John Cena is about to retire, and as his time is up, I thought that my time might be now to take a look back over my thoughts about the career of Mr Hustle, Loyalty and Respect.
Considering that I have been a wrestling fan for the entire twenty-three years that John Cena has been a presence on WWE TV, and I was as excited as anyone by his 2002 debut “ruthless aggression” promo and subsequent battle with Kurt Angle, the question I keep coming back to as we near the end of his tenure is why do I not own a single piece of Cena merchandise? Seriously. I am an absolute mark for merch. All forms of merch. If you’re a band I like, an author I like, and especially a wrestler I like, and you sell merch, I will give you my money. You want examples? I own a Winston Smith face-mask the artist sold during the covid pandemic. I own a Linda Lindas wristwatch and a Descendents bowling shirt, and I don’t even bowl. As I write this right now, a lamp shines on my desk in the shape of one of Pennywise the dancing clown’s red balloons and I am being stared at by a Nick Cave shaped doorstop. From the other side of the room a Ghostface mask and a Phantom of the Opera mask hang alongside a Rey Mysterio lucha mask and the iconic V for Vendetta mask. Through the door I can see my Ghostbusters baseball hat hanging by the front-door next to one of many Aston Villa scarves I own despite only getting into football through the Women’s Super League in the last three years. When it comes to wrestling, of course I have my favourites, and have probably bought every CM Punk t-shirt and hoodie there is to own across WWE, AEW and his own Pro-Wrestling Tees merch in the last nineteen years. When I was a kid, I slept in those duvet covers they sold at Argos adorned by Hulk Hogan, the Ultimate Warrior, Jake The Snake, and the Macho Man. (Hell, I even unashamedly slept in them as an adult, when university living returned me to a single bed!)
The first wrestling show I attended live I came home with a giant foam hand printed with the name of Randy Savage. Bret Hart was the first champion I loved of my “new generation” of grapplers, and you better believe I wore his sunglasses covered face proudly on a t-shirt before turning my allegiance to Shawn Michaels and wearing his broken-heart logo instead. By the time the Austin era began, I was more interested in buying ECW bootleg videos from underground tape-traders to pick up the iconic 3:16 t-shirt, but I remedied that when I got older and now have one in my closet. The Rock suffered a similar issue to the 3:16 tee: a bland aesthetic tendency to go for plain white printing on a black t-shirt, only with less cool words than Austin 3:16. Know Your Role. Layeth the Smacketh Down. Just Bring It! Boots 2 Asses. I didn’t buy any Rock merch, but there was no doubt in my mind that I loved Dwayne Johnson. That attitude, those promos, the eyebrow… I knew that I would have bought something Rocky related if there had been anything I liked. The problem was simply that the stuff they were selling was, for me, no good. But I bought his shitty biography as soon as it came out, and all the Smackdown video games with his face on the cover. And I played as The Rock too, because he was one of my favourites.
I didn’t like Triple H. There, I said it. But not for the obvious reasons. I hated main event, WWE champion HHH not because of his in-ring selfishness, boring promos, and eventual burying of so many people to maintain his overlong title reigns, but because one of my favourite wrestlers back in the day was the Greenwich snob, Hunter Hearst Helmsley and it took me a very long time to accept that the days of that, much smaller, much more bouncy, and much more entertaining comedy wrestler, were over and “The Game” was what we had now. When Hunter was on top I didn’t buy a Triple H t-shirt, and even though I was a fan of HBK, I saw in their D-X years the end of the career of my childhood favourite and the emergence of this new, and in my mind not improved, version of HHH. I didn’t buy the merch because I didn’t buy the gimmick. I wanted my old childhood versions of Shawn and Hunter back, fighting alongside Diesel and Razor Ramon. But eventually I conceded that the wrestling world had moved on. I got on board with the NWO, was delighted when a “retired” HBK returned to the ring again, and though I still found “The Game” dull between the ropes, a few pieces of Evolution merch found their way into my wardrobe. And by the time he was “executive producer” and COO, Paul Levesque, I was throwing my support behind his product. My Triple H merch is the Netflix account I was going to stop paying for until they got the rights for WWE. It’s the WWE Network account I paid for over so many years just to watch NXT even when I’d stopped watching Raw and Smackdown.
I own Brock Lesnar t-shirts, Chris Jericho shirts, Eddie Guerrero shirts, shirts for the Shield and their component members, Mox and Rollins, and way too many Daniel Bryan t-shirts during his time in WWE. I got merch for Becky Lynch, Alexa Bliss, Sasha Banks, Paige, Ronda Rousey… I even got a Kofi-Mania t-shirt after he won the title. Fuck, let’s admit it: I even have Chris Benoit merch! The point is, WWE really doesn’t have to work that hard to take my money. So when one considers twenty-three years of John Cena, and the sheer tonnage of Cena merchandise the company has produced for him, it is astounding that there is not a single John Cena-related thing I have chosen to pay any money for in my collection other than having his face, alongside The Rock, CM Punk, and the Undertaker, on a WrestleMania 29 collectors cup I picked up at MetLife Stadium at WrestleMania itself. A cup I bought to commemorate the event, not John Cena.
And the reason for my lack of Cena merch is that, for me, John Cena represented everything that was wrong with WWE for nearly two decades.
I say “nearly” two decades, despite Cena being part of the company for longer, because I have already said I liked young John Cena when he was an exciting new prospect challenging Kurt Angle. Of all the jacked up Ohio Valley Wrestling clones that flooded the industry during that dark period of professional wrestling generica, Cena definitely had something about him that others did not. And when he started the “thuganomics” rap gimmick, I was a huge fan of his edgy rhymes and throwback aesthetics. His updated version of the old WWF logo was especially pleasing. I was totally on team Word Life. At least for a little bit. The problem remained that when the rhymes stopped coming, and the mic was put down, what Cena could do in the ring wasn’t particularly entertaining to me. It all felt a little bit basic, a little bit “rookie”. And in my snobby fan’s mind, as someone who has never stepped foot in a wrestling ring and has no right to criticise anyone’s ability who has, I deemed the fact that Cena was a completely “made in WWE” homegrown talent who had not perfected his craft on the indies, or around the world, to be the reason for his uninspired move-set. The wrestlers I liked were amazing technical wrestlers, or high fliers, or hardcore blood-drenched fighters. My least favourite style of wrestling was that of big, muscly men too physically limited to lift off their feet, too big to do tight scientific holds, and overly-reliant on feats of strength. After all, I knew that in wrestling “strength” was often an illusion, as much to do with what your opponent allows you to do to their body, and facilitates, as it was to do with muscle mass and power. Cena was charismatic, entertaining on the mic, but between the ropes, to me, he sucked.
And when he started his ascent, not only did I feel he was being rewarded for his mediocre in-ring game and cartoonish faces, but it coincided with the WWE’s decision to go PG. Suddenly the edgy F-U became an “attitude adjustment” and historic wrestling gold became a spinning children’s toy. It was not John Cena’s fault. He was just the man of the moment at a moment when WWE realised the real money was going to come from family-friendly advertisers and securing the next generation of fans by getting them while they were young. But for an older fan like me, the turn to the childish from a product you had fallen in love with during the attitude-era was a kick in the gut, and Cena was positioned, rightly or wrongly, as the figurehead for all that. As things dumbed down, Cena became even more cartoonish, with dumb gurning promos that felt like they were written for five year olds to understand. As WWE tried to pretend that the crowd battles of “let’s go Cena”, “Cena sucks” were a great sign that their champ “caused a reaction” wherever he wrestled, I was firmly on the “Cena sucks” side of the equation. Looking back, there isn’t a single main event feud involving John Cena I can honestly say I cared about, or even remember that much. They were just the predictable and boring end of a pay-per-view I was either watching out of habit with no alternative in those pre-AEW days, or because someone I actually liked was wrestling on the undercard and being held down by the boring main eventer.
People talk about his battles with Chris Jericho and Edge, only because there are desperate rumours that one of these current AEW stars might be Cena’s final opponent come December. And while the chatter about their history reminds me of those fights, and, thinking about it, I did enjoy them a bit at the time because of the way they exposed how much a large number of the older fanbase hated Cena, even these favoured battles left little imprint on the memory. The end result was always the same: Cena wins. Not because it was good writing and the story made sense, but because Vince McMahon loved his new champion and made him indestructible.
I guess I also remember “If Cena Wins We Riot”, and how good it felt to see Rob Van Dam beat Cena at One Night Stand in 2006. But I also remember how bitter it was for Van Dam to be stripped of the title so soon after due to a drugs violation. That bitterness wasn’t helped by the fact that he lost the belt to Edge, and ultimately Edge returned the title to Cena later that year. A revolution finally seemed possible, and then we were back at square one.
Cena gave me little to like, and was the figurehead for a company who felt to me, at the time, like the wheels were coming off. Even when times were good, and storylines improved or cool new wrestlers emerged, Cena’s part on each show seemed to only be to drag things back to the cartoonish and lame. Ultimately Cena seemed to me like someone for kids to like and adults to boo. “Let’s go Cena”, shouted the shrill voices of children, “Cena sucks!” us adult wrestling fans barked back.
But sometimes we need to see the world through someone else’s eyes to really appreciate it. As much as John Cena represented everything wrong with wrestling to me personally, he was the champion and main event figurehead of WWE at the time I got my wife to start watching wrestling. And just as I had accepted the weird reality of the equally cartoonish and lame Hulk Hogan as a thing when I began watching WWE as a kid because he was there, my wife knew no different. John Cena was a thing. He stood for good and he beat the bad guys. He overcame obstacles and he was funny on the mic. She loved his comedy chops and thought his more soap-opera storylines were the best part of the show. She accepted Cena’s “five moves of doom” the same way I had accepted Hogan’s big boot into a legdrop back in the day. It won matches and the hero wins. Through my wife’s eyes I began to see that a lot of what I hated about Cena had nothing to do with John Cena himself, but was to do with my own internal feelings about WWE and change. About a wrestling product that was evolving from what I wanted wrestling to be and was making a choice to consciously appeal to viewers who had different tastes than my own. Furthermore, she loved what she learned about John Cena as a person. About his charity work with Make-A-Wish. About his quirky personality. Cena was a weirdo, in a funny and relatable way. And he put on a show in the ring even if some of what he did was goofy. What wasn’t there to like?
My view of Cena’s wrestling didn’t change, but my wife’s investment in his main event matches got me watching that wrestling in a slightly different way. And though he wasn’t my favourite, my wife’s enthusiasm for him made it harder for me to not see the good that the “let’s go Cena” crowd were obviously seeing in their hero, even if it wasn’t my personal cup of tea. Instead of Cena being “everything that is wrong with wrestling these days”, I began to see him merely as someone else’s everything that was right. You like pop music, and I like punk, but we both like music. As Mick Foley once said, professional wrestling is like a three-ring circus. You might not like a gory and violent Mankind match, but if you wait a few minutes you’ll get a technical tag team match or a fun comedy match from someone else. There’s something for everyone. Hate clowns? Wait for the acrobatics. Cena didn’t suck. Cena just did something different than what I wanted, but he did it very well.
And I began to see that I quite liked Cena the person, whenever I saw him outside of clogging up a wrestling pay-per-view with a match I would have preferred to see someone else have. His role on Total Divas and Total Bellas reality shows as Nikki Bella’s boyfriend revealed him to be a funny guy I had a lot of time for. I especially enjoyed his developing friendship with Bryan Danielson on those shows. It became hard to hate Cena when I’d spent the previous evening being legitimately entertained by him. Then he stopped making shitty action movies and began to focus his non-wrestling career on comedies. Trainwreck, Sisters, Blockers, Daddy’s Home, The Suicide Squad… Somehow, the more he stayed away from the ring, I found myself watching more and more of the man I hated on a wrestling pay-per-view!
I’ve always joked that the best way to get me to like someone I hate in wrestling is to send them away for a bit. I’d jump off my seat and cheer my most detested wrestler if they appeared after an extended absence as a surprise entrant in the Royal Rumble. So when Cena moved on from WWE to an acting career, I wasn’t that surprised to see myself uncharacteristically marking out every time he popped back to WWE. Now that he wasn’t hogging the top spots in the company, those “five moves of doom” were like reacquainting with an old school friend. Annoying, but also enjoyable. A familiar sense of welcome nostalgia from a different time. And of course it helped that the overall WWE product had improved in the wake of AEW and eventual downfall of Vince McMahon. Become more adult-oriented again. Presented more like a real sport as it competed for eyeballs against MMA viewers.
And when Cena announced that 2025 would be his final year as an active wrestler, I realised that I even felt a little sad. I followed his journey to WrestleMania on the edge of my seat, rooting for my detested foe to win the Royal Rumble, even beat my “best in the world” favourite at Elimination Chamber. And when he kicked Cody Rhodes in the balls and sided with “The Final Boss”, although the storyline ended up derailing down the line, it was one of the most exciting moments wrestling had given us, at least in WWE, for years.
And so we come to the end of 2025, with the “never seen seventeen” and “last real champ” reaching the end of his career. As I write this we are about a month out from Saturday Night’s Main Event on December 13th, where Cena will face the winner of a tournament to determine his final opponent, and I have noticed over the last few months that, without any shame, I am on the “let’s go Cena” side of the chants these days. Although John Cena was never my favourite wrestler, and I actively hated him in the ring for many years, I have to credit him with carrying the company on his shoulders during those years of transition and decline. WWE had a clear marketing strategy to capture a new generation of younger fans and hold onto them into adulthood, and Cena was the guy who led that mission for two decades. Current viewing figures and the massive global success of WWE as a brand in 2025 shows us that he was hugely successful in accomplishing this. Furthermore, in that time Cena made himself a household name in much the same way that predecessors, Hulk Hogan, Steve Austin and The Rock did. Even before his acting career took off, Cena memes, “you can’t see me” gestures, and that iconic theme music were known globally, including by people who have never watched a minute of wrestling in their lives. Even now, as a teacher working in schools, when I tell students I like wrestling, the ones that don’t watch it at least know of a man called John Cena when they ask me if I know that wrestling is fake.
While a lot has been written about Cena failing to put over young talent, I am not convinced that was ever true. When I think of wrestlers from the Cena years that I do love, all of them seem to have feuded with Cena at one point in a high profile series of matches. Yes, they may have ultimately lost the feud, but there is little doubt that their time with Cena helped elevate them in the eyes of fans and bookers. A good example might be Matt Cardona. Yes, in WWE he was badly under-utilized and his association with Cena did not lead to the success Zak Ryder fans would have liked. But would we love him so much, and would his modern day success outside of WWE have happened without Cena shining his big goofy spotlight on Ryder? CM Punk is another huge example. Would Punk fans have chanted his name for a decade after his seeming retirement from professional wrestling had he not once memorably beaten John Cena for the WWE title? I know for me, a Punk fan since his days in Ring of Honor, that was the night I felt Punk had finally arrived. Likewise Bryan Danielson. We all remember WrestleMania XXX, and “Yes-lemania”, but would there even be a Yes movement without Danielson’s SummerSlam battle with Cena the year before? Not only did Cena give a platform to some of my favourite wrestlers, but Cena also never hid the fact that his wrestling style was not the sort of wrestling style fans like me tended to love. He was unashamedly what he was, and encouraged people to react against it. If they didn’t like it, do better. You want some, come get some. I wonder if a company like AEW would even exist today if it weren’t for people like me needing an alternative to the sort of wrestling WWE and John Cena were promoting at the time? No John Cena, no need for AEW?
All I know is that I still may not own any John Cena merchandise, but damnit, somehow, over all these years, I’ve become a Cena fan. I’ll be watching that final match in December as a fan, and with gratitude in my bitter old heart for everything that man has done for the wrestling business, even if I didn’t appreciate the bulk of it at the time.
Until next time…
DaN McKee
My book, Anarchist Atheist Punk Rock Teacher, is available from Earth Island Books and wherever you get your reading material. I’ve also got a short story in the new Hardcore Horror anthology.
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