Teddy Long Recalls WWE Backstage Reaction To CM Punk's Pipebomb Promo

CM Punk's comments at the post-All Out media scrum could be considered a pipebomb, but it wasn't quite the same as the legendary "pipebomb" promo that Punk cut on June 27, 2011. Punk notoriously sat cross-legged on the "WWE Raw" stage that evening and aired his grievances about the company and some of the people in power, specifically targeting Vince McMahon, John Laurinaitis, Triple H, and The Rock. Former WWE star Teddy Long was on site that night, and in a new interview with Wrestling Inc. senior new editor Nick Hausman, said he believes Vince McMahon wasn't cued in on what Punk was going to say.

"If that was scripted or written then I know nothing about it," Long said. "I never saw anybody give him any papers, you know what I mean? Any scripts to read. Like I said, there may be things that are done backstage, sometimes people don't know, but I pretty much think it was a shoot. It was real."

A previous interview with Punk back in 2021 seems to confirm as much. Punk claimed that he actually gave Vince McMahon a "fake draft" of what he was going to say, and once that got approved, he said what he wanted to — within certain limits. Long noted how caught off-guard everybody was by Punk's pontification.

"Everybody was kind of looking at each other like, 'Did he just say that?'" Long said. "Because this was all brand new. We never had anybody to go out on live TV and to just go off on a rant like that and just speak their mind. So it was all brand new. It was all something that we'd never experienced and we'd never heard. So we're like, 'Man, this is too much.'"