Summary

John Morrison discussed how he became CM Punk's replacement opponent at WWE Vengeance: Night of Champions 2007 and won the ECW Championship.

In the interview excerpt, Morrison said he arrived at the show as a standby talent and later learned he or Kevin Thorne could be inserted if the scheduled challenger did not appear.

Morrison said he was ultimately selected, wrestled Punk, and won the title, which immediately changed his creative direction.

He also said the next day brought news of a tragedy, and that he has long felt conflicted about benefiting professionally from circumstances tied to that event.

John Morrison says Vengeance 2007 became a career turning point with lasting emotional conflict

John Morrison described that title win as a major career shift, and that consequence came from moving in one night from standby status to being champion and central to TV plans.

At the same time, Morrison said the aftermath left him carrying guilt about how happy he felt before learning what had happened, which he framed as a difficult contradiction he still wrestles with.

Quotes

Quote from John Morrison

“No, I was like a standby. I was booked to be there, maybe have a dark match, I don’t know. So, say call time is 1 pm, everything’s fine. I’m just in catering. Around 3 pm, I hear Chris Benoit hasn’t showed up, and if he doesn’t show up, I might need to fill in or something. Okay, sure he’ll be there though, it’s Chris. 4:30, 5 pm, me and Mordecai, Kevin Thorne, get called into talent relations, the two of us, and we’re told, ‘Hey, can’t get hold of Chris Benoit. He’s not here, and if he’s not here in another hour or two, it’s going to be one of you two guys versus CM Punk. We don’t want to let the crowd down by having the replacement lose. So whoever it is between you two is gonna win.’ So kind of like both looked at each other like, I hope it’s me.”

John Morrison later went on to say:

“So I win the ECW Championship, and it was one of those. This morning, I thought I was just coming to this pay-per-view to eat catering and hang out, didn’t really have anything going on TV storyline-wise. To tonight, now ECW World Champion, the writers are all asking me questions. They’re going to start writing the show around me and, holy crap, this is the best night ever. Then the next day, we get the news about Benoit and what happened. I felt like crap. I felt so guilty just for being happy with something that came to be because of the tragedy we’ve heard about and talked about ad nauseum. It’s still tough for me to be happy about how everything came about. I’m happy that I got that match and my career took a huge turn upwards because of everything. It’s just a very confusing thing to benefit from a tragedy, even if you really had nothing to do with it.”

Sources

As reported by NoDQ.