From the moment it was first announced, John Cena's final run was asked to be too many things at once.
There’s something about an athlete announcing their retirement that offers a new appreciation for their accomplishments. It’s a moment to reflect on their career, and what they mean in the grand scheme of their chosen sport’s history.
For a name like John Cena, who spent more than 20 years in the WWE machine, his place in history hasn’t ever been called into question. He’s a guy who was on the chopping block early in his WWE tenure, redefined himself multiple times, and ultimately paved a path for future WWE lifers to follow. He’s an all-time great and a transcendent talent who put the company on his back when WWE was absent a rising megastar.
Cena preached hustle, loyalty and respect, a modern day twist to Hulk Hogan's saying your prayers and taking your vitamins. Yet despite his genuine positivity, Cena wasn’t met with the same universal support the Hulkamaniacs offered decades ago.
The Attitude Era hangover lingered through the early days of Cena’s rise to fame, as he evolved from the ruthless "Doctor of Thuganomics" to the consummate superhero who fans loved to hate. In his “Fruity Pebbles” era, Cena offered a kid-friendly approach the older generation flatly rejected. With each lengthy title reign paired with a new color-schemed shirt, his famed jorts, and positive reinforcement for the younger generation, he was WWE’s ultimate good guy, both in the ring and in the community. Despite that, each night featured the same call and response with conflicted fans roaring against each other — “Let’s go Cena!Cena sucks!” — regardless of the 17-time world champion’s opponent.
But in recent years, as Cena wrestled fewer matches and appeared on television less, there became a certain appreciation for his overall body of work.
That’s why the reaction was so strong when Cena appeared in Toronto at Money in the Bank last year to surprisingly announce his retirement from professional wrestling.
It seemed like the audience in unison that night recognized the scope of what was transpiring. As he shared the milestone moments he planned for his swan-song run — his final appearance at each of WWE’s "big four" premier live events, his final WrestleMania, and eventually, his final match — his announcement was met with a chorus of boos, for once not directed at Cena, but at the concept that his career could be over.
Most legendary wrestlers aren’t necessarily afforded one more match. They typically hang on far too long, desperate to capture the magic that followed them through the decades. Injuries are often the culprit, while others never officially hang their boots up — despite the number of “retirement matches” they may indulge in. But Cena is different, and perhaps that’s why expectations sped wildly out of control as the calendar turned toward 2025.
Cena has spoken at length about how he felt himself slowing down and refused to be a guy who simply showed up to cash a check. Falling short of expectations wasn’t an option for a guy like him — and by retiring on his terms, that’s what he more or less told the world. He could still go in the ring, and fans were finally ready to embrace Cena for who he’s shown to be over the span of his career.
If this were five or six years ago, maybe we do get a cookie-cutter final year of Cena’s career. It’s what the fans essentially demanded of this run. Give us the "Super Cena" we’ve accepted and grown to love. Give us the quirky one-liners, the verbal jabs at top stars, the handshakes and hugs, posing with fans wearing “Cena Sucks” shirts. Give us the nostalgia matches with CM Punk, The Miz, Rusev, Randy Orton, Sheamus and Roman Reigns. Give us matches with callbacks that simply can’t happen anymore — like trotting Chad Gable out in Kurt Angle’s place for a nice reminder of that infamous “Ruthless Aggression” performance.
But it’s 2025, and this is a different WWE.
At first, as each date and each match came and passed during the early stages of Cena’s retirement tour, they offered something unique and different. His final Royal Rumble was legitimately shocking, with Cena finishing a close second after Jey Uso’s surprising elevation into the WrestleMania 41 title picture.
Then the Elimination Chamber shook the professional wrestling universe and set the bar unsustainably high for what the final nine months of Cena’s career could look like. He won the match, punched his ticket to WrestleMania 41 against Cody Rhodes, and took a molotov cocktail to the establishment by turning heel alongside Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Travis Scott.
But Cena’s transition would be heel in behavior only, not in appearance.
While fan theories ran wild about this new trio, what it might mean for Cena’s short-term future, and what new look Cena might sport, he maintained virtually everything else about his character as if nothing had changed. Same entrance music, same jorts, and what appeared to be the same planned, brightly colored t-shirts, custom designed for each stop along his retirement tour.
The build to WrestleMania 41 and his actual match against Rhodes fell well short of expectations. The classic many expected — and a reappearance from The Rock — never happened. Scott made his presence felt, much to the chagrin of many, impacting the conclusion to the main event and setting the stage for a nonexistent future stint in WWE. The rapper's hapless WrestleMania run-in would be his final appearance alongside Cena during this retirement tour.
This sequence was viewed at the time as perhaps a blip on the radar. Surely, WWE would piece together Cena’s run to make it as memorable as fans expected.
Yet for such a strong showing early in his retirement tour across matches like the Royal Rumble and the Elimination Chamber, the ensuing few months never quite landed, with each one trending further in the same direction as his WrestleMania appearance. As Cena moved from Randy Orton to R-Truth to CM Punk, the novelty of the heel act swiftly went stale. A wrestler who deserved the absolute best send-off had finished more than half of his final year with a series of relatively forgettable feuds and matches.
And then came SummerSlam. Cena turned face again, he and Rhodes put on one of the best performances of his career — and suddenly, the all-time great was redeemed. With the exception of an inexplicable Brock Lesnar squash match at Wrestlepalooza, each step of Cena’s final four months have been exceptional.
He’s elevated young talent, like feuding over the Intercontinental Championship with Dominik Mysterio. He passed on knowledge to rising stars like Logan Paul. He was able to get in the ring one more time for a United States Championship Open Challenge with Sami Zayn, who Cena once upon a time helped kickstart his career on the main roster. And he had one final showdown with the legendary AJ Styles.
His matches against Rhodes at SummerSlam and Styles at Crown Jewel stand against almost any of his outstanding career. On one hand, Cena’s ability to suddenly hit the gas and pour everything he has into the final months of his career is remarkable and created exactly the type of lasting memories we expected. But it also leaves more to be desired.
If this is what he’s capable of, why wasn’t the plug pulled on the failed heel gimmick earlier? And how much better could matches against guys like Punk, Orton, or any number of stars he mixed it up with have been if they just stuck with what worked for the past 20-plus years?
The slow, methodical and devious nature of his early matches were the opposite of his later run. Cena can still move with pace. He can still take huge bumps. He can still piece together matches that, despite having no stakes involved in some of them, capture the emotions and intensity that have made his retirement tour feel alive over this final stretch of the year.
It’s hard not to feel like half of Cena’s last run never quite reached its potential. I guess that’s what we’ve grown to know and love about professional wrestling — it’s totally and completely unpredictable, and sometimes the business tries things that just don’t work. Perhaps none of this is reviewed so harshly if Cena were building to a singular retirement match rather than a year-long retirement tour. The tour put every individual stop under the microscope, compared from one to the next. Simply building to one final match would have created less buzz and therefore less pressure along the way.
Less pressure seems the opposite of what Cena strives for, though. Accept failure, move on to the next big moment, and try to make it as incredible as you possibly can is how he seems to operate.
All that's left to do now is exactly that. On Saturday, Dec. 13, Cena will add a footnote to his illustrious career with his final match in Washington, D.C. against “The Ring General” Gunther.
Cena has been clear that there is no coming back for another final match after this one. There is no return to WrestleMania and no paycheck big enough to bring him back from retirement. On Saturday, Cena’s final sprint to the ring will arrive. And on a retirement tour that brought the unpredictable, odds feel like we’ll get what Cena deserves — a send-off worthy of one of WWE’s all-time greats.
Category: General Sports
