CM Punk says he’s still dealing with vertigo during matches, a lasting effect of a skull fracture he suffered early in his career. Punk opened up about the condition on the September 14 episode of Hot Ones: Extra Heat on Netflix, which aired right after WWE RAW.
The injury happened on June 15, 2002, during a quarterfinal match against Reckless Youth at the Jersey J-Cup. Jersey Championship Wrestling held the event at the RexPlex in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Reckless Youth went on to win both the match and the tournament.
According to Punk, the fracture damaged structures in his inner ear that help with balance, something he compared to dice getting rattled around inside a cup.
“I fractured my skull once. This is the one that reoccurs every once in a while, because after I fractured my skull, I developed vertigo really bad. Also, one I haven’t really talked about too much but what happened was I fractured my skull, and there are some bones in your inner ear to help with equilibrium and those kind of basically were like dice inside a cup and got rattled around and thrown around.”
The problem hasn’t fully gone away. According to Punk, those structures can still shift out of place, leaving him with the sensation that everything is spinning when he lies down and looks up.
“So, sometimes those still get knocked loose, and if I lay down and look straight up, the world spins.”
Punk also said the vertigo has hit him while working in the ring. Without naming specific matches or saying how often it happens, he said some of his most praised bouts took place while he was dealing with an episode.
“So there’s been a lot of matches that you see that you know a lot of people are impressed with, where I’m full on going through a bout of vertigo and I don’t know what’s going on.”
Even after all of that, Punk wrapped up with a joke about one of his moves, saying, “I will also now blame the crookedness of my moonsault on my vertigo.”