Last week, FanFyte’s Emily Pratt reported on a largely unnoticed bit of one of the most watched, most analyzed pieces of professional wrestling in recent memory: The fact that Punk had written two sets of initials, AC and CF, on the soles of his Vans.
To us, it looked like the start of a list of people Punk wanted to test himself against—Adam Cole, whose WWE contract expires tomorrow, and, through some complex mathematics, Andrade El Idolo via the initials of his fiance, Charlotte Flair.
Last night, Punk made his Dynamite debut. Different pair of shoes, different letters. Here’s how they looked during the live broadcast of Dynamite:
The shoe clearly says BW. The second never quite became clear. Given those two letters, the most obvious interpretation, if you take our “Punk’s making a list” approach to things, is Bray Wyatt.
Remembering that Adam Cole’s fate is up in the air, and that “CF” requires jumping some hoops before landing on Andrade, his shoes could be as much of an invitation to follow him to AEW as they are a hint as to what’s in his future. This is where the context of Punk’s prior promos comes into play. In two in-ring segments, Punk has spoken passionately about how the idea of creative freedom is what brought him back to wrestling, AEW specifically. Wyatt and Bryan Danielson, who was explicitly alluded to in Punk’s promo, in particular had issues with creative during their time in WWE, with Wyatt’s intricate character often subject to inexplicable and detrimental shifts, and Danielson’s disposition being such that he didn’t really feel the weight of main eventing WrestleMania.
With Cole and Flair, who knows. I’d like to think that such an oblique shout-out isn’t being made on the basis of both having significant others working for the competition, but the more I think about it, the less this Easter egg hunt feels like a man making challenges, and more like a guy asking his friends to consider a change of scenery.
Thanks to @WrestlingAI_Up for making the second screenshot more clear.
