Reported by Hunter Golden of WrestleView.com
On Thursday, April 26, 2007 at 1:32 AM EST

What People Can’t See About John Cena
By Hunter Golden
Wrestleview.com
April 26, 2007

As most of you know, I’ve been doing the Raw recap for the better part of the last three years now. In that time I’ve watched nearly every match John Cena’s had in front of a TV camera from February of 2005 until now. I’ve heard every argument imaginable regarding the guy and have received heaps of emails regarding my opinions of him. I guess I’ll go on the record for real.

Today, at this current moment in time, John Cena is the best Professional Wrestler in the world. It’s taken a while for him to get there, but let’s face it; no one’s hotter than Cena right now. His two match series with Umaga was perhaps the best back-to-back match series the WWE’s seen in the last five years. The HBK matches, especially the one on Monday Night, may have passed them. Take away the completely painful Champion of Champion’s feud from last October, and Cena’s been absolutely molten hot since July.

Even K-Fed, while it initially made me roll my eyes, made me swoon with memories of Lawler-Kauffman from the early 80s.

As to whether Cena’s ‘good’ or not, I find it virtually impossible at this point in time, regardless of ‘what you like’, to make a coherent argument that John Cena ‘sucks’. In the following, I’m going to outline a bunch of the absolute garbage arguments that seem to pollute the Internet regarding his apparent ‘suck-age’ in an attempt to bring some genuine sanity to the hysteria I read every Tuesday morning when I check my email.

What bothers me the most is the overly ridiculous standards that apply to John Cena and don’t apply to guys like Shawn Michaels, Triple H or other guys who are considered ‘good’. The best example of the double standard is the ‘he always does the five moves of doom’. Well……so does HBK. Inverted atomic drop, two clotheslines, body slam, top rope elbow, sweet chin music. Why don’t those standards apply to Shawn Michaels? How about the Rock or Ric Flair? Randy Savage or Hulk Hogan? Kenta Kobashi?

“Oh.. well, Cena works the same match every time."

Michaels doesn’t? Name another match outside of the WM 22 match with McMahon and the WM 23 match with Cena that Michaels didn’t work the generic “You work my reconstructed back, I come back and whip your @ss" match. Sure, Michaels has worked this style well over the years. There are some glowing examples that should be ‘how to’ guides of how to work the baby face in peril style. The Jericho match at WM XIX is an example of that. But honestly, name a match post-2002 that HBK hasn’t worked that style or gone into his own victory sequence.

Now, I’m not going to pick on Michaels here, but here’s a glaring example of a guy who’s considered ‘good’ doing the same stuff as the guy who is supposedly ‘bad’ but still being called ‘good’ because of what exactly?

What I like about John Cena is that he’s a wonderful break from the same old tried and true WWE main event style matches where everyone sort of runs through their move sets, trades 50 finishers, maybe add a run in or two here and there before hitting a few more finishers and heading home. A ton of people have emailed me and asked me why I thought the Royal Rumble 07 match with Umaga was so great.

What made it great was that Umaga never actually hit one of his big spots. Had this been 2004 or 2003, He’d have hit the running bump butt. He’d have hit the spike six times. He’d have hit the flying head butt through the table. But he didn’t. And that was the story. Cena, although completely overwhelmed, survived, barely, although it was glaringly obvious that had Umaga connected with any of those, Cena would have been cooked. Cena was one big move away from death, but at every turn barely avoided it. You got a genuine feeling that Cena survived the match, not that he won it. As a result, both Umaga and Cena got a rub from the feud. Now juxtaposition those matches next to the HBK match the other night, in which Cena dictated 70% of the offense but got beat. Now how the heck can you say those two matches were similar?

How many good matches is John Cena going to have to have before people stop crediting everyone else whom he’s working with for the quality of the contest and look at what all of those matches had in common with each other: John Cena was in them.

The one that really fries my hide though is the “Cena doesn’t do enough moves" crap. Wrestling ain’t about how much you do, it’s how you do what you do in the context of the story you’re trying to tell. Cena struggling to bench press the supposedly (but not really) heavy ring steps over his head is way better and more meaningful than 450 ‘realistic’ Kurt Angle German suplexes. John Cena yelling at his arm out of frustration because it’s not healing fast enough for him to do genuine damage to his opponent with a lariat is pretty darn good stuff. I’ll take that over 30 minutes of leg work to appease some self-righteous wrestling dork who lives in his mother’s basement. I’ve seen people reach the ropes in Cena’s STFU 5 times in a year of using it. Usually when he grabs it, it’s lights out. And people bitch about finishers not being respected. Cena’s over the top facial expressions bring more to a match than 60 different versions of a top wristlock would ever do.

And then there are the people who have the ‘solutions’ to ‘saving’ his career. Please, stop it. You can’t turn a guy whose already booed by half the crowd and cheered for by the other half. The people who boo him are committed to boo-ing him. They ain’t budging. The people committed to cheering him and buying spinner belts are committed to cheering him. They ain’t budging, either. Regardless of whether or not he’s a heel or a face, it doesn’t matter. If you turned him heel, the people who already hate him would bitch about how lame it was that the WWE were trying to appease fans and keep on boo-ing. The fans that cheer him would love the newly acquired bad-assery of it all. So how exactly would turning him work?

In addition, the ‘he needs to drop the belt’ stuff is kind of lame too. Who’s drawing more of a reaction than John Cena? Who’s drawn more genuine emotion, both good and bad, than John Cena in the last six years? John Cena’s been a launching pad for a lot of success for top-flight guys on Raw. Edge was flirted with in the main event scene for years, but not until his win over John Cena did he REALLY take off in the main event picture. Triple H was such a terrible baby face in 2002 that he just went back to his old act. Fans took to him so strongly as a face during his Feb-April 06 feud with Cena, that they were able to roll that momentum into a successful face run with DX. Umaga is a heck of a lot better off as a result of working against Cena and now HBK’s career as been beyond re-vitalized. Why? Because like the other guys, he’s working with John Cena.

I started recapping Raw in 2005 and have basically watched every single match the guy has had since then. I’ve watched a guy evolve and work a variety of programs with a variety of guys. Each month, he gets better. Each month, he’s incorporating something into that move set that apparently means so much. Each month, he’s topping the program he had previously. Each month, the guy who he feuded with last month starts really going somewhere. Each month I see a bunch of fans consistently crap on him because they supposedly know what they’re talking about and apply absurd standards to Cena that are conveniently ignored with regards to other ‘good’ workers.

It’s time to stop reading the IWC cue cards and thinking for yourselves a bit. Who knows, you might start enjoying wrestling again.