The old saying goes, “It takes a lot of hard work to make it look this easy.” But Punk, born Phil Brooks in Chicago, has spent the better part of his life making his hard work look damn near impossible.

That’s the trade of a professional wrestler. Stage a scripted fight and make it look real. Make each punch seem painful. Force the audience to feel every body slam, every suplex, and every suicide dive outside of the ring. Real pain is immaterial; professional wrestlers absorb heaps of physical punishment, return to the ring the next day, and work through the injuries. It’s why they fear a single concept, the dreaded F-word: fake.

In the unique arena of professional wrestling, CM Punk was one of its best practitioners. He had the persona; straight edge, pierced, and tattooed, standing out amongst his more action figure-esque counterparts. He had the technical chops, cutting his teeth in IWA: Mid-South and Ring of Honor, where he held the heavyweight championship. He then spent a year in OVW, WWE’s developmental territory, before being moved to WWE’s main roster. His early career in WWE was successful, if not unexpected. He won titles, was consistently in the main event picture, and was involved in feud after feud.

But Punk reached his cultural watermark on June 27, 2011, when he delivered what WWE fans refer to as the “Pipe Bomb” promo. Punk had always been talented on the microphone, usually appropriating his straight edge persona as a face or heel persona when necessary. But that evening on Monday Night Raw, at the top of the ramp, Punk delivered a blistering indictment of the WWE and their backstage politicking, echoing concerns that had built amongst fans for months:

“…The reason I’m leaving is you people. Because after I’m gone, you’re still going to pour money into this company. I’m just a spoke on the wheel. The wheel is going to keep turning and I understand that. Vince McMahon is going to make money despite himself. He’s a millionaire who should be a billionaire. You know why he’s not a billionaire? Because he surrounds himself with glad-handed, nonsensical, douchebag (censored) yes men, like John Laurinaitis, who’s going to tell him everything he wants to hear, and I’d like to think that maybe this company will better after Vince McMahon is dead. But the fact is, it’s going to be taken over by his idiotic daughter and his doofus son-in-law and the rest of his stupid family.”

Wrestling, for a moment in time, seemed real again. His rant got mainstream press; as Punk himself would later remark, the only other time wrestling gets this much press is when somebody dies. It all built to an incredible match at the following Money in the Bank pay-per-view, which saw Punk pin John Cena and become WWE Champion. The latter part of his career was filled with great achievements. He held the WWE title a second time for an unprecedented 434 days. He fought the Undertaker at WrestleMania, an honor that places him in an exclusive class of Superstars.