Dave Meltzer Responds To CM Punk’s Instagram Post, Confirms Punk Was Hurt During Match With Jon Moxley

As previously reported, CM Punk posted and then deleted a message on Instagram in which he claimed he wasn’t cleared to wrestle Jon Moxley back in August. He also took shots at Chris Jericho and Dave Meltzer, calling them both liars. It’s believed that his post was in response to something Meltzer posted on the F4WOnline message boards, in which he said Punk agreed to do the match with Mox anyway. In the latest episode of Wrestling Observer Radio, Meltzer said he was in the wrong for making that post and confirmed Punk was still hurt during the match with Moxley. Here are highlights:

On feeling guilty over his post: “This is twice […] I went through a frickin’ guilt trip. Because the first time, if you recall, was when he did the thing, he quoted Sports Illustrated and he said ‘The Young Bucks call Dave Meltzer and blah blah blah about whatever.’ Which was a couple of weeks before the big blow up. And then everything happened there and you all know I thought, ‘I should have just told him that the Young Bucks had nothing to do with it.’ Now do I really believe anything would happen differently? Probably not, but it’s like, you just don’t know. I kinda feel like…it wasn’t my job to do it but it kinda was. I just felt really bad and really guilty about like, I should have said these guys had nothing to do with this. But, whatever. So then this time, I did a message board post that I really wish I never did because so much has happened since then in so many destructive ways, and not just him.”

On Punk being injured at the time: “It was somebody just going, ‘One thing we can say, it was all smooth’ as far as the match that he lost to Moxley, the real quick match before he beat him for the title. And I just kinda said ‘it really wasn’t that smooth’, because it really wasn’t. There was a lot going on. There was drama and everything. And when I said it, I wasn’t writing a news story or anything like that but when I said it I never said a lot of it had to do with his injury. And it did. In his defense, he was coming back from a broken foot and it was a serious injury, and that played into it as far as when he was gonna be ready. The angle…whatever you think of the angle, the angle could have worked. The way the angle was, and it’s like the whole Rocky III thing…if you had more time…the angle would have been better if you had more time. Because of the injury, you didn’t have more time. There’s things they could have done. But the whole point is that a message board post that I didn’t need to make and I didn’t mention the fact that the injury was part of it and the fact that there was drama, which there was. So I feel really bad about it.”

On Punk’s Instagram post: “‘Dave Meltzer’s a liar’, I hear stuff like that on a daily basis. I try never to do that. […] I wasn’t really thinking, I didn’t really tell the whole story and that’s the thing. And then everything happens from there and it’s almost the same thing. It’s funny how different people take what I call the shrapnel. I remember one time somebody said they were mad at me and I said, ‘What are you mad at?’ ‘Well Bryan said…’, ‘I’m not Bryan’ and by the way, that wasn’t fair to what you said either, but whatever, that has nothing to do with it. So it’s like he kind of blasted Moxley too a bit and certainly blasted Jericho and it’s at the time when everyone is trying to see if you can make up and make this thing work and do the best thing for the company and then this happens which. How it’s gonna turn out, who the hell knows, but it certainly is never a good time to do that and Jericho had absolutely nothing to do with this message post. Nor did Moxley. I just didn’t like this. I’m just really sad that it happened this way. I want the best thing for the business. Both companies.”