During a recent appearance on WFAN, AEW Superstar CM Punk commented on whether he’d be willing to mentor younger talent in AEW, if WWE is competition to AEW, and more. You can check out some highlights from the show below:
On whether he’d be willing to mentor younger talent: “I don’t want to be a guy who thinks I know everything, because I don’t. Part of this experience for me is continuing to learn. In 2013 I might’ve thought I knew everything. That was a great time for me to leave. And now I’m like ‘man this is great.’ I got to share a ring with Sting last night. I never thought that something like that would happen. And just talking to him, I’m learning still. I’m not going to tell the young guys I know everything, ‘hey, listen to me. Do it this way.’ I think that’s the beauty of it. There’s no right way.
“It’s like in Major League Baseball. There’s a million different hitting coaches that are going to tell batters a million different things. ‘Work on this, whatever.’ If somebody wants my advice, I’ll happily give it to them. If someone looks at me as a mentor, maybe. I have a wealth of experience that I can help these guys with I think. But I am in no way, shape or form there to fix anybody’s anything. I’m there to help if somebody wants it.”
On if WWE is competition to AEW: “Yeah I think it’d be straight up telling a big old bully like if you said that you didn’t want to beat them in whatever metrics they deem successful. If you ask them, they’ll say AEW is not their competition, which is great because I think everyone sees through that. If you ask us, I’ll say yeah, absolutely they’re our competition. However, we’re focused on what we’re doing. We’re focused on the people in the building that have paid to see AEW. And we’re not so much worried on anything else.
“I know that TNT executives love ratings. That’s what they’re business is driven by. I’m focused on the fans, and I think that’s how you grow the business. I think that’s how we’ll eventually grow AEW. If you’re talking about head to head competition with WWE, they have about a 30 year head start. AEW has been around for 2 years. I like what we’ve been doing and it’s fun again for me. So I’m not trying to bankrupt anybody, put anybody out of business. But it’s 100% competition. If you say it’s not, you’re fooling yourself, or you’re pretending somebody doesn’t exist or whatever. And I think you’re shooting yourself in the foot.”
(h/t – Wrestling Inc)
