WWE Gets Punk'd
CM Punk has now been the World Heavyweight Champion for two weeks. It still seems very strange to type that.
Wrestling is all about being in the right place at the right time. I guess in theory, Jeff Hardy should be World Champion right now. After all, he was supposed to win Money in the Bank before he got busted on a Wellness test and removed from WrestleMania. Of the available wrestlers left in the match, there wasn't a clear-cut next-best-case-scenario. Most people figured MVP would win it, but he was also the US Champion and Matt Hardy's return was scheduled for the show.
So it went to Punk.
There were no long-term plans to have him beat Edge for the championship. This was actually evident with no insider knowledge since no man so supposedly high on the totem pole has lost so frequently since the heyday of Rey Misterio as World Champion. Punk lost so many times since WrestleMania that it was almost easier to remember the matches he'd won than the matches he'd lost. It looked like he was going to ultimately be the first guy to cash in his briefcase and not win the title.
But then they needed a shake-up.
Despite all of his losses, Punk is one of those Teflon guys like Rob Van Dam who can be beaten like a drum and the people will still get behind him. The place went nuts when he beat Edge, even though the way he did it was, well, rather cowardly. In fact, he won the title the same way that Edge, the hated heel, won his for the first time, by sneaking in and beating a guy when he was down. But at least it was poetic, in that it all came back to bite Edge on the ass in the end.
Punk got beaten so many times that I think pretty much everyone figured JBL was going to beat him for the belt before the night was over. But that didn't happen, Punk survived the week, and because this past Monday's Raw was all about finding a contender for him, that means he's going to survive at least until the Great American Bash.
But is his defeat there a given? Although it seems likely, it also seemed likely that he'd lose to JBL. Punk actually has several things working in his favor as of the time I'm writing this, not the least of which is the fact that Raw the past week has held steady at a very strong 3.5 rating. A few months back Raw was floundering in the very low 3s, and so Vince decided that the best way to bring the rating back up was to do a Million Dollar Giveaway. He made this announcement while off-handedly mentioning that they were going to do a draft as well. The show in which the announcement was made did a 3.2 rating. The next week, when details on the giveaway were given, the show was down to below a 3.0. That could be blamed on Memorial Day. Yet the first actual show where they gave away money only did a 3.06 rating. Money was not the answer. I pretty much knew this going in, and predicted that if anything was going to boost that rating it would be the draft show. And that's exactly what happened -- after weeks of giving away money and hardly moving the rating at all, the draft shot the number up to a 3.4.
Now the next week there were no guarantees. People could very well have tuned into the draft and then tuned out the following week. But on the very next show, at the very top of the first hour, CM Punk won the title and it resulted in a show-long storyline with JBL. Had this show dropped back to the 3.2 range or lower, there is no way Punk was walking out of Great American Bash as champion.
But it didn't.
The Punk title win show did a 3.5 rating, and perhaps more surprisingly this past week's show also did a 3.5 -- both higher than the draft show did. This has been a major eye opener, and if Punk as champion can maintain Raw's rating for one more week then he's set for the foreseeable future. He may not retain at Great American Bash, but he'll have proven something to WWE. Ironically, this is very similar to what happened with the guy that he beat for the title, Edge. When Edge cashed in his briefcase the idea was only for him to be a short transitional champion. And that's what happened, however during that transition he popped the ratings significantly, and while WWE stuck with the original plan and had him lose the belt back to Cena, the business during his very brief run resulted in them seeing him as a long-term main eventer, and he's been given the title for extended periods several times since, and until the draft was basically the number-one star on the entire Smackdown brand.
Granted, Edge is a better all-around performer than Punk, and Punk has many hurdles he will continually face, such as heat for his straight-edge lifestyle, his lack of a superhuman physique, etc. But he's already proven many people wrong, including a lot of people within WWE, and his next six months will be interesting to follow.
