A Farewell to John Cena’s In-Ring Career and the Last Pieces of My Childhood
Looking Back at One of the Greatest Wrestling Careers of All Time
Well, it’s official. John Cena’s final opponent is set. In just a few days he’ll step in the ring for the last time, against one of the most deserving guys on the roster, “The Ring General” Gunther. I’m not here to break down their match though. Just know I’m genuinely thrilled for both of them and excited for whatever the outcome is.
I’m here to say thank you to the greatest professional wrestler of my lifetime, and to spell out what his twenty year run has meant to someone who grew up with him and a grown man still trying to hang on to that inner child.
According to a study by The Insights Family, “Over twenty percent of kids in the U.S. pick their favorite sports team before they turn seven.” When I was that age, I only cared about one sport, and that was pro wrestling. The year was 2004, which made choosing a favorite wrestler pretty easy.
It was the height of the Ruthless Aggression Era, and a rising John Cena was stepping into the space Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin once held as the faces of the WWE.
That same year, Cena won his first singles title, made his WrestleMania debut by beating Big Show, and main evented his first set of pay-per-views. Meanwhile, seven year old me was in the back of a second grade classroom in Charleston, Missouri, chewing on a Spearmint Chapstick and counting down the hours until Monday Night RAW started.
By the time the company was moving from the Ruthless Aggression Era to the PG Era, Cena had become the guy. His “Dr. of Thuganomics” heel persona was finished because he had gotten too popular, or in wrestling terms, too over to boo anymore. It’s the same thing we’re seeing with Dominik Mysterio right now, where the crowd decides for you instead of any creative team.
Cena went from poorly impersonating Vanilla Ice to free-styling about the boss’s hot daughter to delivering promos that genuinely inspired millions of young fans. That cleaner, cable friendly shift only worked because he was the face on the posters. Without him, the transition would have fallen apart.
This new era pushed his career into a whole new lane built around the Never Give Up mentality and weekly promos that often sounded like a Sunday preacher or a politician, yet somehow it all worked. I hung onto every word he spoke.
Cena wasn’t handed the top spot. He worked his way into it. Or as he put it: “I would say luck and preparation. I didn’t dominate WWE when I first started, it was a slow process. I wasn’t labelled the golden child from day one. It’s been a very long road.”
Once he crossed into full time main event status, Monday nights became must see TV because you knew RAW would open with his infamous theme song (you know the one), and that shiny spinner belt catching every camera flash in the arena. Growing up in a low income family, we could never afford pay-per-views, what they now call PLEs, so the only strategy was knowing exactly who to avoid at school on Monday if you didn’t want last night’s results spoiled before the show.
The truth is, Cena was often one of the only things I had to look forward to at home. His music hit, the crowd roared, and nothing else mattered for a couple of hours. Plenty of kids around the world felt that same jolt of hope every week.
Every once in a while (not often), Cena would lose a match, and Monday night would open with some promo from him reminding you that failure is part of life and that giving up is never an option. He didn’t just sell catchphrases, he lived them. And for kids like me, it really stuck.
“I spent five minutes last night feeling sorry for myself, and right after that, I began to move forward,” he once said after losing to Sheamus. “That is what’s difficult about failure, the disappointment is on you… but failure has made me who I am today. Failure gives you two choices: you stay down, or you get up!”
When I was fourteen, I was lucky enough to see John Cena wrestle in person in Las Vegas. That night ended up being one of the most important in WWE history, the night of CM Punk’s “pipe-bomb.” I wrote about it here. It was the only time I ever got to see him wrestle, and I’m grateful that I caught him on a night that became so legendary.
My fandom and his career ended up following oddly similar paths. Things started winding down in the ring for both of us. Cena moved toward Hollywood, and in my own way, so did I. As his work picked up, he spent less time wrestling. As my career in television and film took off, I invested less time into wrestling. We both drifted away from it in our own ways, and now it feels like one of the last pieces of my childhood is disappearing right in front of me. Even so, I still have a few pro wrestling-related projects of my own in the works.
Last year, when Cena announced his farewell tour, I had a reason to fully tune in again. Every appearance meant one more closer to the last. Every match felt a little more important. In January, I felt like a kid again, tuning in to every new episode of RAW. The show’s quality may have dipped, but the shift from one era to the next was still carried by the same familiar face, and Netflix happened to benefit from timing more than anything else.
A lot like the music industry, pro wrestling has a real retirement problem. Money talks, and “one more match” usually turns into four or five more at least. Wrestlers rarely know how to hang it up, and with Saudi Arabia money in the mix, the pressure to come back is more lucrative than ever. But I genuinely believe John Cena will be a man of his word and actually retire, from in-ring work.
He has talked about the legitimacy of this decision several times in recent weeks:
In just a few days, I’ll watch John Cena march to the ring for the final time, eyes already welled up. More than twenty years of wrestling memories will end on December 13, at Saturday Night’s Main Event.
His feelings about retirement mirror the way a lot of us feel about our own childhoods and that constant urge to hold on to whatever pieces of it are still hanging around.
In his interview with Jimmy Kimmel, he puts it plainly: “I wanted to give people a heads up so people could process whatever closure they want… If you’re one of those people that think ‘you’re never going to retire,’ after the thirteenth is going to be weird for you because you won’t have the closure you want.”
Sure, there are still a handful of stars from his generation still going like Randy Orton, R-Truth, Chris Jericho, Kofi Kingston, but none of them compare to “Super Cena.” He is the LeBron of our era, the Serena Williams, the Tiger Woods, the Michael Phelps. The list goes on. His retirement feels like the closing of my childhood, one more G.O.A.T. walking away from another sport I love.
In another interview, he said that his post wrestling plans are simple: “to live useful.” From most people, that answer would sound like such a cop out, but from someone like Cena, it lands differently. If there’s one thing you should know about him, his life outside the ring and off set goes far beyond just living useful. He might be one of the most generous celebrities alive.
One of my favorite things about John Cena is his work with the Make-A-Wish Foundation. I know he’s not retiring from charity work, I just want to highlight this side of his career because it matters. Cena holds the Guinness World Record for the most wishes granted, with close to seven hundred of them. Here is one of my favorite videos of him ever, and fair warning, you might need some tissues:
I can go on and on about the wrestler John Cena was. The memories are endless, and if you grew up in that era, you know exactly what I mean. But I won’t do that to you, not today. Someday, I hope my path crosses with his, because it would mean getting to thank the man who helped shape my childhood and pushed me toward the man I eventually became.
To wrap this up, here are my five favorite matches from Cena’s in-ring career:
Maybe that’s the real gift of this whole farewell tour. It let me feel like that kid again, even if only for a few months. What are your favorite moments from John Cena’s WWE career? Leave a comment.
What a career man! A staple of our childhood. Superman