WWE legend and 17-time World Champion John Cena recently appeared on the No-Contest Wrestling podcast to discuss various topics, including his decision to make his retirement show a night featuring exhibitions between WWE and NXT.
Cena said, “I think when you like, I always search for a good explanation, and a good explanation of AJ Styles debuted at the Rumble wanted to retire at the Rumble. As soon as he told me that, I mean AJ and I got to work in Perth. We shared with each other like, man, I kind of wanted to push the idea of like, ‘Dude, you’ve been doing this a long time. There are people who would really like to say goodbye. You may want to think about this model. And he turned to me and said, ‘I’m 49.’ And as soon as the words left his mouth, I was like, ‘That’s a good explanation.’ So AJ’s perspective was my debut meant a lot to me. I want it to be a circle of life in my career where I retire. I leave the same day I came in at the same event. That’s a good explanation, but our perspectives are different. He has a we look at the business a different way. We all want to when the lights are on, and everything’s out, we want to do good, good stuff when we’re out there. I look at it as how can I lead this place better than I found it, and how can we do good business? We’ve all this energy and the IP, how do we make the most of it? Let’s have the event in our weakest month. And then the add-ons of like let’s do it as a night of exhibitions and bring in the young talent.”
On Bruce Prichard wanting his retirement show to be a one-match show:
“I remember Bruce Prichard, who was a great friend of mine, came up to me. He’s like, ‘For your last show, I’m thinking about a one-match show.’ I said, ‘You will kill the audience. You will absolutely murder the live event audience.’ Now, WWE is great at production. If you were watching at home, that would have been great. Yeah, but the wind would have been out of the sales in DC. I said, ‘No, **** that. Do two, three-minute packages here, but let’s get some matches. Let’s bring in some marquee guys and guys you want to do like the cycle of life. A marquee guy was like who back there wants to take this open challenge and idiot, ruthless aggression guy came out. So like how cool of a full- circle moment is that where I kind of went out the same way I came in, but it’s just under it’s not, it’s not set and anchored into a date, you know. So if you need that beautiful performative poetry, I literally went out the same way I came in. Yeah. On a night of exhibitions, a night of open challenges where the next John Cena walks down the tunnel.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
