Two Components of a Big Return

There are projects that feel like you’ve captured lightning in a bottle, and they’re only partially fueled by talent.

The biggest story in professional wrestling right now is the return of CM Punk. A man who walks down to the ring to talk, and gets a standing ovation from ten thousand fans that lasts through a commercial break. It’s the kind of buzz that wrestling hasn’t got since it’s dwindling heyday in the late nineties, when two major companies fought for supremacy, and household names like Steve Austin and The Rock were consolidating their status as superstars.

Part of the reason fans are coming unglued: this return wasn’t meant to happen. Seven years ago Punk left the biggest game in town—the WWE—after mismanagement and ignored health warnings left him burnt out on the business. He was at the top of his game, but he wasn’t happy as a wrestler anymore, and especially unhappy with the way WWE treated him, frequently suggesting he was too weird, too alternative, too small, too difficult.

Punk did a lot of things in his time off: trained to fight for the UFC; wrote comic books; acted in small films. He sued the WWE’s doctors for repeatedly mismanaging his health, including a failure to diagnose and treat a potentially deadly staff infection. He got into a legal battle with his former best friend, whose Podcast was hit by a counter-suit by the WWE doctor for Punk’s comments about his time with the company.

And while people leave wrestling and come back all the time, from retirements that don’t stick to short-term movie gigs that take wrestlers away from the ring, Punk gave every impression of sticking to his guns. He didn’t do many fan events, rarely entertained questions about a return, and leaned into his reputation for being honest with the fans when he said, “I’m done.”

Then, suddenly, he wasn’t.

The rumours started a month ago: he was signing a contract with the two-year-old federation, AEW. They hinted at it on AEW’s major shows, and on Punk’s social media, and fans were cautiously excited. 90% percent sure there was a comeback afoot, but still never 100% sure. I’d stopped watching wrestling at the start of the year, because following a moderately large company like WWE or AEW means a) a subscription fee to access their content, and b) committing to watching several hours of television a week to follow the product.

I fired up my subscription to AEW again on the strength of the CM Punk rumour, and I still braced myself for disappointment if it was all hype.

Then he debuted. All he does for the first five minutes of his return is walk to the ring while the crowd goes berserk, and if you’re a wrestling fan, it’s goddamned riveting. People cried. I cried. The impossible had taken place. AEW pulled their biggest TV rating ever, which led to their biggest pay-per-view buy ever.

Punk’s return is a phenomenal success, and I’m a nineteen-year-old wrestling fan all over again, nerdily invested in the action.

But the thing worth noting about it: this isn’t a return you could manufacture out of nothing. Punk and AEW are capitalising on the circumstances available to them, picking their time and place to maximise the effects. They’re definitely working to make this as big as possible, but the organic heart of it—a mistreated wrestler with enormous fan investment who walked away on principle, then stayed away for seven years with nary a hint of making a comeback—that heart… that context… isn’t something you can manufacture.

None of this should take away from the talent of the people involved: CM Punk is fantastic at what he does, and the folks behind AEW are doing a damn good job of building a credible challenger for the WWE.

But it’s also a reminder—talent is only part of a massive success, the rest is capitalising on the circumstances and making the best use of the context in which a project debuts. I know from experience that launching a book in the early days of social media of 2007, when old friends were rapidly connecting and catching up on one-another’s’ lives, was a very different experience to launching books in 2021 when Twitter and Facebook are a drag on our attention.

Those first books felt like I’d captured lightning in a bottle, but that was as much circumstance and timing as anything I did as a writer. Old networks were re-awakening, friends who’d invested in the early stages of my development as a writer were checking in and getting excited by forward progress. Thing came together: right place, right time, right product.