The Goodness 10.24.06: Cena Needs To Be Cena

As much as I love getting feedback, I’m starting to get worried. With my last two columns – ‘It Used To Mean Something’ and the Forgotten Goodness piece on the Intercontinental Title – I got waves of e-mails from people agreeing with me. No nasty responses. No ‘You’re a jerkwad dickface’ replies. All in agreement with me and, frankly, it’s a little scary. I love it though and I’m glad that I’m on the same wavelength with a good portion of my readers. That is a good thing.

I had to make quick mention of Kevin Federline’s appearance last week on Raw and his possible appearance as I write this Monday afternoon on tonight’s Raw. It was, in a word, fantastic. So often, celebrities are brought into wrestling shows and the crowd couldn’t give a rat’s ass. Well the second K-Fed walked out, the L.A. crowd was all over him. And he cut a pretty mean promo for someone who never has before. Color me impressed. Heck, he even looked like a strong heel, standing up to Cena and telling him he wanted to see him get his ass kicked. His got a bigger set of cajones at this point than Edge & Randy Orton put together. Good stuff.

The Goodness 10.24.06: Cena Needs To Be Cena

Since the Internet Wrestling Community formed and gained steam in the late 1990’s, there has almost always been a groupthink mentality when it comes to certain wrestlers. Everyone loved the Rock. Everyone hated Goldberg. Everybody thought Chris Benoit and Chris Jericho were being held down in WCW. Everyone got tired of the nWo. As time progressed, the online fans even tended to change opinions as one. Triple H was one of the most hated (not in a good way) wrestlers in 1999 until he put on some good matches and, by early 2001, everyone had jumped on the infamous ‘Turn Triple H face’ bandwagon. Heck, by 2002, everyone jumped off that bandwagon and hopped on the ‘Trips Must Die’ train. It has been a fun ride with him, no?

Anyway, my point is that there is usually a universal opinion when it comes to the entertainment value of a wrestler. I say usually because in John Cena, the wrestling world has been confronted with its most intriguing love/hate relationship. (It may have been different if there was an Internet during Hogan’s first WWF but there wasn’t) So as Cena ascended to the spot of the face of the WWE in 2005, there have been two wildly divergent schools of thoughts. There are those who appreciated Cena’s talents, both on the mic and in the ring, while there are those who feel that Cena is bland, Vince McMahon wet dream come to life with limited abilities. That division among fans has been palpable at nearly every Raw and pay-per-view in 2006 with split crowds, save for WrestleMania when a building full of wrestling diehards willing to shell out hundreds for a ticket voiced their displeasure for Cena.

But how the hell did we get here?

I’m not going to pull out any revisionist history – I was just about the biggest Cena mark in 2003. When he came out during the WrestleMania XIX pre-show – after name rappers declined to battle him on the big show – he rapped against cardboard cutouts of Fabolous and Jay-Z. At the time, I told my college roommate that Cena was the next big thing and would achieve Rock-like status within the year.

The last non-WrestleMania show I ordered was 2003’s Vengeance and Cena’s match with the Undertaker was a major factor. Quick aside: that show is one of the criminally underrated shows in WWE history with Mysterio/Kidman/Benjamin/Haas putting on a ***** tag match and Angle/Lesnar/Big Show hitting ****+ in the main event. For the first time in a long time, the mark in me got out and I rooted for Cena to beat the Undertaker. I wanted him to win and I wanted him to win badly. Sure, I was one of those folks sick of the Undertaker, but I just felt like Cena was on the verge of something. Of course, he lost.

Not all his momentum was lost and by WrestleMania XX, when he opened the show with a U.S. Title win over the Big Show, he was truly a star. The New York crowd – made up of similar folks that booed him to heck this year – treated Cena with a standing ovation and a spontaneous “Ce-na” chant during his pre-match mic work. All the pieces were in place and, by the time he won the WWE title at WrestleMania 21, it seemed like it was just time for him to take off.

Except it didn’t happen. Nothing substantial has happened in the WWE since then, even with Cena as the poster child for the entire company. There have been no gains at the box office, no spike in ratings and, if anything, the buyrates have tanked with the one exception of the TLC match with Edge recently. How could such a sure thing peter out so badly?

The most common reason is that everything that made Cena so appealing as a heel was slowly stripped away. He doesn’t rap anymore and when he talks, it’s basically just a white guy rhyming words as he talks. His use of the five-knuckle shuffle, at first just a funny gag used in the middle of matches, has become an integral part of his finishing routine – garnering much of the same disdain that the Rock got when he would use the People’s Elbow as a finishing maneuver. Even when he added a nice submission move to his moveset they gave it the lamest, middle-school name ever – the STFU. Really? The WWE pays its creative staff hundreds of thousands of dollars and that’s the best they could do?

Even worse, they tried to play Cena off as a rebel to authority while whoring him out in marketing to make money. I admire the WWE to try to make a movie and a CD to make some money off of him and, well maybe it was moderately successful, but it killed the character in the long run. When the Rock made the Mummy Returns in 2001, he didn’t come back as the Scorpion King, did he? When the Rock made that awful song “Pie” with Wycleaf Jean – NOT Forgotten Goodness – they didn’t play the video or give us a look at the making of the video 8 gazillion times. They tastefully turned the Rock into a mainstream star without bashing us over the head with it.

In my opinion, the most damaging thing that has occurred to Cena’s character is the morphing into the Marine. Not that there is anything wrong with supporting our troops, but we are in the midst of one of the most unpopular wars in the nation’s history. It is not “cool” to support this war. I dare you to find one actor, singer, you name it that’s considered ‘in’ and ‘trendy’ that supports the war openly – save for country singers, of course. When he comes out on the ramp and does that stupid salute, he is bowing down to authority. Rebels do not salute. What they have left themselves with is a rebel against authority who also respects and honors authority. In short, that doesn’t work.

So as the character of John Cena has devolved into bland garbage – he is about 180 degrees removed from the 2003 Cena we all marked out for – his wrestling has not improved. If you watch a match with the Rock in 1998 or Triple H from that same time period, you see a young wrestler with the tools necessary to put on ***** matches but not being able to put it together. No one expected Cena to rush out and put on classics, but it is expected that a main event performer should be able to raise the level of his opponent to make memorable matches.

In my opinion, Cena has failed to do so. Yes, he has put on many good matches but there has not been one Cena match that I thought was “great” or a “classic.” The TLC match with Edge was good but it wasn’t ***** in my book or anyone else’s book. Now does a wrestler need to hit that plateau to make money? As Goldberg and Hogan proved, of course not. But those two men, who did not have Cena’s talent in the ring, were able to provide ***** moments thanks to their natural charisma. So far as champion, Cena’s natural charisma has not come through to a point that there is a moment indelible inked in our minds as a classic moment. It’s a hole in his resume.

So why is this entitled ‘Cena Needs To Be Cena’? Because Cena has everything in place to be a star but is being held down and my presumption is that it’s from the WWE offices, most likely Vince McMahon. I’ve seen Cena on several guest appearances on talk shows and such and he is the most natural on a television screen in the wrestling business and rivals the Rock for his entertainment in these instances. It’s almost amazing. Nothing’s forced, he’s funny, he knows how to tell his stories and he almost always engages the audience and the host of a particular show. The problem? We don’t see this Cena on Raw.

No, the Cena on Raw is the result of an attempt to manufacturer charisma and comedy. One of the best traits of the Rock, who the WWE is clearly copying with their portrayal of Cena, was his ability to ad-lib and telling jokes as if they weren’t scripted. Now most give credit to Pat Patterson and the WWE writers at the time for coming up with a good portion of the Rock’s material, but he always delivered as if it was his own. When he did an impression of another wrestler, most famously the “I’m Billy!” spiel against Billy Gunn, it felt like a seasoned comedian rocking the mic. When Cena does it, it comes off as a lame attempt at comedy. In fact, Cena’s best bits and the one where the crowd cares is when he’s clearly off-script and riffing on the fly.

That’s who John Cena is. He is a natural charismatic guy who doesn’t need to salute, do impressions or actively pander to the crowd to be loved as a true babyface. He needs to be himself. He needs to be the guy in 2003 that just rolled with it and acted naturally. He said many times, in interviews, that the character he portrayed in 2003 was basically just himself – he always did the whole freestyle rapping thing for fun – and he just amped it up to 11, as they say. Let him do that again. John Cena has been floundering for nearly two years now as a good, not great, world champion. Give him a chance because, deep down, I’m still a Cena mark. I’m just waiting to cheer for him again.