John Cena’s time is almost up and faith in this new era of WWE booking under Triple H is right there with it.
The latest Cena retirement tour disaster took place on Saturday night at Wrestlepalooza, where the GOAT got crushed by a Brock Lesnar painfully propped up as a big deal for a more casual ESPN audience.
For longtime WWE fans, the end result really wasn’t that shocking. Once WWE let it be known that the two legends would open the show, rather than spotlight in the main event, it was pretty easy to see a sub-10-minute squash coming.
Those seasoned fans know there are only so many Cena dates left, only so many opponents, and there’s an interesting story to tell behind an aging, fading Cena going into a massive underdog role against a longtime rival.
But that doesn’t change the fact that the match was bad. The finisher spam, which lasted all of nine minutes, was clearly aimed at shocking more casual audiences.
For whatever reason, WWE got cruel along the way, letting Cena have a bunch of kids escort him out during his entrance, only for cameras to zoom in on kids clad in his attire in tears in the audience after the match.
Leading to, naturally, infamous screengrabs:
After the match? Cena limped off to chants of thank you, Cena and sort of, well, just left.
Call it a good summation of the Cena retirement tour so far. Any hope this Lesnar match would really set things back on a proper path instead just reaffirmed that the whole thing was never on a path to start with.
The hiccups along the way have been horrendous. WWE chose to put Jey Uso over him in the Royal Rumble. He turned heel, which seemed great, until The Rock stopped showing up and musician Travis Scott ruined one of the worst main events of WrestleMania of all time.
And for every highlight, like great encounters with old foes like CM Punk and Randy Orton, there has been wasted airtime on things like Logan Paul and a weird R-truth-fan-revolt-thing that led to nothing.
Cena then turned back babyface, breaking the fourth wall in the process and saying he didn’t want to go out like that. Fine, but things haven’t exactly corrected despite Cena’s sudden shift on the morality scale.
Even the build to this Lesnar feud was sloppy. A little more than a week ago, Lesnar showed up on SmackDown spitting for a fight with Cena, only to get into a promo battle with…R-Truth. Cena showed up on Raw a few days later and cut a promo against air because…Lesnar didn’t show up.
Now? A jacked-looking Lesnar got some monster presentation in front of an ESPN audience, even getting Paul Heyman back. This was more of a “we’re sort of like real sports too, guys” attention grab from ESPN than respecting Cena’s limited remaining dates.
What stinks is that anyone who has been around a long time would know this is perfectly fine with Cena, the ultimately company man for WWE.
But for fans? It’s a borderline farce.
Lesnar himself is a polarizing name on his own right now, and the fact that multiple of Cena’s final dates ever went to “building” this is a shame. Fans would almost certainly rather see him put over the next generation of Superstars on his way out the door, working with guys like Gunther, Bron Breakker, or even big names like Drew McIntyre.
Instead, a Lesnar retread. We can dress this up as Cena needing an excuse to be written off television while he does other things before his next date, but other Superstars on the roster could’ve served in this role just fine.
As such, Triple H and WWE’s credibility have lost all benefit of the doubt here. When Roman Reigns and the Bloodline were on an epic tear, really questionable booking decisions were easily forgiven when the peak heights occurred later.
There’s no hindsight angle making what happened on Saturday night acceptable. Not when the story has yet to even make up for the botched heel turn and miserable ‘Mania main event.
Triple H, especially, continues to burn goodwill like he doesn’t have a choice, and it’s a dangerous path. Being the architect of a botched GOAT Cena retirement tour is one heck of a mark on a resume.
Usually, it’s easy to exit a mess like Saturday night, optimistic that hey, this is pro wrestling. They can course-correct and fix this. However, the Cena-underdog-goodbye concept has even lost its luster in the face of cheap, corporate ESPN trends, which include a future WrestleMania being held overseas.
Frankly, Cena deserves better, just like fans. Instead, it feels like the machine keeps marching into a misguided new era, kicking out the old, like Cena, as it goes.
Read the full article here
