CM Punk suffered two serious injuries in a matter of months this year, and Freddie Prinze Jr. isn’t sure we’ll ever see him wrestle again.
Freddie Prinze Jr. was a recent guest on INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet to discuss a wide variety of subjects. When asked if he believes we’ll see CM Punk wrestle again in the future, Freddie admitted he isn’t sure and mentioned how his body has held up for him over the past year and his frustration in dealing with a young generation of talent in All Elite Wrestling.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if he wrestles again. I don’t,” Freddie Prinze Jr. said. “I mean, his body wasn’t able to hold up. You know, he was getting hurt a lot, as we all do when we get older. His patience wasn’t able to hold up in dealing with a younger generation. I mean, look, for millennials and Gen Z, my generation and up. It’s not an illusion; they hate you because they don’t want to understand you.
“The things that my generation and older say about them are the same things my mom’s generation said about me. You’re softer; you don’t work as hard on this. Yeah, you’re right; you made it easier for me to live. So, thank you to your generation, but now we have a remote control, and I don’t have to get up and change the channel because you’re old and arthritic, and can’t do it anymore.
“I get that they hate the fact that kids can make millions on YouTube or Twitch, and they don’t have a boss telling them they suck every day. But here’s the flip side to that. Yeah, they may not have a boss, but they have dozens, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people that not only say they suck but demand to have say in what they do. That’s what the life of a streamer is.
“I’ve seen people sacrifice their dignity and their soul; I’ll put on a banana suit if I get 50 followers today. You can’t take that back; you know what I mean? If you start living by people who are giving you $5 a month and all of a sudden you want some of that dignity back, so goes their $5 too. So, they have to deal with much different pressures than these older generations had to deal with.
“Yeah, I had a director who was on my case every day on I Know What You Did Last Summer, every single day. It sucked. That’s one son of a bitch. All right, that’s one guy. The streamers out there, YouTuber all these, everyone in the world that has access to the internet can say horrible things about you. And these are young kids that are not prepared for that type of fame. That’s why I took my channel off Twitch because they don’t care; they don’t care about these young kids.
“They don’t put any measures in to protect them until four or five years later after, you know, these kids have been complaining and begging and asking for it. And it’s not like once they were bought by Amazon, they couldn’t afford to put measures in place. They simply chose not to because it wasn’t cost-effective. So, screw Twitch, screw those companies, man.
“I hope all of you go to YouTube or somewhere else where you’re in control, and you’re not having to pay for their service in order for you to get paid. Like, I got love for y’all, I really do. And I understand the pressures that they have to go through. I’ve seen it affects so many young people, I’ve seen it. The first person that called me uncle Freddy, or I think it was she said he’s my twitch uncle, was this girl I found randomly on Stream, and I was reading the comments, and I was just like, oh my God, is this what streamers have to go through?
“And for a female streamer, it’s different, right? Because these guys were letting her know exactly why they were watching her and saying sh*t that you’re just like Jesus Christ, like Michelle Pfeiffer never had to hear that in her Catwoman suit looking fine as hell. Like she didn’t have to hear just non-stop, and there’s no accountability. And there’s no one there to smack them and be like show some respect because it’s all digital.
“And they’re just enduring that at an age where you’re not equipped to deal with that yet. And I just remember going like this is a bad, bad place, and so I get it, and I have a lot of empathy, sympathy as I would have gone through it, and I haven’t. So, I empathize with what they have to go through. And I respect the ones that are able to come out on the other side and still have their dignity intact. Because it’s soul-selling and soul-stealing. And those are hard things to deal with in your early 20s. So, I don’t know how CM Punk moves forward. He’s of that older generation.”
READ MORE: Eric Bischoff Doesn’t Believe It Would Be Good Business For WWE To Bring Back CM Punk
What do you make of Freddie’s comments? Do you think we’ve seen the last of CM Punk in the world of professional wrestling? Let us know your thoughts by sounding off in the comments section below.
