CM Punk has been a divisive figure in pro-wrestling as of late. Following the All Out media scrum and the backstage incident that followed, Punk’s reputation has changed among fans and some of his fellow AEW wrestlers.
However, CM Punk hasn’t been completely maligned in AEW; he still has some vocal supporters to this day, including Dax Harwood, who has praised Punk as a wrestler and as a person more than once.
That trend continues here as Harwood gave a detailed example of just how nice CM Punk has been since coming to AEW.
CM Punk proud of AEW wrestlers, looked forward to making money with them
On his FTR Podcast, Dax Harwood recalled a particular situation where Punk showed the kind of person he was. He [Punk] was optimistic about working with different AEW wrestlers and wanted to motivate them about the prospect of working with him.
“We had a match with Proud and Powerful, Santana and Ortiz, and he [CM Punk] loved the match, and he told me he had been waiting to see us work live, because he had seen us before. And we just kind of started talking about that.
And, obviously, the love of Bret Hart came into play, and we’re both enamoured with him, we both think he’s the greatest.
And he knew coming in that he was going to eventually work with Max in an angle. And so he called all the guys in The Pinnacle in his locker room.
And, I said this before, his locker room door was always open, you could walk in and walk out without knocking and say hello, he was incredible at that.
But he brought us in his locker room, and he sat everybody down. And he said, ‘We’re all going to be working together soon. And I can’t wait to work with you guys. I’m a fan of every single one of you. And I hope we can make a tonne of money together and hope we can make a tonne of money for this company’”.
And to really hammer home just how much goodwill he had towards his future opponents/co-workers, Harwood said CM Punk bought each of them an expensive gift.
“And he said just to show you my appreciation, I have these for you. And he knew that most of us were coffee connoisseurs or we’d love coffee. And he had these gift cards for Starbucks with like $500 on each gift card.
And he gave it to myself, Cash, Shawn, Wardlow and Max. He said, this is to show my appreciation for you guys allowing me to work with you. And that’s kind of how things started rolling them.”