Kevin Nash was meant to face CM Punk at Night of Champions 2011 in a match that absolutely nobody needed to see. It came a decade after Nash’s prime (and that’s being generous) and interrupted Punk on the most electric run he’s ever been on in wrestling.
After Money in the Bank 2011, CM Punk was the most popular wrestler since Stone Cold Steve Austin. The Best in the World turned the wrestling world on it’s head with his iconic pipe bomb promo, before shocking the world by defeating John Cena and walking out the company with the WWE Championship in Chicago.
When he returned, he was primed for one of the greatest runs in wrestling. It started out with matches against John Cena and Alberto Del Rio. However, soon he was faced with part-timer Triple H. He had a good feud with the then-COO of the company, trading some excellent “worked shoot” promos. However, any goodwill that the feud had was lost when Triple H beat him clean and never gave him the win back.
However, that match was never meant to be Triple H. Kevin Nash was supposed to face CM Punk at Night of Champions after attacking at Summerslam 2011. He cost Punk the WWE title and would have been his first post-champion rivalry, giving Punk a big win over the Attitude Era star.
However, the man formerly known as Diesel was unable to compete and never wrestled CM Punk in the WWE. Kevin Nash spoke with PWTorch.com
I never went into it and WWE never went into it because of the privacy issue. What happened was, because of the wellness program, because my dad died of a heart attack at 36 years old, they do beyond a thorough physical. Well, my heart and everything else was fine, but I’m on Plavix and Plavix is a blood platelet agulator; they call it a blood thinner. It’s not, it stops your platelets from sticking together so you don’t get cardiovascular disease and blockages in your arteries and have a heart attack. it’s also for stroke. It’s very common to take with a statin drug if you have anybody in your heredity who died before 50 let alone having a father who died of a massive coronary at age 36.
“So I was on Plavix. So this comes through. When the doctor sees I’m on Plavix, I can’t wrestle. So now I’m supposed to wrestle C.M. Punk. I can’t. They won’t medically clear me. Triple H has to take my spot. It screws up the entire angle. That’s how all that came about. WWE would never – because that’s the class of the program – let that come out, but I need to make sure people realize it wasn’t Creative’s [fault], it was that a 52 year old guy was on Plavix and I had to go off it.I had to be off it for a certain amount of time before I could go back to work. It just so happened that I was finishing the Soderbergh film “Magic Mike” at the time, and I had to go shoot that, so it coincided with me going away for a while. I took the shot with the sledgehammer in Buffalo at Night of Champions and that got me away until I could be clear, and then I came back and we went into the match with Paul [Triple H] and I. At that point, Phil [C.M. Punk] and I sort of missed our opportunity to have that match. That’s the true untold story that I give only Wade Keller”
Annoyingly, when he did return he never faced CM Punk. Instead, Kevin Nash wrestled Triple H in a “Sledgehammer ladder match”, which was actually a lot better than it sounded. That was Kevin Nash’s last match in WWE aside from a surprise Royal Rumble spot and he, nor Triple H, ever gave CM Punk the win back that he truly deserved.