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| Punk will be there in Chicago Photo Credit: WWE.com |
Sunday, WWE comes back to Chicago, not for the first time since that event, but for another crossroads-type event. Punk is scheduled to wrestle Chris Jericho here, not two months after he confusingly left WWE in the wake of his loss to Undertaker at WrestleMania in character. Out of kayfabe, he took his hiatus to heal up. I don't know how many people expected him to be back by now; I certainly didn't. However, I still feel like there's a lingering feeling in the air that he won't be back, that this is all just one giant bait and switch designed to get massive amounts of heel heat on both Paul Heyman and his new client, Curtis Axel.
Obviously, there have been tells lately that should have allayed my fears about this happening. Axel was inserted into the Intercontinental Championship three-way after Fandango suffered his concussion. Punk has also publicly endorsed reports that the band Rancid will be providing a new theme song for him to debut at the event. Of all the things that are being presented, there doesn't seem to be anything that indicates Punk won't be there.
However, the thing about pro wrestling is that it's such a bullshit carny business that it's not even funny. I don't know if the attitudes are changing as the business lurches forward in time, but there's not a whole lot to dissuade me from the idea that people in wrestling are workers in every sense of the word. It wouldn't be the first time a company has thrown smokebomb after smokebomb in order to misdirect the audience from their true intentions.
However, if there's one thing to me that confirms that Punk will be there in Chicago is that he's being advertised for a show in Chicago. I will emphatically defend my town's reputation as a great pro wrestling city, but in the face of all the evidence, I'd be a liar if I claimed any other city in the United States was better or more receptive to pro wrestling than the Windy City. Chicago is, by far, the best rasslin' town in America right now, and CM Punk is their hometown guy. If you advertise that man for a show in that city, then you best better deliver him lest you risk the destruction of the arena you've booked your show in.
Again, the wrestling industry is full of carnies, and I suspect Vince McMahon is the biggest one of them all. However, I don't think it's populated by blithering idiots. No matter what you or I or anyone else might criticize a given promoter for "misusing talent" or lazy booking, it would take a severe lack of brains or a gargantuan amount of hubris to bait and switch on CM Punk in Chicago. McMahon is not someone who will ever be accused of modesty in the least, but I also don't think his titanic ego supersedes the common sense he should have about baiting and switching here.
While the arena might have threatened rioting had Cena won in July '11, I don't think they would have carried on with it had things have been different. However, if WWE promised a CM Punk match at Payback and didn't deliver it as a planned story trope all along? Well, I would be surprised if there WASN'T a mass-scale unrest. That's exactly why CM Punk is going to show up at Payback in Chicago. IT would be the objectively worst business decision Vince McMahon would ever have made, and if McMahon makes mistakes, they aren't nearly as clearly errors in the planning as this one would be.