Shooter CM Punk Tries to Rehabilitate His Tough Guy Rep

But Do Tough Guys Matter in 2023?

Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer.

“Shooters” have long been an obsession of professional wrestling fans. I’m, of course, no exception. Hell, I wrote a book about wrestling tough guys, lost in the lore of who could really go and who was just putting on a show.

At this moment I’m still at it, researching the early 1900s scene for a book project. And, friends, even at the dawn of the century when men like Frank Gotch roamed the land, much ink was spilled debating who was for real and who was a mere fabrication. Fans have long been both suspicious of wrestling and also caught up in its magic, skeptic and true believer. Sometimes even the most cynical fan can be both at once, picking and choosing which lies to embrace and defend to the death and which to treat as fanciful whimsy.

(If that sounds familiar, you’ve probably encountered contemporary wrestling fans online. Little changes, beyond the technological capacity to share our bullshit far and wide).

None of this matters one bit—any more than it matters whether or not Sly Stallone could have really taken Mr. T in a fight when they were filming Rocky III. People don’t obsess over things like that because it’s clearly not the point of the enterprise. Rocky is fiction, the two actors were just pretending to fight and, ultimately, it doesn’t matter one iota who was tougher in “real life.” If the story is good enough, no one is even thinking about it.

In theory, the grunt-and-groan circuit should be viewed through the same lens. Certainly by the 1920s professional wrestling was entirely an entertainment-based enterprise, no matter how many times an old-timer claims fans used to believe in the efficacy of the pseudo-sport. That’s obfuscated, in part, by the endless discussions over the years about who was a “shooter”, conversation often driven by the boys themselves. Lou Thesz’s book Hooker is one prominent example. His discussion of box office greats like Jim Londos and Buddy Rogers is colored by his opinion of their ability to “shoot” in the ring.

“Why,” I once wondered aloud, “did it matter who was a good amateur if wrestling hadn’t been on the level for decades when they were performing? Who cares?”

He didn’t much care for the question.

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The attitude stemmed from a barely hidden embarrassment on the part of many of the wrestlers of yester-year, formerly football players, bar fighters or amateur grapplers, at being part of a pantomime. That’s mostly gone decades past the collapse of kayfabe, but even in the early years of the Wrestling Observer in the 1980s, you see a disproportionate emphasis on how much guys could lift and who could handle themselves when the shit got haywire.

Even in the late 1990s, when the business was booming and over-the-top stories about deadmen, kidnapping, sexual harassment and cartoonishly assaulting the boss were the coin of the realm, there was still a part of the industry that felt it had something to prove. Distorted claims of football prowess or college wrestling success were one thing. That kind of exaggeration is mostly harmless. At its height, however, the result was Brawl for All, a disastrous toughman contest that did more than any newspaper exposé to highlight the fact that most of the men in the business, even the tough guys, weren’t especially impressive when the script went out the window and things got real.

Today the quest for legitimacy, for being seen as more than a gargantuan soap opera actor, comes in the form of the injury litany, popularized by Mick Foley in his book Have a Nice Day. It’s all an attempt to highlight something the boys in the back feel is important—wrestling is more than just musclebound guys playfighting in their underwear.

“There are stakes.”

“We are risk takers.”

“We matter and are worthy of respect.”

That’s all true. Wrestlers are incredibly expressive physical actors, capable of artistry and story telling that astounds us all weekly. The success of smaller wrestlers like Shawn Michaels, Eddie Guerrero and eventually Rey Mysterio helped turn the business into a performance-based, intricate dance, one less tied to the idea of portraying a realistic athletic contest. And, yet, even as the average wrestler shrinks beneath 6 feet and fails to crack 200 pounds on the scale, there are still vestiges of the business obsessed with the idea of toughness.

Last night, as All Elite Wrestling presented the biggest show in the company’s history, this panicked, toxic masculinity reared its head in a way that, at this point, is just part of the promotion’s DNA.

CM Punk, failed MMA fighter and notable malcontent throughout his long career, reportedly got into a scuffle with Jack Perry as the two crossed paths in the backstage area. Having learned his lesson from a previous locker room scrap, Team Punk was quick to get their story to the tabloids first, claiming that Perry was the aggressor and Punk had choked him into submission. Others tossed cold water on that claim—but being first allowed Punk to stamp his version of the story into wrestling lore.

What’s interesting about this supposed confrontation is how little it all means. In the 1980s, hardcore fans wondered who would win a real scrap between “Doctor Death” Steve Willams and Haku, a noted amateur wrestler and a bar fighter with a bad reputation. Both, it was widely conceded, would smash most any mere fan with a flick of their wrist.

Those reputations don’t exist in the AEW “fight”, which was apparently little more than a tussle, a weak punch, and a quick separation—hardly a fight at all. After all, Perry is slight of frame and short, looking more like a lover than a fighter. Punk, the self-proclaimed winner of the scuffle, is famous for his relative ineptitude during his brief MMA career. The image of his awkward, flailing punch missing Mickey Gall by a country mile is seared into the memory of all who saw it. In his second fight he was beaten by an MMA photographer.

Suffice to say, this was hardly the battle of the titans.

Even so, there’s something odd about Punk’s insistence on beating back the mockery attached to his MMA career with his late-life sojourn into locker room punch-em-ups. He’s targeting exclusively guys who are smaller and weaker than he is. Sure, Punk didn’t rate as a professional fighter. But he’s a guy who has spent a lot of time practicing fighting. Picking on smaller, inexperienced guys in the locker room is hardly the stuff of which legends are made.

It’s bully behavior, plain and simple.

I’ve been around legitimate tough guys all my life, whether in the MMA gym or an Army formation. People with real, earned confidence didn’t get it by beating up on the helpless or disadvantaged. No one respected Dr. Death because he terrorized Randy Mulkey. Respect can only be earned when there is risk attached.

The truth is, it doesn’t matter if CM Punk can beat up Jack Perry. If it mattered, Jake Hager would be AEW champion and Tony Khan could do a real Antonio Inoki tribute. But being a tough guy doesn’t mean a thing. It’s essentially irrelevant to the aims of modern wrestling and the way it is presented on television.

The shooter has been replaced by the athletic marvel, the wrestler who can get it done in the ring. Wrestlers talk openly about the performance aspect of the business, no longer pretending winning and losing is the point. The point is the show, having the best bout, and wowing the crowd. No one is thinking about who would win an actual fight—if they are, someone is doing it wrong.