WWEWWEFirst he was The Prototype. Then he was the prophecy. Now it’s time to say goodbye to John Cena on the eve of his farewell match. By David ShoemakerDec. 12, 11:30 am UTC • 10 min
There have been a lot of lists of the greatest John Cena moments in the year leading up to his retirement match, which will air this Saturday night on Peacock. But for me, the singular transformative moment in Cena’s career was his match against Rob Van Dam at ECW One Night Stand in 2006. Cena entered New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom to a loud chorus of boos. ECW was the anti-establishment wrestling fed, and even though it had been bought and co-opted by WWE, the fan base still roundly rejected the corporate champ Cena. He was kid-friendly, chiseled, more style than substance. He represented everything the hardcore audience hated.
The crowd was hostile. The ubiquitous “Cena sucks” chants (or its variation, “John Cena sucks,” sung to the tune of his theme song) wouldn’t emerge for six or seven years, but the ECW crowd lit into him with a succinct “Fuck you Cena” chant. Cena had a steely, slightly perturbed look on his face. Certainly he was expecting this kind of reaction, but it was unclear to what degree he was reacting to it at the moment, or whether he was just playing the part. When he threw his hat into the crowd, as he always did, the hat came flying back, and Cena saw it out of the corner of his eye. He threw his T-shirt, and the crowd lit into the catcher: “Throw it back! Throw it back!” they chanted. The shirt came back, surprising Cena while he was trying to get the match moving.
Cena threw the shirt again; again, it flew back to him. Then it happened again. The fourth time, Cena threw the shirt and stood stock still, staring at the person who caught it. He had been stoic to that point, but when it came back this time, Cena looked exasperated. It was a moment of clarity, of Cena embracing the hate. He had turned the other cheek, and the slap stung.
For so much of his career until this point, Cena had been the home team star, ingratiating himself to the fans with his feel-good, family-friendly, hip-hop-adjacent he-man act. He literally wore the jerseys of local sports teams into the ring in whatever city he was in. But on this night in Manhattan, we got to see Away Team Cena. Nothing he could do would pacify the crowd—except lose. And, ever the showman, Cena gave the fans what they wanted.
After interference from Cena’s rival Edge, RVD pinned Cena and won the WWE Championship. Seconds after the pin, which was counted by ECW head honcho Paul Heyman, Cena quietly rolled out of the ring to cede the floor to RVD’s celebration. You can hardly see him; it’s as if he was swallowed up by the crowd when it erupted. And in a sense, he was. That night, he died and was reborn a vessel of professional wrestling.
John Cena had always been a pro wrestling prototype. He was actually called The Prototype in his days in the WWE developmental program. He looked like someone cast as a pro wrestler in a Hollywood movie. His physicality and the faces he made were so over-the-top that they nearly belied the whole enterprise. In his early prime, playing a rapping Boston thug with Reebok Pumps and a chain around his neck, Cena deliberately evoked the crass cartoonery of the Attitude Era, the recently bygone age that was the heyday of many wrestling fans in the Cena era. Much has been made of the fact that Cena carried WWE—and, by extension, the entire industry—through the fallow years between the Attitude Era and wrestling’s modern explosion. He did this, in large part, by simultaneously channeling the recent past and appealing to young kids who would become the audience of the next generation.
The Cena period is often called the PG Era because WWE cleaned up its act to change its TV rating from TV-14 to TV-PG and attract a wider audience (and a wider swath of sponsors). And Cena, despite the bathroom humor built into his freestyle raps, was the face of that shift. But it was necessary to replenish a fan base for a product that had alienated kids (or, more importantly, their parents) during the lewd ’90s, and Cena made it possible. He was despised by many longtime fans for this association, but he was the Moses of the coming WWE explosion, laying the groundwork for the mainstreaming of the industry in untold ways. Unlike Moses, though, in his retirement tour, Cena now gets to visit the promised land.
Cena’s Retirement Tour Winds Down
An NBA Six-Pack, Netflix’s WBD Pursuit, NFL Picks, and John Cena Finally Stops By, With Joe House and Matt Belloni
An NBA Six-Pack, Netflix’s WBD Pursuit, NFL Picks, and John Cena Finally Stops By, With Joe House and Matt Belloni
An NBA Six-Pack, Netflix’s WBD Pursuit, NFL Picks, and John Cena Stops By
An NBA Six-Pack, NFL Picks, and John Cena Joins
Cena’s Retirement Tour Winds Down
An NBA Six-Pack, Netflix’s WBD Pursuit, NFL Picks, and John Cena Finally Stops By, With Joe House and Matt Belloni
An NBA Six-Pack, Netflix’s WBD Pursuit, NFL Picks, and John Cena Finally Stops By, With Joe House and Matt Belloni
An NBA Six-Pack, Netflix’s WBD Pursuit, NFL Picks, and John Cena Stops By
An NBA Six-Pack, NFL Picks, and John Cena Joins
If nothing else, Cena was reliable, which is to say largely predictable, and to many fans that was unacceptable. At WrestleMania 22, he was booed loudly in a match against Triple H of all people, one of the most straightforwardly villainous stars of the era. When Cena made his shocking return from a torn pectoral muscle (months ahead of the scheduled recovery date) at the Royal Rumble in 2008, the diehard crowd at Madison Square Garden—largely the same folks who had been at the ECW One Night Stand match in ’06—went nuts. Because that, contrary to everything we thought we knew about him, was a real surprise. Cena’s yearslong feud with The Rock that headlined WrestleMania 28 and 29 was a passing of the torch from the previous generation to the current one, but more importantly it was Cena’s only big-time opportunity to work as the home team, with Rock leaning into Hollywood entitlement. It’s telling that over the past year, with Cena returning from his own Hollywood career to bid farewell to WWE, he’s finally gotten universal cheers.
No matter how the crowd responded to him over the years, Cena always got a reaction. When he got to pick his opponent for his SummerSlam 2013 title defense, he called the whole roster out onto the stage and polled the crowd about who he should face. None of the WWE “superstars” seemed to get more than an apathetic groan. That is, of course, except for the person he chose: Daniel Bryan (known outside WWE as Bryan Danielson), for whom the entire crowd erupted. It was a slightly bizarre moment in the context of pro wrestling; Bryan had just been in a storyline with Randy Orton, so he wasn’t exactly plucked from obscurity. Still, normal pro wrestling logic would dictate that Bryan should win a tournament to get that opportunity, or at least incite some sort of beef with Cena. Instead, WWE leaned on the functionality of John Cena, pro wrestling main character, the sort of meta wink that allowed him to teleport past kayfabe contrivance and land on the preferred destination. Cena lost the title to Bryan at SummerSlam, enduring many more boos in the process despite him elevating the fans’ beloved and beleaguered star.
Cena left after that match for surgery on a torn triceps and returned later that year; in 2014, he feuded with Bray Wyatt ahead of WrestleMania 30 as part of a storyline in which Cena was tempted to embrace the dark side, which he only finally did this year, during his retirement tour. The night after that WrestleMania on Monday Night Raw, the “Cena sucks” chants were born.
The duality of Cena became the defining metric of his career. Every entrance was a contest between fans chanting “Let’s go Cena!” and “Cena sucks!” But it would be naive to assume that there weren’t many people in every crowd chanting both sides. The chants were part of the fun, as was the fact that wrestling fans could both appreciate and despise Cena at the same time. His best feuds weren’t traditional babyface-vs.-heel setups, but rather ideological contests between competing candidates. The most notorious of this ilk was, of course, CM Punk, who represented indie wrestling, wrestling history, and generally everything contrary to the then-current WWE status quo. Punk had the more compelling case, but Cena had the establishment behind him. Announcer Michael Cole took to calling Cena “the most polarizing individual in WWE history” to lean into the crowd chatter.
Despite the venom that fans leveled at Cena, his role was irreplaceable. As I’ve written many times before, Cena’s most potent power was his ability to make the people standing next to him feel important. I once called it Trickle-Down Thuganomics: If you’re a diehard fan of Punk or Bryan, you probably don’t like John Cena, but the legitimacy he imbued upon them was undeniable. Cena’s matches against Punk, Bryan, and RVD (as well as AJ Styles and Kevin Owens)—the matches where he was forced into the Away Team role—are far and away his best.
When he beat Cody Rhodes at this year’s WrestleMania 41, Cena set the record for most world title reigns at 17, surpassing Ric Flair. Flair was the last iconic NWA champion, the end of a long line of world champions from the Territory Era who would travel around the country, going into the regional fiefdoms and taking on the local champs. Ironically, in a time of industry consolidation, this is the role into which Cena almost accidentally stepped. At his absolute peak—not coincidentally when he was getting the most vitriol from the crowd, just as Flair and Harley Race and all those who came before did when they marched into someone else’s home turf—Cena was the champion who would make your local hero look good by association.
Georgiana Dallas/WWE via Getty Images
So, it’s fitting that Cena’s last match will see him surrounded on the Saturday Night’s Main Event card by a bunch of up-and-comers. He’s wrestling Gunther for his last match, and Gunther is sort of the thematic distillation of every major Cena opponent. He’s a foreign menace, and a monster, but he’s also a technical wrestling purist and an indie wrestling icon. He’a funhouse mirror version of Cena, too: Fans are often caught between booing and cheering Gunther himself, even as he’s positioned as a bad guy.
The rest of the card will feature stars from NXT, WWE’s developmental brand, getting opportunities to shine against established WWE stars. Cena’s first moment on WWE television was him answering an open challenge from Kurt Angle that catapulted him from unknown to main roster player. (It took him starting to rap for him to actually catch on, but Angle gave him the platform.) No matter what you think about Cena—or thought, during his prime—his role as a tool for the evolution and growth of pro wrestling is undeniable. He’s provided a platform for many new stars to make their mark, just as Angle did for him. And aside from Gunther, on Saturday many fans who will tune in just for Cena will be exposed to Oba Femi, Sol Ruca, Je’Von Evans, Leon Slater, and other stars in the making.
Despite Cena’s postmodern utility in the modern wrestling world, he doesn’t have a lot of meta on the surface, unless you want to count his heavy-handed Instagram presence or him sometimes calling moves so loudly that the fans watching at home can hear him. But there is a note in his final run of what made his SummerSlam match with Bryan feel a little off. In a more traditional wrestling environment, Cena would retire unwillingly, by putting his career on the line in a big match and losing it. We all know that it’s staged, but it feels organic in wrestling logic. (His brief, organic, old-school feud over the last several weeks with Dominik Mysterio has been the most fun thing on his entire retirement tour.) And it creates drama in not knowing when, exactly the “Last Time” will be.
This is a more modern, curtain-pulled-back era of pro wrestling, and it’s certainly a more marketing-driven one, where an event this big has to be scheduled and promoted from the heavens. But it feels a little like throwing yourself a surprise birthday party. I appreciate the resolution of Cena’s impending end—if he does indeed retire and never comes back, he will be the first wrestler in the history of the world to do so—but I will still long for the drama of uncertainty. But that was never Cena’s strong suit.
Cena is all about certainty, self-assurance, and perseverance—and the perseverance has paid off. At One Night Stand in 2006, the crowd was entirely against him. For years, the “Cena sucks” contingent out-yelled the “Let’s go Cena” group. But this weekend at SNME, the fans will be 100 percent behind him. It’s entirely deserved. Cena is one of the all-time greats of the industry, and many will argue he’s the best of all time. To me, this perseverance is what distinguishes him, the enduring appeal and tenacity with which he approaches his craft.
When I was at my most anti-Cena, it was because he felt prepackaged and overhyped as the face of the business for much of his early run. But that insistence became prophecy. John Cena is, and was, the man the wrestling industry needed, the man everyone from CM Punk and Daniel Bryan to Cody Rhodes and Gunther needed to achieve their ultimate badge of legitimacy. Now, he’s the nostalgia act the fans need to put the previous era to bed.
I’ll leave the argument about whether he’s the best of all time for another day. But I think it’s fair to say that John Cena is the most important wrestler of all time. And on Saturday, he’ll say goodbye.
His famous catchphrase “You can’t see me” became a meme that will live on long after Cena has left the ring. It’s an iconic pro wrestling taunt, one of the real true innovations of Cena’s early act, and it too became prophecy. This weekend will be the last time we get to see Cena wrestle; when he throws his shirt into the crowd, every single person watching will reach out to try to catch it, hold onto it, and never let it go.
David Shoemaker
David Shoemaker is the host of The Masked Man Show With Kaz and the author of ‘The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling.’
