John Cena

[KB8]

I had Cena at 64 in 2016, and honestly, at this point I have no real idea what to do with that. I don't think I could ever drop him off the list, but he's not really an exciting candidate to me in the year 2021 and I feel like that book has closed (the pendulum might swing back by 2026, I suppose). He certainly has the output. His matches regularly feel huge just by virtue of his participation, and even in the more homogenised modern WWE he would stand out as being a legit attraction unto himself. His execution on stuff isn't the best and his strikes don't always look great, but for a guy who had the label of being a Superman bulldozer who'd run through opponents, it was always his selling and ability to take a shit-kicking that was most impressive. I think his selling could be sort of inconsistent, but at its best he was super compelling and his limb selling especially was great (and at this point I'm not as bothered by someone dropping limb selling as I used to be). He's a pretty great "little things" wrestler. Like in the Punk match from MitB, where he's getting progressively frustrated and at one point nearly gets in the ref's face before restraining himself. It wasn't a huge moment, but it was a character moment that doesn't really happen often in WWE today (or for a while). I guess he has a lot of dreck over the years as well and you couldn't pay me to re-watch at least a dozen of the Orton matches, but outside of his experimental PWG run for a minute there you could probably drop me into any period of his career and I'd find SOMETHING to enjoy. I should revisit some of his best stuff. He wasn't half bad. 

 

JOHN CENA YOU SHOULD WATCH:

v JBL (WWE Judgment Day, 5/22/05)

v Umaga (WWE Royal Rumble, 1/28/07)

v Randy Orton (WWE RAW, 8/26/07)

v CM Punk (WWE Money in the Bank, 7/17/11)

v Brock Lesnar (WWE Extreme Rules, 4/29/12)

[strobogo]

Very weirdly good match:

 

Cena vs Rene Dupree from Judgement Day 2004. It's only about 10 minutes, it is for the US Championship, and it's John Cena vs Rene Dupree, but it's very clear someone in the back worked very hard to lay out a match to make still green Cena look like he could produce a late 70s/early 80s Mid Atlantic style match. Especially notable as I don't think Rene has anything worth watch in WWE besides this, and both guys were still very green, and this type of match just wasn't happening in WWE anymore/at all. It's really one of the very few really solid matches from the Thuganomics period. 

[Clayton Jones]

This is a really great thread for such a divisive candidate. Even discussion that made me reassess Cena in both directions in ways I hadn't considered. Here's what's on my mind after my first round of watching Big Match John- for as great as he is at one off, spectacle, big fight performances, was he ever effective at building and escalating a feud? I'm sure this ties into the lack of longterm selling/continuity he's guilty of or the system is guilty of depending on your perspective, but Cena to me seems like he cooled off way too many potentially great feuds he was a part of over his career. That said I'm high on Cena overall but for someone who is touted as an all-time great American big match worker, this is a criticism that I think hurts him a good bit in my book.

[elliott]

14 hours ago, Clayton Jones said:

This is a really great thread for such a divisive candidate. Even discussion that made me reassess Cena in both directions in ways I hadn't considered. Here's what's on my mind after my first round of watching Big Match John- for as great as he is at one off, spectacle, big fight performances, was he ever effective at building and escalating a feud? I'm sure this ties into the lack of longterm selling/continuity he's guilty of or the system is guilty of depending on your perspective, but Cena to me seems like he cooled off way too many potentially great feuds he was a part of over his career. That said I'm high on Cena overall but for someone who is touted as an all-time great American big match worker, this is a criticism that I think hurts him a good bit in my book.

Umaga?

For the rest of it I would ask hOw much of this comes down to booking? Can you cite some examples of what youre thinking about? 

[Rah]

If we're going off promo then he's definitely someone who injected fuel into feuds as they carried on. Wrestling-wise I'm not sure, and would need to investigate his 2007-2009 work more, but I'd like to say not to the extent other greats would. It's really difficult to layer your matches when you're in the main event and you're expected to put on a particular style, though. Maybe Punk/Cena but that could easily be attributed to Punk if it's a one-off.

[Clayton Jones]

Yeah I realized after my post that you kind of do have to separate the promos and the matches for what Cena brings to the table in his feuds. And to use a Matt D talking point, if the promos don't translate into something tangible in the matches, I don't know how relevant it is to assessing him for a project like this. I think Punk and HBK rivalries are good examples of escalating matches and stakes. But in terms of heated feuds that built effectively over a series of matches, my guess would be JBL, HHH, and maybe heel VS Taker would be the best examples? But I'm going off of memory which is why I'm asking. I'll make an effort to get into the minutiae of some of these more to see if I'm overstating this point. But I feel like VS Owens, Wyatt, Rusev, Umaga, Lesnar, and probably more I'm forgetting, Cena fails to capitalize on the momentum he's so good at building initially.

[DMJ]

Its an interesting criticism because some of the other major feuds from that era - HHH/Batista, Jericho/Rey, Jericho/HBK, Taker/Edge, Orton/Christian, Orton/Bryan - definitely had that sort of match-to-match development. Of course, looking at those feuds, whether you're a fan of their work or not, there are some common factors in Jericho, Christian, and even Edge (allow me to step away from the tomatoes being thrown at me) all kinda being "deep thinkers" in the tradition of Mick Foley, envisioning their matches and rivalries as epics with chapters that build off each other. 

I'm not sure Cena has that same mindset, but even if he did, the booking of his storylines always felt a bit rushed. Like, the first match in the rivalry would be a singles match and then, by the second, it was some huge gimmick match and then, after that, some even bigger gimmick match. Sometimes they skipped right to the gimmick/stipulation match. For example, Punk/Cena at MITB isn't a gimmick match but it did have two stipulations (that Cena would be fired if he lost and Punk was wrestling the "last match on his contract") or Miz/Cena having their WrestleMania match with The Rock basically guaranteed to be involved (and he did, in fact, use his power as Mania Host to restart the match and make it No DQ/No CO). Its hard to build a series of matches when match #1 is No DQ, match #2 is a Last Man Standing, and #3 is a Hell in a Cell and your boss clearly wants big spectacle matches, not the slow boil of Steamboat/Flair.

[WingedEagle]

Is there a good list of Cena's worthwhile TV matches out there?

[Tetsujin]

His best tv matches are the ones worked like a big ppv match but in RAW (vs HBK, Punk, Rey, his best US title challenge matches...), so I'm not sure those count. I'd say he's a mediocre tv worker because he always did the exact same match with any random opponent and just filled time for the finishing sequence and/or overbooked finish of the week. Cena's case is all about big matches.

[Chess Knight]

I was an edgy anti-Cena teen and then came around on him being a great worker. Aaaaand now I'm kind of dropped on him again, but less. There are some cases (vs. Lesnar) where there's nobody else who could fill that role, and I do value that, but a lot of his better matches to me now usually give me the mind set of "Cena looks good here" and not "Cena looks incredible here." He has his definite heights where I do think he looks incredible but there are less of them - and less spread across a consistent basis - than I used to. Him being a tv match worker was brought up, but I also find so many of his ppv matches a mostly bleh nothing to watch. His 2010 for example - I really liked the first couple in the Batista feud but following that I don't know if I'd say there's one good Cena match on ppv until MITB 2011, other than the big Nexus tag which obv involved a lot of others. Then there's his 2007 which I still find undeniable. His super indy dream match worker thing around 2015 is cool for a couple matches but I thought became tiresome and overdone pretty quickly. He's really an Undertaker kind of case to me where the consistency isn't always there, the lows are lowwww, but the highs are very high and enough to at least put them up for thought (I'd think about Cena as a case much more than Taker).

 

Some Cena tv matches I remember thinking were worthwhile and have been maybe kind of forgotten(?):

vs. Big Show (Smackdown 2/27/09)
vs. Sheamus (Raw 5/17/10)
w/Evan Bourne vs. Sheamus/Edge (Raw 5/31/10)
vs. The Miz (Raw 5/2/11)
vs. Alberto Del Rio (Raw 9/3/12)

[Matt D]

Quote

“Best advice John Cena ever gave me was twofold,” Cody said (per Fightful). “The first thing was rather recently, I was going through a polarizing time in my career. We were getting, for the first time ever, ‘Let’s go Cody, Cody sucks’ type thing. He very eloquently told me to be honest with myself as to why a crowd would react that way. Look in the mirror and if you feel you’re doing the right thing, keep doing it.”

He continued, “The second piece of advice is if the crowd starts making any noise, in any capacity, start clapping their hands, start stomping their feet. If they want you to fight back, something, anything, you have to reward them. You have to give them something whether it’s just coming to your feet, or whether it’s just showing the intent that fits there has to be something.”

Rewarding the fans by timing your hope spots for the clapping up is a huge thing for me.

[EnviousStupid]

Just last week, WWE released a video of John reacting to his debut match with Kurt Angle and one of the big takeaways for me was how much he values a crowd's reaction. 

 

[Matt D]

Interesting Cena bit from the Regal podcast. He noted that Cena was one of the guys who watched every match. Even if he was signing things, he had a monitor nearby so he could watch while he was doing it and Regal said a lot of that was to know what everyone on the roster was doing so he could work his stuff into their stuff and vice versa.