During a taping of Monday Night Raw in Chicago this week, the show was overwhelmed by CM Punk chants, and Stephanie McMahon responded by calling Punk a loser.
CM Punk chants broke out over and over during March 6th’s show, with the first major instance being during a Goldberg segment. Not only did the crowd boo Goldberg as he held up his new Universal Championship, but they began to chant “CM Punk” at him as well. Goldberg responded by nodding and telling the crowd, “I hear that.”
Punk chants also broke out later when Stephanie McMahon appeared in a backstage segment, and when McMahon made her first in-ring appearance shortly after 10:00 p.m., the arena went absolutely wild screaming “CM Punk!”
McMahon responded by saying that the Chicago crowd is extremely predictable and that they are a bunch of losers just like CM Punk.
“All you Chicagoans are all alike, right?” McMahon said. “You’re just like CM Punk, right? That’s right: you’re all losers.”
This, of course, prompted a massive boo from the crowd. A few moments later, after that CM Punk chant died out, another one began, as the crowd actively tried to drown out what Stephanie McMahon was saying in the segment. And a few moments after that, when Stephanie McMahon asked Mick Foley who the real boss is, the crowd could be heard shouting Punk’s name.
CM Punk chants break out quite often on Monday Night Raw, but most frequently during tapings in Chicago, Illinois, where CM Punk is from. Because WWE ended their relationship with CM Punk on bad terms, the chants are essentially a crowd’s way of giving the entire company, and especially the McMahons, the middle finger or of otherwise expressing displeasure with the show.
This is not the first time Stephanie McMahon has responded to CM Punk chants; back in December, the last time Raw was taped in Chicago, she told the crowd, in reference to Punk’s UFC career, “So if you guys could keep that [chant] up for about two minutes and 15 seconds, you’d last one second longer than Punk did.”
WWE employees other than Stephanie McMahon typically do not acknowledge the CM Punk chants in any way. But last month, while speaking to a crowd after a taping of Raw had ended, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson actually responded to the CM Punk chants by calling Punk up on the phone and leaving him a message telling him that the fans wanted to talk to him. Punk later said on Twitter that he was walking his dog when Johnson called but that it was nice to hear from the fans.