CM Punk retained the Undisputed WWE Championship against Kevin Owens on Friday’s SmackDown, and it somehow wasn’t the story of the night, because Punk wore his dead dog’s paw prints into the ring, stitched onto the side of a hockey mask that covered his whole face. That happened in Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena, per F4WOnline.
I’ve watched the entrance four times now and I still can’t process it.
Larry, the dog Punk shared with AJ Lee, died back in December. The CM Punk Larry mask is a full Jason Voorhees riff, bone-colored with black eye holes and a red claw mark scratched across the cheek. The mask was made by the same FX artist behind Bray Wyatt’s Fiend, a guy named Jason Baker, who also built Bo Dallas’ Uncle Howdy face. Fightful reports the paw prints on the side are Larry’s own, not a stock design standing in for the idea of a dog.
The CM Punk Larry mask didn’t need a graphics package to sell it.
Baker posted the design himself, and the caption is the part that actually wrecked me:
https://twitter.com/bakingjason/status/2091002650150002935
This was a CM Punk dog Larry tribute wrapped inside a title defense, and the tribute won. WWE has spent years faking grief that bleeds into the show on cue, a piano sting here, a slow-motion replay there, and everybody already knows it’s coming before the wrestler’s face changes. Punk just zipped up a white jacket that said “BEST IN THE WORLD” in red, put the belt on over it, and walked to the ring without any of that. Nobody oversold it.
Then the match happened, and it got stranger from there.
Owens accidentally shoved Punk into the referee, and that’s when Sami Zayn ran in from the crowd itself, not from backstage, and threw Punk into the ring post before reviving the ref for a near fall that had no business existing. Zayn tossed the championship belt into the ring for Owens to swing with. Owens looked at it, looked at Zayn, and tried to hand it back instead of using it.
Zayn cracked him across the face with the belt anyway. Punk hit the GTS on Owens for the pin, according to Yardbarker’s live results.
Sami Zayn turned on Kevin Owens, and it wasn’t a random swerve. Zayn kept beating down both guys with the belt afterward, screaming that Punk had stolen his championship, and he’s not wrong technically: he won the title at Night of Champions this year, and Punk ended the reign nine days later. Zayn and Owens are also real-life best friends who’ve spent this entire run fighting side by side, which is what turns a title-match ambush into an actual betrayal instead of an angle nobody will remember by Monday.
I’ll admit the timing bugs me. Stacking your biggest heel turn of the year onto the same show as your champion’s tribute to a dead pet risks burying the thing people are actually going to remember tomorrow morning.
It didn’t work out that way, because the mask never had to compete for the moment. It just got to have it.
I have a dog named Revis. I’d rather not think about it any further than that, so I’m just going to leave this here for the rest of our WWE coverage to sort out.
