CM Punk’s second MMA bout, which occurred on the main card of UFC 225 last weekend, was more or less a disaster for him. Though he managed to survive the full fifteen minutes with his foe Mike Jackson, he was out-classed from bell-to-bell, and left the cage looking like bruised plum.
Over the course of his fifteen-minute fight with Jackson, Punk showed plenty of heart — enough heart to “fill the arena,” according to his foe. Yet the unfortunate side-effect of the fight going the full fifteen minutes is that it provided ample proof that Punk is not cut out for cage fighting.
In the eyes of UFC commentator Joe Rogan, who called the fight from cage-side, it might even be more severe than that. In his eyes, Punk has no athletic talent whatsoever, and was only ever successful as a pro wrestler because of his charisma.
“He’s a very nice guy and he’s a hard worker, but he does not have athletic talent,” Rogan said on his podcast (transcribed by MMAMania). “He’s a showman, and when he was in the WWE, he was allowed to say, ‘I am the fucking man!’ and throw his hand up in the air and say he is the man, and they had it scripted so that he was the man. But when you’re in there with a guy like Mike Jackson, who had zero fear of him and was just so casual, popping him in the face anytime he wanted to — he literally could’ve stopped him anytime, if he got angry and wanted to stop him, he could’ve at any point in the fight.
“He doesn’t have the ability to move his body right,” Rogan continued. “There’s a lot of guys you can take out there, track and field guys, football players and you can get them to fight better than him in a couple of weeks easily because they are athletes.”
“They’d understand how to shift their weight and throw a punch. He doesn’t have any talent, is all it is, he doesn’t have physical talent for whatever reason. Whether it’s his approach, his intensity. It’s not his coaching, it’s [not] Duke fucking Roufus.”
What do you think of Joe Rogan’s take on CM Punk?
This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 6/14/2018.