Only One Thing Left To Do: Turn John Cena Heel

About a year ago, I wrote a post entitled, “Keep Your Head Up, Cena”.  I’m not the biggest John Cena fan in the world.  Not by a long shot.  But as cliche’ as it sounds, I have a tremendous amount of respect for him.  He respects the sport.  He has explosive energy.  I was truly amazed and inspired when he came back after major shoulder surgery in considerably less time than was predicted and seemed to be in the best shape that I’d ever seen him in.  He’s young, good-looking, smart — he would seem to be the champion that wrestling fans could really mark out for big time.

So why then are we booing him out of the building?  (I say “we”, because I’m just as guilty as everyone else.)  I don’t like Cena.

Since I wrote the post, I’ve been trying to make sense of the “Cena hate” that seems to have followed him throughout every arena in every live WWE taping.  It’s funny — I watched Raw a few weeks back and it opened with an interesting experiment.  The show opened with three simple head-shots of the three main title contenders at Wrestlemania: Randy Orton, HHH and Cena.  With nothing but a camera pointed and closed in on their faces, the show began with the first shot — HHH.  Total face pop.  The fans went crazy.  Then the camera pans to Randy Orton — as you would expect, classic heel heat.  But then the camera pans to John Cena…  I’d like to say the reaction was “mixed”.  Maybe it’s that the males are drowning out the females.  But whatever the reason, they just kicked in a boo about as loud and as passionate as I heard for Orton.

It’s amazing to think back to all of the guys that we cheer and all of the reasons that they’ve given us NOT to do so.  We love HHH — yet he’s probably the guy who has railroaded more guys from getting the top spot as a McMahon-by-marriage than anyone else.  We love Ric Flair — but this is the same guy who was part of the crew that held down Steve Austin and so many others in Georgia.  We cheer for Shawn Michaels — despite his involvement in the biggest shoot ever captured on live TV – the Montreal Screw Job.  (“Shawn were you in on this?” “No Bret, my hands are clean of this one, I swear!”)  And hey, I love the guy too.  He might be the only reason why I’m thinking of watching Wrestlemania.  And the list goes on… so many guys who get the glory despite a record less deserving of applause.

So what is it about John Cena that’s so bad?