CM Punk To Haters: F*** Off, Don’t Watch Me Fight

Almost a year has passed since the UFC decided to reveal that former WWE champion Phillip “CM Punk” Brooks was making the transition to mixed martial arts (MMA) and preparing for an eventual bout that was supposed to happen sometime in 2015.

But we’ve set to see Punk in the octagon or anything close to it yet, and his debut was recently pushed back further when he suffered a shoulder injury training at Milwaukee’s Roufusport. That’s lead to an insane amount of hate being directed at Punk online from MMA fans (and even some fighters) calling him a “fake fighter” while believing we may never witness the 37-year-old Brooks walk into the cage.

Punk is noticeably upset by the droves of haters, but on a recent appearance on The MMA Hour this week, he insisted that he bypasses all the trash talk by simply not paying attention to the online “cesspool of humanity”:

“You stomach it by not reading it. That’s what you do. Otherwise you’ll just go f*cking insane. It’s a cesspool of humanity.”

It may be hard to argue with him there, as it’s clear that humanity has sort of devolved into a bunch of negative naysayers who disparage fellow humans with a built-in audience as they hide behind the perceived security of a computer screen.

Yet while that is indeed true, it’s also hard not to notice a sort of sense of entitlement from Punk, who got his UFC shot without a single MMA fight as no-name athletes fight and claw to make ends meets while hopefully making it to the big show.

Despite that fact, Punk feels he’s been wronged, and just like his “boss” Dana white, he insists that if you don’t like something, just don’t watch or pay attention to it:

“I deal with enough sh*t,” Punk said. “The last thing I need is some phony journalist being like, ‘Oh he’s fake injured. He’s never gonna fight.’ F*ck off, pal. Who told you it was OK to write a book? Who made you a journalist? I don’t know why people are so concerned with what I’m doing. If you don’t like the book somebody wrote, don’t read it. If you don’t like the TV show somebody is on, don’t watch it. If you’re mad that somebody is remaking Big Trouble in Little China, it’s your favorite movie — guess what? Don’t watch the remake. Don’t want to watch me fight? Don’t watch me fight.”

Those words could easily be construed as sour grapes from a man who arrived with a ton of hype and has failed to deliver on that in any way, shape, or form to the fullest sense of the term. Many are starting to believe that Punk has bitten off more than he can chew, but he still insists that interest in his first bout is not actually waning.

In fact, he believes all of his haters will still support him, and that’s what he thinks is ironic:

“It’s nice,” he said. “They want to see me fight. As much as they pretend, ‘Oh this is terrible for the sport, we hate him, we’re not gonna support it,’ they’re gonna watch it. They want to watch it. That’s the funny thing about it.”

With his attitude seemingly going south with each passing question, Punk then admitted that he does sometimes wish the UFC had not announced his foray into the UFC so long before he was actually ready:

“Some days I wish that,” Punk said. “It also wasn’t my call. I wasn’t the one that called them, they called me. I suggested, ‘Hey why don’t we wait until I’m ready to fight?’ And they were just like, ‘Nah, f*ck it. We’re gonna do it right now.’ Alright.

“Some days are better than others mentally for me. I think, ‘Man, it would have been better if we waited.’ Other days, I don’t think about it.”

A move like the one he decided to make was bound to garner its fair share of controversy and criticism, and even though Punk says he doesn’t pay attention to it, he’s admitting that it does get to him at the same time. It’s an odd paradox of a strange situation, and with his UFC debut still six to 10 months away after his injury; it’s something that’s not likely to disappear anytime soon.

Because of that, Punk knows he can’t fuel the fire of his online enemies, as he’s “fed the trolls” before and was made to deal with the predictable results:

“They can say it’s a PR stunt,” Punk said. “They can say whatever. But I know I’m gonna get my day in the Octagon and I’m gonna have fun doing it. I just try to ignore all the silliness. Some days it gets to me, and I don’t ignore it. And then I remember, oh yeah, that’s why you do ignore it. Because I fed the trolls. Don’t feed the trolls.”