Summary

John Morrison reflected on winning the vacant ECW Championship at WWE Vengeance: Night of Champions 2007 after originally being at the event as a standby talent.

He said CM Punk was initially set to face Chris Benoit, and Morrison was told later in the day that he could be inserted into the match if Benoit did not arrive.

Morrison ended up facing Punk and winning the title, then held the ECW Championship for 69 days before dropping it back to Punk.

The source text states it was later revealed that Benoit killed his wife Nancy, son Daniel, and himself in a double murder-suicide.

John Morrison says the Vengeance 2007 title moment changed his trajectory and complicated how he remembers it

John Morrison said winning the ECW title changed his career direction immediately, and that consequence moved him from standby status to a central creative role overnight.

He also said the tragedy that followed left him feeling guilty about being happy in the moment, which remains the core tension in how he looks back on that night.

For related context, see our earlier report on Morrison discussing the same title win and aftermath.

Quotes

Quote from John Morrison

"So we’re at Vengeance 2007, not everyone’s there. It’s a pay-per-view, but I happen to be there. The ECW roster didn’t have a lot of representation at that particular event. Say call time, I think it was maybe 2 pm."

John Morrison later went on to say:

"No, I was like a standby. I was booked to be there, maybe have a dark match, I don’t know."

John Morrison later went on to say:

"I don’t know who made that decision with that call, but I’d had a lot more TV time consistently than he had up to that point. Whoever made that decision? Thank you. I agree. Good call. So we have that talk, and then I spend the next two hours pacing, hoping that Chris Benoit does not show up. Walked out to the parking garage a couple of times, just to see if I saw a car coming. I didn’t. Then the pay-per-view started, put my tights on. The whole time I’m like, Oh my God, Chris Benoit is gonna show up, and this is gonna get squashed, and I’ll just be back to business as normal. He doesn’t show up, though, and we have the match. I wrestle CM Punk. It was a great match, Punk and I had several after that, leading to eventually the two of us having great chemistry. The first couple were a little clunky, but still fun. 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. Because up to that point, as far as I knew, I thought Chris and his family were just very nice people, you know, and Chris I thought was nice to a point. He always liked me, I think, and respected me, because he could tell that I liked wrestling and that’s what I was there for, but he was one of the guys that was kind of going to weed you out if he didn’t like you, or if anyone thought you had an attitude problem, you’re gonna have to deal with him. I kind of felt like it was cool that he saw me in regard to the fact that I did like wrestling then, I like wrestling now, more than that, I loved it, and I still love it, and as mentioned, confusing, like talking in circles about it."

John Morrison later went on to say:

"I’ve never thought about it in those terms. The only thing that I think about is I feel guilty about being so happy and excited because I didn’t know what had happened. I don’t care if it’s a footnote or not. What happened after it is more meaningful to me anyway."

Sources

As reported by Fightful.