Shoot interview video of Kevin Owens discussing locker room incident with CM Punk
In a July 2014 interview published to the Title Match Wrestling YouTube channel, Kevin Owens aka Kevin Steen addressed a story that he and CM Punk nearly came to blows backstage at a Ring of Honor show. Here is what Owens had to say…
“People know me for wrestling in a shirt. I still wrestled in a shirt back then, and I still do to this day. But I had a singlet, and Gabe, before I started, Ring of Honor told me, ‘Can you wrestle just in the singlet? Because I don’t want guys wrestling with shirts on my show.’ Even though Homicide did and plenty of people did. ‘Yeah, all right, whatever.’
So I wrestled in the singlet and it was fine. I just felt like the singlet wasn’t me, and I don’t know why. That’s stupid, but—and you could say it’s because I’m trying to hide the fact I’m fat, but everybody knows I am, you know what I mean?
So I don’t know why, but I just find the T-shirt looks better. Some people might disagree strongly, but that’s fine.
I wrestled just with my singlet at PWG before, and they told me, like, ‘Can you wear the shirt? You look better with the shirt. The singlet just doesn’t—it’s just not you.’
Anyway, so after a couple months of wrestling without the shirt at Ring of Honor, I asked Gabe [Sapolsky]. I’m like, ‘Can I just wrestle with the shirt on? It’s like, I just feel more comfortable. Like, I feel like I can be myself. When I don’t have the shirt, I just feel like I’m this wrestler dude.’
And Gabe was like, ‘Yeah, fine, whatever.’ But it wasn’t ‘yeah, fine, whatever,’ because he went and told Punk what I said.
And then that afternoon, before the show, when I was going to wrestle, and I had already decided, like, on the way up there, that I was going to wrestle without the shirt because I figured I’d already started without the shirt at Ring of Honor, so why would I just start wearing it out of nowhere now? So I’d already made the decision to just wrestle my singlet and gut it out.
But that afternoon, Punk just made a crack about me wrestling in the shirt, but whatever. I didn’t care. You know, I think Punk and I were on good terms. It was fine. I took it as a joke. You know, I don’t think he was trying to humiliate me. I really don’t think so. Other people probably saw it differently.
I did the match in the singlet, and I came to the back and I was blown to shits. I was blown up. But Punk was just—and it was a very small locker room, and people were, you know, minding their own business and talking their stuff out. But Punk was just, standing there looking at me, and I was blown, and I figured, ‘Oh, I’ll joke with him. I’ll joke back.’ And I said, ‘Are you happy now?’
But I guess he took it like I was trying to show him up, which I wasn’t trying to. I was literally trying to have a relationship with this guy and just joke around with him. But I guess I was blown, so maybe my tone was off. I don’t know. He got very upset. He yelled at me and he said I was disrespectful and all this stuff.
And for what it’s worth, If I had been in his position, maybe I would have thought the same. And now I know Punk a lot better, and I think he knows me a lot better too. And that’s now it’s just like a far thing. It’s like it never happened, really. But people still talk about it because there was a lot of people in the locker room and everybody saw it.
But I ended up just saying, ‘Okay, I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m sorry.’ That was it. It was no big deal. But, you know, the next day online, it was being reported we almost came to blows, which is not true.”