Powerhouse Hobbs on Wrestling CM Punk at AEW Rampage Grand Slam

– During a recent interview with the Wrestling Perspective Podcast, AEW star Powerhouse Hobbs discussed his match with CM Punk at Rampage Grand Slam in September 2021. Below are some highlights (via WrestlingInc.com):

On his first match in APW in 2009: “We had a battle royal. 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.”

Powerhouse Hobbs on his match with CM Punk at Rampage Grand Slam last year: “That was huge. 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, but I place those two right up at the top.”