27 JANUARY 2014
It’s just hours before Monday Night Raw, the biggest show in the history of professional wrestling, is scheduled to begin, and CM Punk’s voice is echoing through the cavernous backstage of Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena. He is screaming for someone to help him. Tonight. Right now. His head feels like it’s going to explode from a stiff blow he suffered during the Royal Rumble last night. He’s had enough concussions to know he’s got one. There is a disgusting welt on his ass that hurts like hell and keeps getting bigger. His ribs ache and his knee is shot. An infection rages in his body; he’s been coughing up yellow bile for weeks. A steady stream of oral antibiotics has been causing such intestinal distress that he crapped himself on live TV a month ago.
CM Punk calls himself “the best in the world”, and to the millions of fans of professional wrestling who watch him every week, he is exactly that. But today—right now—he feels like the world has broken him.
His bosses—the executives at World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE)—have other plans. Despite everything, they still want him to perform tonight. They want him to piss in a cup and pass a concussion test. If he fails the test, they’ll still send him out to talk, just not take a hit. They want him to put on a show for a national television audience, as he’s done every Monday for weeks, despite being so sick he gets on his hands and knees and dry-heaves backstage. He doesn’t want to talk. He doesn’t want to do any of it. Punk is 35 years old and fears he’s expendable, like so many wrestlers before him. One of his heroes, Eddie Guerrero, died in 2005 on the road in a hotel room with a toothbrush in his hand when his heart failed. He was 38. That same year, his friend Chris Candido died from complications following surgery to repair a shin he broke in a cage match. He was 33.
“Please, ” Punk yells, “somebody [...] help me!”
Then CM Punk walks into a room with the principal owner of the WWE, Vince McMahon, and McMahon’s son-in-law, wrestler Paul Levesque, better known by his ring name Triple H, who is head of talent relations. CM Punk lays it all out: He doesn’t love wrestling anymore. He’s sick and hurt and confused. Every day is an effort to show up. He’s lost all his passion and doesn’t want to do it anymore. He says everything he needs to say.
Then he says, “I’m going home.”
And that’s exactly what happens. Phil Brooks walks out of the building CM Punk walked into and goes home to Chicago. Nearly a decade will pass before he steps inside a pro-wrestling ring again, and when he does, it will be with a start-up dead set on challenging the billion-dollar WWE.
Where did Phil Brooks go?
And how did CM Punk find his way back?
PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING ISN’T REAL.
The stories are scripted and match outcomes are predetermined. But elements of it are all too real. There’s nothing fake about the punishment on a wrestler’s body, both in the ring
