Seth Rollins prepares to face commercial punk on Saturday as two-thirds of headline 41 on WrestleMania 41, but the screen-on feud isn’t just built for television.
In fact, Rollin’s silly das against Punk are so real that he is willing to train and learn MMA just for the opportunity to calm the beef in real battles. Before the event they joined the Rome ruler in the match, Rollins pitched the idea of fighting Punk in the UFC after his longtime rival actually tried his hand at MMA a few years ago.
Punk eventually went 0-1 in one contest in the UFC, but he technically lost both fights, but his second match against Mike Jackson was overturned after Jackson tested positive for marijuana.
“Of course, yeah, I’ll fight him,” Rollins said of punk on the Robert Griffin III podcast. “I’m not going to arrest him in his locker room behind the scenes and I’m not just starting to light him up, but if Dana White wants to book CM Punk vs Seth Rollins, I’ll try wearing gloves and try it out, like the first fight with one of the UFC fighters (vs.) non-UFC fighters.
“It could be just me, but you put me there along with one of the others in my weight class, I’m out.
Punk actually complemented his wrestling training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for years before actually signing with the UFC, but after Rollins began wrestling when he was still a teenager, there is no real martial arts background.
That doesn’t seem to matter much to Rollins, who openly expressed his hostility towards Punk when he addressed their rivalry after the 46-year-old athlete returned to WWE in 2023.
“When you use the word cancer, it’s very strong, but cancer is a parasite,” Rollins said as he addressed Punk. “It doesn’t give anything. It doesn’t care about itself. It replicates and cares about itself. He feels that way as he tries to replicate it by infiltrating and trying to make him seem to be helping these young guys. A small army beneath him of those who buy him in his brucura.
“At the end of the day, as he says, it’s not for improvement in the industry, but for improvement in his.
It’s unlikely that UFC CEOs will jump at the chance to actually book a fight after Punk’s two appearances to the promotion didn’t showcase their high level of skill accurately, but Rollins knows it will generate a lot of buzz and probably make a huge amount of money at the box office.
Rollins knows that, as stupidly, that UFC and WWE are now owned by the same company, so they don’t know what is possible.
“Give me a few months (to prepare),” Rollins said. “Give me a training camp. But I feel I can handle myself. TKO, we are all under one umbrella so it could be the first.”