CM Punk

CM Punk invaded comic con

Phillip Jack Brooks (born October 26, 1978),better known by his ring name CM Punk, is an American professional wrestler currently signed to WWE and working on its Raw brand.In professional wrestling, Punk is a six-time world champion having won the ROH World Championship, ECW Championship, and WWE Championship each once, and the World Heavyweight Championship three times, making him the second wrestler (after Kane) to have held all three of WWE's World titles.In addition to these championships Punk has also won the World Tag Team Championship (with Kofi Kingston), and the WWE Intercontinental Championship making him the nineteenth WWE Triple Crown Champion. Between WWE and ROH (where he is also a two time tag team champion), Punk has won a total of ten championships. He was also the winner of the 2008 and 2009 Money in the Bank ladder matches, the only Superstar to win the match twice in a row.Punk initially came to prominence through his career on the professional wrestling independent circuit, primarily as a member of the Ring of Honor (ROH) roster, where he won the ROH Tag Team Championship, ROH World Championship, and was the first head trainer of the ROH wrestling school. In 2005, Punk signed a contract with WWE and was sent to its developmental promotion, Ohio Valley Wrestling (OVW), where he won every championship available in the promotion.Throughout his career, Punk has consistently used the gimmick of being straight edge, a lifestyle he follows in his actual day-to-day life.Depending on Punk's alignment as a crowd favorite or villain, he emphasizes different aspects of the culture to encourage the desired audience reaction.
Punk's first venture into wrestling was a stint in a backyard wrestling federation called the Lunatic Wrestling Federation with his friends and brother Mike Brooks in the mid-late 1990s. He first started using the ring name CM Punk when he was put into a tag team named the Chick Magnets with CM Venom after another performer skipped out on the card. Unlike his friends, Punk genuinely wanted to be a wrestler and saw it as more than simple fun. When the promotion started taking off, doing spot shows out of a warehouse in Mokena, Illinois, Punk found out that his brother Mike had embezzled thousands of dollars from the small company, causing them to become estranged. Mike has not wrestled since.He soon left the federation and enrolled as a student at the "Steel Dominion" wrestling school in Chicago, where he was trained by Ace Steel, Danny Dominion and Kevin Quinn to become a professional wrestler. As part of the training, he wrestled at Steel Domain Wrestling in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was in the Steel Domain that he met Scott Colton, who soon adopted the stage name Colt Cabana. Punk and Cabana became best friends and spent most of their early career together working in the same independent circuit promotions, as opponents or allies. In the independents, Punk, along with fellow Steel Domain graduates Colt Cabana, Chuckee Smooth, Adam Pearce and manager Dave Prazak, formed an alliance named the Gold Bond MafiaPunk's home promotion for his early career is usually considered to be Independent Wrestling Association: Mid-South (IWA:Mid-South). During Punk's time in IWA:Mid-South, he had high profile feuds with Colt Cabana and Chris Hero while also rising to the top of the roster winning the IWA Mid-South Light Heavyweight Championship twice and the IWA Mid-South Heavyweight Championship on five separate occasions, beating stars like A.J. Styles, Cabana and even Eddie Guerrero for that Championship. Punk's feud with Hero included a 55-minute TLC match, a 93-minute two out of three falls match, and several 60-minute time limit draws.Punk's matches with Cabana led him to being hired by the Ring of Honor promotion. From February 2003 until May 2004, Punk refused to wrestle for IWA:Mid-South, because he claims that this was in protest to Ian Rotten's mistreatment of Chris Hero in the company.Hero, however, has stated he believes there were other reasons, and Rotten's treatment of him was just an excuse by Punk to stop working for the company.Eventually Punk returned to IWA:Mid-South and continued to perform as a wrestler and commentator for them until 2005 when he was signed to World Wrestling Entertainment. His last appearance in IWA:Mid-South was on July 2, 2005 in which he competed in a 60-minute time limit draw against Delirious.

Initially, Punk joined Ring of Honor (ROH) as a crowd favorite, but quickly became a villain in a feud with Raven that featured numerous variants of no disqualification matches.Their rivalry lasted most of 2003 and was considered one of ROH's top feuds of the year,and was based around Punk's straight-edge lifestyle, with him likening Raven to his alcoholic father.Their rivalry was settled at The Conclusion in November 2003, where Punk defeated Raven in a Steel Cage match At the same time, Punk joined the wrestling promotion NWA Total Nonstop Action (TNA), in which he was paired with Julio Dinero as members of Raven's TNA alliance The Gathering.
Punk started climbing the ranks of ROH, including coming in second at the Second Anniversary Show during the tournament to crown the first ROH Pure Champion, losing to A.J. Styles in the finals and winning the ROH Tag Team Championship twice with Colt Cabana as the Second City Saints. Both times Punk and Cabana defeated the Briscoe Brothers to win the championship.Circa October 2003, Punk was hired as the first head trainer of the Ring of Honor wrestling school, having previously been a trainer for the Steel Domain and Primetime Wrestling.
Shortly before a TNA show on February 25, 2004, Punk had a physical scuffle with Teddy Hart outside of a restaurant that was broken up by Sabu. The scuffle reportedly stemmed from an ROH show in which Hart performed three unplanned spots putting several other wrestlers in danger of injury Around the time of the scuffle, Punk and Dinero stopped appearing on TNA shows, leading to speculation he was fired for the incident.Punk, however, has stated that the scuffle had no bearing on his TNA career. He said the reason he and Dinero stopped appearing on TNA pay-per-views was that TNA officials believed that he and Dinero had not connected with the fans as villains, having recently turned against the popular Raven and instead formed a villainous tag team managed by James Mitchell.The officials decided that as the teams as villains was not working decided to put the storyline on hold indefinitely, and thus had no work for Punk or Dinero.Punk officially quit TNA in March 2004 during the Rob Feinstein controversy, after having a dispute with the TNA offices over his ability to compete in ROH following a TNA order that their contracted wrestlers were to no longer wrestle in ROH.
In ROH, Punk faced off against ROH World Champion Samoa Joe for the championship in a three match series. The first match, on June 12, 2004 at World Title Classic in Dayton, Ohio, resulted in a 60-minute time limit draw when neither Punk nor Joe could pin or cause the other to submit in the 60 minutes. The second match between Punk and Joe was planned for December 4, 2004; however, due to Steve Corino being pulled from a match with Joe by Pro Wrestling ZERO-ONE, the second match was hastily rescheduled on October 11, 2004 for October 16 in Punk's hometown of Chicago.At Joe vs. Punk II on October 16, they wrestled to a second 60-minute draw.In addition to Joe vs. Punk II becoming Ring of Honor's best-selling DVD at the time, the match received a five-star rating by Dave Meltzer's Wrestling Observer Newsletter. It was the first match in North America to receive a five-star rating in seven years—the last one being the Hell in a Cell match between Shawn Michaels and The Undertaker at Badd Blood: In Your House in 1997.Joe ended the series by defeating Punk in the third and final match on December 4, 2004 at All-Star Extravaganza 2 in which there was a no time limit stipulation.
In June 2005, Punk accepted a deal with World Wrestling Entertainment, after a try-out match against Val Venis on its Sunday Night Heat show. Even though he had accepted the deal, Punk went on to defeat Austin Aries with his Pepsi Plunge move, winning the ROH World Championship on June 18, 2005 at Death Before Dishonor III. Immediately after the match, Punk proceeded to become a villain and started a storyline where he threatened to bring the ROH World Championship to WWE with him. For weeks, Punk teased the ROH locker room and the ROH fans as well as mocking the championship he possessed, going so far as to sign his WWE contract on it.