’s officially won the match, but also another example of the ways in which Eddie’s worst tendencies work against him. He hit it before the match even started, throwing his biggest shot out there as an immediate middle finger, thus impeding his ability to do it a second time when it counted against someone as smart and experienced as Punk. On top of that, it also creates a brilliant contrast, his failure to hit his move a second time as the immediate transition into Punk hitting his own finisher, successfully, a second time in what gives him the win.
Punk’s second Go to Sleep is hit now right out in the middle, more as an emphatic statement than the Hail Mary that the first was, and Punk wins.
After the match, Punk tries to finally give Eddie the respect he didn’t seventeen years ago, only for Eddie Kingston to do the most Eddie Kingston shit in the world and deny him the satisfaction at his expense.
(For as much Bret and Austin as there’s been throughout this whole thing, and there’s been a fair amount, it’s nice to see something like this taken from a feud between spiritual predecessors of the two. One’s mind is sent back to Homicide refusing to shake Steve Corino’s hand after WAR OF THE WIRE, denying the issue a conclusion for the time being as a matter of pure and petty principle.)
And somehow, that’s that. The end of it, at least (hopefully) for now.
There’s that other thing about AEW in 2021 too, when I say “as great as a feud thrown together in a few weeks can be”.
One of the major weaknesses of AEW is that they never seem to know when their pay-per-view events are. Sometimes, they do and things reach their peak at the right time so as to make people pay for it. A lot of the times though, we get situations like this, where something is thrown together weeks before, and it all feels kind of rushed together. Another of AEW’s major weaknesses is their refusal, much of the time, to run rematches or continue things. Between the way this went and Eddie’s refusal after the match to shake hands and give Punk anything, this is a match begging for follow up.
At the time the final bell rang, this was the hottest thing in the company, and it hasn’t continued. Punk’s gone on to work with another one of AEW’s golden boys, while Eddie Kingston became the latest hot act to mysteriously wind up in a program with Chris Jericho.
It might be something they come back to one day. I’d certainly hope so.
It also might not be.
The shame of this is that even three months after the fact, there’s not a concrete answer there. Of all their many failings, one of AEW’s largest mistakes may have come here. Both in doing the match at this point in time, where it felt like Eddie Kingston very badly needed a win and in a spot so early in Punk’s return, in which they were unwilling to continue something that badly needed to continue. The easy comparison at the time was Bret Hart vs. Steve Austin at the 1996 Survivor Series, for good reason, but the reason that’s remembered so fondly is that on top of being one of the best wrestling matches of all time, it was the start of something instead of being what this feels like months later, which is simply a way to fill time. It’s one of the best time-filler programs in recent wrestling history, but all the same, something capable of being so much more than it was.
Everything I love about AEW can be summed up in the build up and the execution of this match. Everything I don’t can be summed up by the failure to follow up on this, and directing both men to far less interesting and satisfying programs with far worse wrestlers instead. It’s beautiful that they were able to book Eddie Kingston vs. CM Punk in 2021. It also explains the more recent fall-off for late 2021 and early 2022 AEW that they reacted to that by using the energy created by this feud and by this match to help out Chris Jericho and MJF instead of seeing where else this could go.
If not a perfect match, a perfect synopsis of this company at this point in time.
As such, a very deeply weird match to consider, but also an undeniably great match.
One of the best of the year, from two of the best to ever do it.
HANDWERK 