Bully Ray Likens CM Punk & The Elite To Two ECW Wrestlers With Real-Life Drama
As much as fans wanted to see it happen on the debut episode of "AEW Collision," CM Punk did not come face-to-face with The Elite in the middle of the ring. Instead, the "Second City Saint" only made a reference to The Young Bucks and bragged about how much the divisive head of Warner Bros. Discovery likes him in a promo to kick off the show.
But according to Bully Ray, if this whole situation had played out in ECW back in the day, Paul Heyman would have immediately turned the "Brawl Out" fallout into a storyline by putting Punk in the ring with Hangman Adam Page, Kenny Omega, or the whole gang, which is something that the "Mad Scientist of Extreme" did often.
On "Busted Open Radio," the WWE Hall of Famer and Tommy Dreamer reminisced about how many real-life rivalries ended up in the ring. While briefly touching on Dreamer's epic rivalry with Raven, they focused on the tumultuous relationship between Taz and Sabu. It all started in the early '90s when the "Homicidal, Suicidal, Genocidal, Death-defying Maniac" no-showed an ECW event to take a booking in Japan.
After a public firing from Heyman, Sabu resigned in 1995 and the "Human Suplex Machine" was furious because his former tag partner left the company high and dry. The grudge spilled out from the locker room and into the squared circle a number of times after that, most famously in 1997 at ECW's first pay-per-view, Barely Legal. But if both men weren't professionals, things could have come unglued well before that.
Survive If I Let You
When Sabu returned to ECW in 1995, he and Taz were kept apart for 18 months before they finally had a match. During that time, the former "Tazmaniac" continuously called out his rival whenever he had a chance.
While he typically got no response, there were a few teases, including one brief confrontation where they came to blows. It was during this interaction that Bully Ray saw the full effect of his colleagues' real-life heat.
"I remember the night that Taz was standing in the middle of the ring, the lights went off in the ECW Arena, the lights came back on, and there was Sabu standing there, finger in the air," he said. "Taz wanted to rip Sabu's head off of his shoulders and spit down his neck. For a 100% straight up shoot. To the point that Paul asked guys like me to be out there just in case. And I'm a young boy in ECW. I'm Jabroni Dudley at the time, but Paul's like, 'Bubba, you gotta be out there just in case anything goes down. I need you to get in the middle of this.' Because there was so much animosity and hatred."
Though the multi-time tag team champion didn't explicitly say that this is how far he wants things to go in AEW (which is where Sabu and Taz shared a locker room most recently), Bully did express that he hopes that the rumors of a roster split never actually come to fruition. That way, there's still a chance of Punk and The Elite potentially settling their differences in the ring one day.