Since most members here weren't around when it happened and the, I want say, five members that were probably forgot, I'll give the cliff-notes of what happened. So CM Punk has basically been one of my all-time favorite wrestlers for as long as I've been watching. I only started in 2006, like I think few months before he debuted in WWECW against Justin Credible. Anyway, he was "my guy" and the Pipe-Bomb promo from the Raw Roulette, is my favorite moment as a wrestling fan. There's a whole story there but the long & short of that is, I had stopped watching wrestling at that point (there's no story attached to that stopping & no time-table for when I stopped or how long I stopped), random happenstance happened and I ended up watching that Raw (for Punk mind you [and HBK to a much lesser extet], and wouldn't you know it, Punk blew up the wrestling world that night. Watching my guy become the biggest thing in wrestling, seeing how the product started to improve in general (
This picture says it all, love all of them, it was a great time to be a fan. I even accepted a lot of the stumbles they made during the Punk story.
But boy, let me tell you the end-game of Punk's historic reign being The Rock ending it so John Cena can get his win back, that did not sit well with me. I think I spent months on this forum, writing about why they shouldn't do it, presenting alternate booking ideas, arguing that The Rock doesn't need the title, yada, yada the point being I kinda set myself up for major disappointment but trying to believe that something else might happen. To try and hope that Punk's time as champion would amount as more than just a plot-point in the Cena/Rock feud.
I was not happy with the Royal Rumble PPV, especially since Punk/Rock didn't have the decency to be any good, and I love that genre. Watched Chamber, liked that PPV significantly more than The Rumble, even thought Punk/Rock II: Electric Boogaloo was good (which surprises me, I reread my old review). Then came WrestleMania 29, the night my love died. My highest scored match was a 5/10, the lowest a 1/10, with an average of 3.8/10 which I think is still my lowest rated PPV on here ever.
So I stopped watching after that right? NOPE! I'm nothing if not stubborn, at Elimination Chamber I stated that I was going to review all the WWE PPV's that year. After WrestleMania 29 I exclusively watched WWE PPV's and nothing else. All so I can keep my self-made proclamation on here, and yeah sometimes there were great matches but mostly, it just made me even more bitter to wrestling.
After TLC 2013, I stopped watching wrestling entirely and conversely stopped posting on here altogether. It wasn't until WrestleMania 31 that I finally watched wrestling again, and I only did it because one of my best friends was still big into it and it was something to do. I thought I wrote a review on it but apparently not.
Basically, I had resigned myself to casual filth who only watched Mania and nothing else until WWE did the one thing I always said would make me give them another chance. A draft split. Watched the WWE Draft on Smackdown Live before SummerSlam, thought it was alright but paid a bit more attention then I had been but not a ton. I didn't engage in PPV's at all, hadn't got the network, and I don't remember if I checked out many of the the youtube clips. I didn't feel like I really started getting into it until Survivor Series weekend. I wanted to see Lesnar vs. Goldberg so I got the Network. Side-note, I watched the Mickie James vs. Asuka match the night before because I was a big Mickie James fan. It's fitting that my first network match would be an Asuka one. It wasn't until 2017 where I made a point to start watching PPV's fully, and that's when I fell into my current watching habits of Youtube clip the weekly shows [maybe full version the Asuka stuff] and full the PPV stuff (Unless there's something I really don't want to see). Wrestling's a lot more palpable when I selective watch.
