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| It's never in doubt, is it? Photo Credit: WWE.com |
No, seriously, John Cena is the absolute worst wrestling character on the scene right now. Yes, this includes Brooke Hogan and her meathead father, but they’re annoying tops. There’s no way Hogan comes out of retirement to risk shattering every bone in his body to beat Matt Morgan, Austin Aries, and Bully Ray in a three-on-one handicap Yappapi Strap match, which is pretty much the equivalent to what Cena has done to Dolph Ziggler over the last two weeks in two well-done but headache-inducingly booked matches.
Cena’s superman booking is nothing new. Obviously, he’s been “overcoming the odds” for almost a decade now, being the WWE’s answer to the 1927 New York Yankees if the Yankees were allowed to take pills that allowed them to stop aging and dominate the American League until World War II started, while the rest of the league was sprayed with healthy doses of Lou Gehrig’s Disease in weaponized form before every season began. Even when he lost matches, he couldn’t do it in a way that made anyone believe the person beating him was on his level. Take for example every single match he’s ever wrestled against CM Punk.
But that’s not it, man. If a wrestler wins an inordinate amount of times, even against an up-and-comer, there’s always some sort of redemption within the lopsided feud if the guy on the squashing side is entertaining. Then again, the guys who always won didn’t have the same panache as the ones who were naturally entertaining, with the lone exception that I can think of being Steve Austin. The Rock lost so many times, but no one really noticed because the guy oozed charisma, at least for the audience back then. That’s why it’s so baffling that him as a part-timer away from the business for so long makes him so dominant, but really, as reference from last night’s He-Man Woman Hater Club musical performance, that’s the least of his problems.
Cena, I’d argue, is only entertaining if you’re a fifth-grader with socially backwards parents. His go-to jokes involve poop, and then when someone else stoops to his level, he retorts with sing-songy replies about how they’re not raising the discourse. He only drops the misogynist, homophobic façade when he has to hawk pink merchandise for a questionable organization that may or may not be doing good work on the cancer research front.
The worst part is that everything his opponents say about him is true. He gets so many mulligans from management that it’s almost like whenever a new GM is installed, he shoves a Game Genie in whatever orifice it’ll fit and enters a code for infinite lives. There is no goddamn reason why he should keep getting title shots or main events or sole spotlight, but he does. Management agrees with him too. He’s the spoiled rich kid who gets a job thanks to legacy and then is given all the advantages. In fact, he’s a more talented version of Tim Tebow. Or is Tim Tebow a homeless man’s John Cena? Yeah, I think the latter’s more the case here.
None of this is news. I could have written this at any point in the last year. Within the backdrop of the last three episodes of RAW, it has become unbearable, even by Cena’s awful standards. If their desire was to build Dolph Ziggler into a main event player, then man, I want some of the drugs they’ve been doing in Stamford. Dumping poop on the guy and following it up with two losses where he hit Cena with everything he had and then some before falling to one, just one of Cena’s finishers, is the exact opposite way to do that. If I were someone who took wrestling just a bit too seriously, I would doubt whether Ziggler could hang with Santino Marella, let alone Cena. Or worse yet, I would seriously wonder who would be left that could give Cena a good fight where he could conceivably lose who didn’t just pop in the door twice a year tops. What incentive do I have to watch the show if the main character arc is so predictable?
Someone should clue in everyone at Titan Towers that effective stories have conflict and at least should arise suspicion that the main character might not make it out successfully. The underdog story trope doesn’t work if no one’s rooting for him, and the only people you’re serving by having the guy on top always win convincingly are the people that you already have watching. Granted, it’s great to concentrate on giving your audience what they want, but there are ways to go about it that will make it more than just an empty, Pavlovian exercise.
So yeah, it doesn’t matter if Cena grants the most wishes ever or if he gave that shirt to the girl with Down’s in the front row or if he even bends over backwards to make sure as many of his fans get to experience him in the best way possible. That’s great, but why should that mean the rest of us have to sit through a show that’s basically a three-hour blowjob to the man, no matter how petulant he acts? As a person, I have no idea how to process Cena, but as a wrestling character, the man is the most awful thing going right now. The last three weeks of RAW have been the nadir of this in the last year, and it’s killing my buzz for an otherwise enjoyable product.
