Powerhouse Hobbs Recalls CM Punk Adding Sentimental Meaning To Their Match

Will "Powerhouse" Hobbs will never forget the moment he first stepped into the ring with CM Punk.

The AEW star recently appeared on the Wrestling Perspective Podcast and was asked about his first "welcome to wrestling" moment. Hobbs managed to come up with two, starting with his first-ever match in 2009 in All Pro Wrestling [APW].

"We had a battle royal," Hobbs recalled. "I was still doing ring crew, setting up, and one of the trainers was like, 'Hey, you got your gear with you?' And I'm like, 'Yeah,' and he's like 'Okay, we got a no-show for the battle royal, you're in it.'

"When I got in that battle royal, it seemed like every vet in there wanted to chop me, get ahold of me... Maybe about a month or two before, we learned how to go over the top rope backward and that happened to me. It was [Georgia legend] Larry Blackwell, and he's like, 'Alright, I'm gonna give you a chop, take the clothesline, go over.' He chopped me, I sold it, went over clean backward. That was my moment, I got to the back and all my classmates were congratulating me."

More recently, Hobbs found himself a bit starstruck when he took on CM Punk at AEW Rampage: Grand Slam in September 2021.

"That was huge," Hobbs said. "What was it, 20,000 people that were there? And just how much that match meant to me with my mom passing away about a month before, and he knew it and he wanted to make sure that that match was for her. I can't say this about him enough, he's such a great dude. He sits down with me to this day and watches my matches with me.

"But when his music hit and you could just feel that energy coming from the crowd, and he's standing up on the top rope and he looked at me, and I'm looking at him, and I read his lips and he was like, 'Okay, motherf***er'? I'm like, alright, we gonna do this sh*t!'"

"I had other moments," Hobbs admitted, "but I place those two right up at the top."