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| The Champ is here and it's his birthday Photo Credit: WWE.com |
Yes, the dorky hee-haw faces he makes when he's supposed to be serious are annoying. He's also got a noticeable shift in gears when it comes to his actual matches, more of a function of his opponents than anything else. That being said, the biggest problem most people, myself included, have with him is the way he's presented. He wins matches all the time, but then again, if you went to work and your boss gave you Employee of the Month all the time, would you take it in stride, or would you speak up and say that someone else should get it? Both are viable options, but it's human nature to want people to praise you all the time. Therefore, I'm not sure I'd blame Cena if the office wants him to win all the time.
That being said, if he didn't win all the time, or more specifically, if he didn't win all the time despite the narrative being that he's always overcoming the odds, would he be beloved by more people than what he is now? It's hard to do mass psychoanalysis, but it's also hard to imagine that a guy who does what is mostly best for the company on the whole as well as the fans would get the kind of backlash that he's gotten ad nauseam over his entire career.
By all accounts, he's a charitable human being; no one in WWE grants more wishes than he does. He's apparently a great coworker. The only people I've heard badmouth him have been Ken Anderson and Michael Tarver. Think about it; out of everyone who has ever worked for WWE, the only people who have badmouthed him were two assholes, one who got fired for being a sloppy wrestler and brownnose and the other who acted as if he was in need of psychotropic drugs to treat a mental disorder after he was canned. He's allegedly been an advocate for guys like Zack Ryder and Daniel Bryan.
And yes, that "gear shifting" problem he has in his matches? Well, it turns out that when he shifts his gears into the "good" direction, he's one of the best wrestlers on the planet, pure and simple. As annoying as it can be to see him just go all Superman over guys like Jack Swagger and The Big Show, when he's in there in a marquee setting, he's bringing the goods. We've seen that with Umaga, Shawn Michaels, Batista, CM Punk, Mark Henry and even The Rock at WrestleMania this past year.
Speaking of The Rock, Cena spent the entire year being called every homophobic slur that was allowed to be mentioned on a PG-rated program and ended up being served up to lose in the main event of the biggest Mania ever. Now, he's being served up to feed Brock Lesnar a month after. I know wins and losses don't matter in the way that most think they do, but one might think that if Cena had a problem with making these returning guys looking good, then he wouldn't have segued right into Lesnar after losing to Rock. Backstage conjecture is just that, conjecture, but at the same time, so many stories have come out about guys who are obsessed about their winning percentages, especially at the top of the card, that it's almost unusual to see Cena, the top guy in the company, offered up for the slaughter. It almost presents him as a company man, which upon further review, could foreshadow some kind of character shift in this reality age. For now though, I'm not even sure what it means.
Still, whatever the metric, Cena doesn't deserve the shit heaped upon him by many people. Granted, he's not above reproach either, but no one is. I also am not saying people have to like him, but some people pass off their preferences as fact as to why he should be shunted down to the dark match level forever, and I just hate that line of thinking. The man is one of the best performers in the business today, and hopefully, it'll take more than it just being his birthday for people to see that.
