The D'Amore Drop: It's time to talk about John Cena's final year

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The D'Amore Drop is a weekly guest column on Uncrowned written by Scott D’Amore, the Canadian professional wrestling promoter, executive producer, trainer and former wrestler best known for his long-standing role with TNA/IMPACT Wrestling, where he served as head of creative. D’Amore is the current owner of leading Canadian promotion Maple Leaf Pro Wrestling.

It feels like “last weekend was a huge one for pro-wrestling” could be the first line to almost every column I do, but last Saturday was the latest massive day/night for the business.

AEW presented its All Out pay-per-view in Toronto and then WWE launched its new ESPN era with Wrestlepalooza at Indianapolis, Indiana.

I was at AEW All Out last Saturday in Toronto — and what a great event it was.

The AEW world title match of Hangman Adam Page vs. Kyle Fletcher accomplished every objective a booker could have aimed for.

The match was fantastic, Hangman got a strong pay-per-view win to kick off his new title reign, and Kyle Fletcher — just 26-years-old, as AEW were very keen to remind us — had a star-making performance.

What stood out to me was how complete it all felt. This wasn’t about a shock result — I don’t know if anyone really expected Hangman to drop the belt — but it was about seeing a young talent rise to the occasion under the brightest lights. I’ve worked with Kyle in the past — he’s a great person along with an unbelievable talent, and he underlined just how big of a star he now IS.

As we discussed they might last week, AEW started off the pay-per-view with Adam Copeland and Christian taking on FTR.

Everyone knows that Adam and Jay (Christian) are closer than a lot of brothers and it’s also true that Adam has taken FTR — Dax Harwood (David Michael Harwood) and Cash Wheeler (Daniel Marshall Wheeler) — under his wing.

They didn’t just work hard for each other — they worked incredibly well together. It was a super-heated even to kick off the pay-per-view with.

Then then Beth — Adam’s real-life wife — came in and the place went insane. The pop she got was massive and she looked like a million bucks. That was a truly cool and special moment, one of those things people will remember coming out of All Out.

In a bit of a shocker, AEW put the women’s belt on Kris Statlander, who’s been pegged to be a massive star for many years. So it’ll be interesting to see where things go from here with her reign and what they do with Toni Storm, who is a generational talent and couldn’t be more over.

That, plus last night’s announcement that AEW is introducing women’s tag-team titles, underlines just how vibrant the women’s scene is in AEW.

Since the beginning of this weekly column, I’ve advocated for a "wait and see" and "give WWE time to tell their stories" approach to judging John Cena’s final year as a pro-wrestler. And I stand by everything I’ve said this year — John’s work, no matter what he was asked to do, has been outstanding.

He’s 48 years old. He’s done incredible work, including his best match in well over a decade against Cody Rhodes at SummerSlam. He’s been so much better than anyone could've realistically asked of a near 50-year-old.

That said, with five appearances and, who knows, maybe only three matches left of this retirement year, it certainly seems like the farewell tour has not been what we’d have hoped for.

There was been some great moments — him and Jey Uso as the last two of the Royal Rumble, the shocking heel turn, some of his heel promos, his acting skills illustrating he was torn about treating the fans so badly, the SummerSlam match — but there’s been a lot that just didn’t hit. And I’m not just talking about the heel turn that was abandoned with a throwaway line during a promo.

I understand fans being upset with the way John was squashed by Brock Lesnar last Saturday. It was a near repeat of the match they had a decade ago, but that match set up Brock as the monster Cena needed to slay. This latest one-sided beating, on the other hand, did nothing for Cena.

Now, there’s something to be said for not always having formulaic matches. In boxing, MMA and "real" combat sports you get one-sided victories all the time, even in massive, supposed 50-50 fights, and that can work in wrestling.

I just don’t see what Saturday’s easy win for Brock accomplished that couldn’t have been done without using up one of the few John Cena matches we have left.

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I thought the Seth Rollins and Becky Lynch vs. CM Punk and AJ Lee match was perfectly booked.

AJ looked amazing, especially considering she’s been off for a decade.

Bronson Reed (he’ll always be “Jonah” to me) and Bron Breakker have been booked extremely strongly since April and are really filling the role of monsters.

Both of them are so believable in these roles — it just works on every level. I am really enjoying what they are doing, along with Paul Heyman.

I love AJ Styles personally and, professionally, I will always say the guy walks on water. I just don’t see why John Cena vs. Styles — especially in a match set up by a tweet — is what anyone wants for one of Cena’s final-ever matches.

It will be a fine match, no question.

But … why now?

Iyo Sky has already had a half-dozen classics this year, and she had yet another “match of the night” for the WWE Women’s Title against Stephanie Vaquer at Wrestlepalooza.

In terms of sheer consistency of having the best matches on what are always loaded cards, I can’t think of anyone — woman or man — who’s doing what Sky is doing in 2025.

She is amazing.

Vaquer, clearly, has all the potential in the world … and WWE is extremely aware of it.

Winning a world title doesn’t make you a guaranteed star or headliner these days, and the new champ has work to do. But so far she’s not put a foot wrong since joining "Raw" in April.

In one of my very first Uncrowned columns, I wrote that Jey Uso had to win the WWE World Championship at WrestleMania or he’d be stuck as a B+ player forever.

He did beat Gunther at ‘Mania but his reign was over in 52 days.

Seth Rollins is already at 54 days as champ and counting.

No one can take the fact that Jey was a world champion away from him, but I can’t help but feel he has a lot more to give WWE than they are currently seem to want from him.

Good on ESPN’s Andreas Hale for calling it how he saw it — giving WWE’s first-ever ESPN show, WrestlePalooza, a “C” grade.

I don’t understand why that was controversial either.

Does anyone really think WrestlePalooza was as good as the magnificent two-day SummerSlam last month? That was an “A,” and WrestlePalooza, as fun as it was, wasn’t near that level.

And isn’t “C” a passing grade anyway?

As a kid who was more street smart, I’d walk out of exams with my “C” grades like I was Ric Flair arriving at the Great American Bash ’85!

Following on from that thought: WWE hasn’t done a bad PLE all year. Including AAA, NXT and the two-day 'Mania and SummerSlams, they’ve done 16 PLE’s in 2025 and counting. And that in and of itself is so impressive.

They are machine gunning out super-card after super-card at a rate no other company ever has.

Yeah, WWE has an all-time roster of super-talented performers and — as fans have seen on "WWE Unreal" — a small army of bookers, writers and match agents, but no promotion — ever! — has been expected to produce this much at such a ridiculously relentless pace.

It is very hard to pique fans’ interest every three weeks and the WWE creative team and talent are meeting this near-impossible ask extremely well.

At TNA Slammiversary 2020, we pushed the idea of big surprises to drive pay-per-view buys. Fans were wondering which recently released WWE stars might show up. And we delivered — the Good Brothers, Eric Young, EC3 and Heath Slater had been signed and the Motor City Machine Guns returned and Rich Swann returned.

But there’s a cost to promising surprises. The moment you tell people to expect one, it can’t possibly hit as hard when it happens. Paul Heyman showing up with Brock Lesnar would have been a much bigger shock if fans hadn’t already been primed to wait for a surprise.

Part of the letdown with WrestlePalooza was that it was hyped as a near-WrestleMania-level show, but with only a few weeks of build, it was always going to be tough to meet those expectations. And when WWE added the “surprises coming” line, it raised the bar even higher.

There was a big debate on Twitter this week about deathmatches — ultra-violent matches involving weapons and crazy spots.

I have a nuanced view here. There’s long been a phrase in wrestling: Red makes green.

The Shiek — the original one, Sabu’s uncle — was a massive draw because he was known to have bloody matches. Abdullah the Butcher used forks on his opponent’s foreheads 40 years ago. Freddy Blassie did so much blood he was called the vampire.

I am not going to bury deathmatches, if you excuse the phrase. I think that they can be done well and tell stories. But, at the same time, just like any type of match can lack storytelling and just be plain bad, that’s also true of deathmatches.

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WWE rightly gets praised for its in-arena production — so much that we can take for granted how much goes into these shows.

Wrestlepalooza looked incredible on TV.

Likewise, I was at AEW All Out all day, and the crew had only a matter of hours to get that arena ready.

They were hustling until literally minutes before the doors opened to let fans in (remember it was an early show time). It was an amazing thing to see — what a team.

MJF is a generational talent. Just look at what he did this past weekend. Friday night, Sept. 19, he walked into Arena México for CMLL’s 92nd Anniversary Show in Mexico City. He put his CMLL World Light Heavyweight Championship on the line against Místico in a title vs. mask match — and lost.

Then, less than 24 hours later, at AEW All Out in Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena, he wrestled Mark Briscoe in a brutal Tables ’n’ Tacks street fight. Two nights, two totally different settings, and he did the honors both times.

And it doesn’t hurt him one bit to lose twice in 24 hours. In fact, he walked out of both matches with more even more heat than he walked in with. Very few can do that.

Briscoe getting the big win in a violent match vs MJF at AEW All Out was very interesting. I’m excited to see how he can capitalize on this.

And, of course, I saw the tweet about him wanting to face TNA star Nic Nemeth — he called him by his old WWE name Dolph Ziggler — in Maple Leaf Pro-Wrestling.

Yeah, let’s do that!

Maple Leaf Pro-Wrestling returns on Oct. 27 at the New Age Experience Center, Toronto, for REENA RUMBLE — a big event to benefit REENA, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting individuals with developmental disabilities.

I can confirm that WWE legends Matt Hardy and Carlito, AEW star Colt Cabana, lucha sensation Microman, and reigning MLP Women’s Canadian Champion Gisele Shaw have already signed for the show.

This will be another “digital house show” event, where we’ll put the full event on our YouTube channel shortly after the show.