D’Amore Drop: How WWE leaned on one of Paul Heyman’s golden rules with its CM Punk decision

The D’Amore Drop is a weekly guest column on Uncrowned written by Scott D’Amore, the Canadian professional wrestling promoter, executive producer, trainer and former wrestler best known for his long-standing role with TNA/IMPACT Wrestling, where he served as head of creative. D’Amore is the current owner of leading Canadian promotion Maple Leaf Pro Wrestling.

I see the logic for getting the WWE World Heavyweight Championship onto a proven guy like CM Punk. He is super over, is having great matches and obviously can carry world title feuds on the mic.

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I don’t know if we call CM Punk a “legend” yet, but you can bet your last dollar we will when he retires. He can carry “Raw” and has more than enough star power to carry any PLE WWE wants him to headline.

As I said last week, I’d have gone with Jey Uso turning heel and winning the belt, but, when I think about it more, that would go against one of Paul Heyman’s rules of booking.

One of the first of many lessons I learned from Heyman about putting a wrestling show together is, when you are forced to make a substitution due to injury or whatever else, the babyface should go over.

If the babyface champion is not available for a big match, the new babyface should win. If the babyface challenger is substituted, the new babyface challenger should win.

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WWE was just forced to make a substitution — Seth Rollins is out for an extended period — and that left CM Punk, the babyface in the feud versus Uso in the Saturday Night’s Main Event title match.

According to the Heyman Doctrine, it doesn’t matter if Uso was a heel, face or a tweener — you go with the original babyface.

And, so, they put the belt on Punk.

WWE needed the belt on Punk and, well, they took the most direct route to that goal — and now Punk will help them make everyone forget that Seth Rollins was/is the linear champion (until such time “Freakin” comes back and reminds us of that fact).

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This reminded me of years ago, back in the winter of 2006 when I was with TNA.

We wanted to get the belt on Christian Cage in early 2007 and were going to use Abyss as the transitional champ to get the belt from Sting to Christian. For whatever reason, the idea stuck that we couldn’t pin Sting, even if Abyss cheated … so we did the gimmick where Sting was disqualified and lost the belt that way.

I hated it, but it was my job to tell Christian: ‘Hey, it still gets the belt to you.’

Christian was livid. As a traditionalist, he felt the credibility of the title was getting washed out, that Abyss didn’t really win the world title and therefore he wouldn’t really be the champion once he beat Abyss.

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At one point, Christian told me he didn’t even want the belt under those circumstances.

But, that’s the way it went down — and, of course, in Christian’s hands the title was seen as massively prestigious regardless of how Sting lost it.

Punk’s first promo as champion this past Monday painted a picture that there’s an army of challengers for him to face: Bronson Reed, Bron Breakker, AJ Styles, Dominik Mysterio and more.

Punk is so good.

The truth is, WWE is struggling for credible title challengers (Universal Champ Cody Rhodes’s dance card is very thin over on “SmackDown”), but the way Punk sold it, there’s a golden age of great PLE main events ahead for him.

Punk turned 47 years old last week. He doesn’t have very long left at all, as he’s said himself several times.

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Now that he’s achieved his dream of headlining WrestleMania, it could be that he’s one injury away from being done.

So … maybe it was the right call to get the belt on him now, while we can enjoy one last CM Punk run as champion.

There’s always an exception to every booking rule, and in the late ’90s I found the exception to Paul Heyman’s “the babyface must go over in case of a substitution” mantra.

When I first started booking TV for Border City Wrestling, we were in a jam where Johnny Swinger’s title challenger, Vampiro, couldn’t make it. Man, we were desperate. The promotion was falling apart already, and now we had no title match for a card we desperately needed to be a success.

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We had no one that made sense. No one we called could make it in time. Every idea was a dead end and the clock was ticking fast.

So, we went with the Brooklyn Brawler, Steve Lombardi. Swinger was a heel and, in my crazy, overworked, panicking brain, I defaulted to the Paul Heyman thinking that “when you can’t deliver the advertised match, the babyface has to win.”

Drumboy — who I’m so close to, some people in the industry literally think he’s a blood relation to me — came and tried to use logic. You can’t end a long heel title run with the Brooklyn Brawler, who’s lost thousands of times in WWE, coming in on no notice, he said. Swinger is super over as a killer, he argued, he can’t lose the belt to the guy who spent years losing in 20 seconds on WWE Challenge.

No, no, said I. It will work. This always works. The substitution babyface going over always works.

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Well, when Brawler came out as the mystery challenger, the place went NUTS! The fans came unglued. They were cheering, screaming their lungs out for every punch, kick and slam Brawler did.

You should have heard them, they went insane!

Now, I am at the curtain with everyone who’s told me this was a terrible idea. And, of course, I am already doing the, “You hear that? I told you so! Didn’t I tell you this always works!” And Drumboy and everyone else is sheepishly going, “Yeah, yeah, OK, fair enough.”

And then comes the finish! One … two … three! Brawler wins the title!

And … silence.

The fans may as well have died.

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They were in utter disbelief — and not in a good way. It was obvious they were thinking, “I can’t believe this is what they booked”.

See, the fans loved seeing the Brawler get a title shot and beat Swinger up for a few minutes. But they didn’t want, nor believe, an all-time loser beating the killer heel.

So, to get out of the dead end I’d booked myself into, we filmed a scene in a boardroom where Swinger’s lawyer argued since there was no contract, the match was not official, and thus the title change was null and void.

By winning last week’s four-way, Soamoa Joe earned his AEW title rematch with Hangman Adam Page at AEW Full Gear, which takes place Nov. 25.

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He turned heel along the way, which guarantees we’ll see a different type of match for the return bout.

Joe was a legend in TNA, had a good run in WWE, and now is having this great Indian Summer in AEW. He’s the elder statesman in AEW — the younger guys look up to him and know he’s a legit tough guy.

Some people put Joe on their TNA Mount Rushmore, some people don’t. I’m not the right guy to ask because the booking team I was on — with Mike Tennay, Jeremy Borasch, Dutch Mantell and Bill Banks — was coming to power right when Joe joined and we put a rocket on him. I’m a Joe guy.

At the time, the two biggest stars TNA could sign were Joe and CM Punk. There were reasons — you can google them — TNA wasn’t getting Punk at that time, but we badly wanted Joe.

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I know that Jim Ross — WWE’s then-head of talent — put out a memo that they needed to get both Punk and Joe to stop TNA from getting them.

During my next call with Joe, I said: “Look, you will do great wherever you go — but you are everything I ever wanted to be as a wrestler. You have exactly the style, the look, and character I wanted to present. And, as such, I know exactly how to book you.

“So, my question is: Who do you want booking you? Something who understands exactly who and what you are as a talent, or WWE, who only want you to stop me from having the chance to work with you?”

We signed Joe that very week.

Sticking with booking, the frustrating dark art it is, one thing I know having done it these many years is that it’s easy to get wrong and very hard to get right. Especially up and down the card, and especially consistently.

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When folks critique WWE vs. AEW booking, they need to keep in mind that WWE and AEW are booking differently, and I don’t just mean that WWE still somewhat books for family/crossover fans while AEW books more for what Tony Khan calls wrestling “sickos.” (His term! Not mine!)

WWE is the market leader, one-half of a $16 billion company, and it just isn’t prudent to take creative risks all the time. WWE’s job is to keep the machine rolling by putting on an entertaining product and limiting any risks — in terms of who’s champion, who is turned heel — to the most calculated ones.

AEW is, as Tony Khan loves to say, the challenger brand. They need and must take risks in order to stand out. Go back to the late ’90s, when WCW was beating WWE in the ratings — it was Vince McMahon who was forced to take risks, and we saw the rise of DX and the Jerry Springer era of edgy WWE TV.

It is no coincidence that as soon as WCW was gone, WWE moved right back to a safer booking style.

Until now, WWE has not played to Jade Cargill’s strengths nor hid her weaknesses anywhere near as well as AEW did.

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But, maybe things are changing. Jade crushed Tiffany Stratton at Saturday Night’s Main Event this past weekend in exactly the manner she should have — power move after power move, like a female Brock Lesnar.

Jade looks like money, she has real presence, and she makes you stop and think, “Oh hell, she is a killer!” WWE needs to lean into that.

Sometimes you must stack the bodies high to build one killer star.

In TNA, Samoa Joe tore through the entire X Division to become a monster. There were a lot of people unhappy with it at the time — more than one X-Division wrestler let us know they weren’t thrilled — but Joe became a massive draw for the company as a result.

Not to turn this into a Paul Heyman D-1 glazing column, but he was the master of booking to his talents’ strengths and hiding their shortcomings.

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Look at The Public Enemy in ECW — Heyman booked them playing to their comedic timing and personality and he hid their weaknesses, which at the time was in-ring work.

And they were so over and so good in ECW.

So over, in fact, WCW came calling with bags of money, and they were thrown out there on “Nitro” to sink or swim.

And, without someone like Heyman who understood what they were good at, they sunk.

Speaking on his podcast, MVP backed up what I said last week about Ricochet having the ability, as a heel, to make everyone look better.

I’m happy more people are noticing just how well Ricochet is doing near the top of the card for AEW.

Is Logan Paul joining The Vision? Or merely forming an alliance ahead of WWE Survivor Series?

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Logan Paul has been very effective in playing, well, Logan Paul, a filthy rich big-mouth. But he’s also a very big guy — he was much taller and almost as thick as Bron Breakker when they stood next to each other, and he’s legit tough.

I’d be intrigued to see Logan Paul play more of a badass heel from here on out, especially if he’ll be learning directly from Paul Heyman.