Even Ric Flair has an opinion on AEW’s CM Punk situation

[Liz]

Everyone has an opinion on the situation currently overshadowing AEW between CM Punk, Ace Steel, and The Elite trio of Kenny Omega and the Young Bucks. KENTA has an opinion on it, Bobby Fish has spoken on the matter, and a number of performers from across the wrestling industry from Colt Cabana to Kevin Owens, Eddie Kingston, Trent Beretta, and even Matt Hardy, have either shown support for The Elite or condemned Punk for his unprofessionalism in the past.

A new, completely surprising name who can be added to the chorus of commentators on the Punk-Elite situation? Well, that would be none other than Ric Flair, who decided to dedicate a surprisingly decent amount of time on his To Be The Man podcast to the fight and how entertaining he finds the whole affair.

Is Flair reading the situation correctly? Is this all just for the entertainment of 70-year-old WWE Hall of Famers, or has Flair's old-school mentality clouded his ability to read the situation objectively? Either way, his take needs to be heard, or in this case read, to be believed.

Asked about his opinion on the backstage brawl at the end of AEW's All Out by his podcasting partner/son-in-law Conrad Thompson, Flair delivered a doozy of a take that you can read below via a transcription from Fightful:

"I've been watching this from afar. It's very entertaining. If it's entertainment the fans want, it's entertainment they're getting, and Punk is giving a lot of it," Flair said. "He's creating excitement now, and if he's not afraid to say it.... I like the way he said I'll walk down the hall and be ready. That's Harley Race talking right there. I don't if he's that tough, but I love it. That's old-time stuff right there, it is. You got a problem with me, you can find me, right there in the building."

Yeah, that's certainly a, shall we say, old-school approach to how wrestlers should deal with their problems. While some may take issue with how forward Omega and the Bucks were about confronting Punk when tensions were still incredibly high, very few folks take issue with that aspect of the story – that would be the whole throwing chairs at folks and biting dudes as they attempt to save a puppy dog."

Still, Flair doesn't believe that Omega and the Bucks are bad people, as he actually thinks pretty highly of the trio.

"I actually thought it was pretty cool if what I'm told, and I don't know about who won the fight or who did what, but the fact that Punk said, 'I'm here in the building if you wanna find me,' something like that, I like that. It's probably not what Tony or anybody wants to hear, but if he has the courage to say that and he feels that strongly about somebody, hey, I don't blame him for saying it. I don't know. I like Omega and I like the Young Bucks, so I don't know what the heat could possibly be. They seem to me like really easy guys to get along with, but I don't know them that well. For me, it's how they treat me as an individual, and they treat me great. I had a chance to be around Kenny a lot when he wrestled [Andrade] in Mexico and really got to know him pretty good, and Young Bucks have always been awesome. So I don't know. CM Punk, I don't know him. But he said it and I don't know anything about Colt Cabana. I have no idea what's going on there. He seems to be under Punk's skin a little bit. I know nothing about that."

Okay, so in summation, Flair more or less thinks everyone handled the situation more or less correctly and is a big fan of The Elite largely because of his interaction with Omega in Lucha Libre AAA, which admittedly makes some sense, considering he sold "Nature Boy's" chops like it was 1987. If Flair was AEW's booker, he'd have likely run a camera into the locker room to catch the end of the brawl and its immediate fallout before booking a trios match for the very next episode of Dynamite. While that may have worked in the glory days of Jim Crockett Promotions, it's probably for the best that promotors are no longer trying to convince fans that everything they see on television is real and just suspending performers pending investigation.