[This review was originally posted at Wrestling Rambles on August 14, 2013]
SummerSlam is this Sunday so this week’s review is a SummerSlam match. I’m not reviewing a SummerSlam classic because I don’t review classic matches that people have talked about a million times. I’m reviewing a match from CM Punk’s first World Championship reign. Punk is currently my favorite WWE superstar and I will admit that his first World Championship reign was bad. I was going to compare it to Jack Swagger’s World Championship reign, but it’s likely most people don’t remember it. A good comparison is the World Championship reign Dolph Ziggler had this year. I think Ziggler’s short reign might have been slightly better. At least Ziggler lost his championship in a match. Punk was told that the Chris Jericho and Shawn Michaels feud that was happening at that time needed the World Heavyweight Championship. WWE felt that the best way to take the World Heavyweight Championship away from Punk was by having Randy Orton punt Punk in the head during a backstage segment at the 2008 Unforgiven Pay-Per-View. Punk was unable to defend his championship so Punk was replaced by Jericho in the World Heavyweight Championship Scramble match and Jericho won the championship. Punk got an opportunity to win back his championship a week later and lost to Jericho on RAW in a steel cage match. Punk’s reign lasted only two months and he defended the title on PPV only two times. There weren’t many good things that happened during Punk’s first reign. I could only think of two. The first was the Orton punt only because when Orton and Punk needed a reason to fight at WrestleMania 27 almost three years later, Punk talked about wanting to get revenge for getting punted by Orton at Unforgiven. They were able to take one of Punk’s worst WWE moments and turn it into an entertaining WrestleMania storyline. The second thing was Punk’s match against JBL at SummerSlam 2008.
