Sean Ross Sapp: How I Found Out About CM Punk's Talks With AEW

After seven years away from the squared circle, CM Punk returned to professional wrestling at AEW Rampage: The First Dance on August 20. The Second City Saviour will be full-time in All Elite Wrestling and he is set to make his in-ring return at All Out against Darby Allin.

News of Punk's in-ring return first surfaced in July after Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful reported the 42-year-old was in talks with AEW. Only one month later, The Straight Edge Superstar was officially All Elite. 

Speaking to Ross Tweddell on Straight To Hell, Sapp detailed how he found out about Punk's talks with AEW. 

"It was more widely known than what AEW thought and it wasn't known by many in AEW, if anybody. But I do know there was another media member in early July who was poking around and asking Tony Khan about it. Now, the thing is that person said, 'Hey, I've heard that CM Punk has signed. Can you dispute that?' And Tony said, 'Yeah, I can dispute it.' Well, that's because he hadn't signed. Tony was being honest with him, but he hadn't signed," Sapp said.

"What I had heard maybe a day or two after this person had asked him that, and I didn't know this yet, but somebody said, I was talking to them about something completely separate related to sports in the Chicago area, they're like, 'Hey, you need to check on CM Punk going to AEW.' And I rolled my eyes like, 'Yeah, right. Whatever.'" 

After his initial reaction, though, SRS thought back to a comic con he attended in 2019 for a Q&A with Edge and Christian. At the time both men were retired, but they have since returned to the squared circle, Edge in WWE and Christian in AEW. As a result, Sapp decided to pursue the Punk lead. 

"The next day I thought of something that happened two years before the pandemic. I was at a comic con with one of my friends and I went there just as a fan and it was for an Edge and Christian Q&A. At this point, Edge had been out of the ring for eight years, was never gonna wrestle again. Christian had been out of the ring for five years, was never gonna wrestle again. Somebody said, 'Hey, would you all ever consider going to AEW and wrestling?' and a bunch of people snickered and laughed that person out of the building. Then I thought back to that and I was like, 'What are those two doing right now?' One of them is in AEW wrestling, the other one's in WWE wrestling. Everybody thought about that question and they thought, 'What a joke' and that's how I felt when I heard the CM Punk thing," SRS continued.

"It's like maybe I should look into this. And then I did and someone said, 'Well, how did you hear that?' I couldn't tell them. Then I went to another source that I thought would know. They didn't know, but then they were like, 'Well that would make an awful lot of sense.' Then finally I got a confirmation close to one of the sides and that snowballed things and a lot more people started talking about it."

You can check out Sean Ross Sapp's full episode of Straight To Hell below: