Undisputed WWE Champion John Cena attended a panel session at the Denver Fan Expo, where he shared his insights from working with Eddie Guerrero.
Cena said, “For those of you who aren’t WWE fans, we’re going to go inside baseball a little bit. You’re just going to have to bear with me. You saw one match with me and Eddie Guerrero. I was lucky enough to have a bunch of live event matches with Eddie Guerrero. Eddie Guerrero is one of the greatest of all time, and for those of you who don’t know how WWE works, some matches are televised, some matches are not. So Eddie was one of the people that mentored me and one of the last individuals who was an improviser. I take a lot of my skills from Eddie Guerrero because he was a genius. Not only was he brilliant in his execution, he knew when to do things and what y’all don’t know is he was just making it up as he went along. So he was that astute to the audience.”
On what he learned from Guerrero:
“The most influential thing I learned from Eddie Guerrero and something I’ll never forget, WWE went through a boom in the Attitude Era, and then all those guys- we fired Stone Cold, The Rock left, The Undertaker got hurt. We changed the name, the XFL failed. There was a lot of upside down stuff. We started SmackDown and it had Kurt Angle as its anchor, but we brought Eddie Guerrero and a bunch of (others) like Edge and me and a bunch of other new guys and people trying to find their way. Eddie was our champion for a certain period of time, and he used to tell me that it is the night when the fewest people show up that you have to work 10 times as hard because the presence in that area isn’t as strong. When I get a crowd like this, working the room is easy. If it’s just you five in the front, I gotta give my whole self to you. Not that I don’t. But it’s on those nights where business is bad, do not ever, ever, ever phone it in. As a matter of fact, you work 100 times harder to get those people to go out and be like, ‘Yo, dude, you missed that show,’ and you want to go back the next time. He was a person that was able to weather the storm through some of those lesser attended events and still put on these spectacular matches.”
On how Guerrero took being champion seriously:
“He took being the champion very seriously, and that’s something that I’ll definitely not forget under his tutelage. He also taught me to listen to the audience. I’m one of the loudest talkers out there. If you’re sitting close enough in the WWE show, you get the match before the match, but that’s okay. Because the tool I learned from Eddie Guerrero was to listen to the audience because they’re the biggest piece of energy and they’re the biggest star we have. If you don’t do something when they want you to do something, lose their attention. They’ll be generous, they’ll give you once or twice, but you lose them that third time, they don’t care about your match, and Eddie was always so surgical about not only doing the right thing, but doing it at the perfect time. He taught me to improvise, he taught me to listen, and he taught me to work hard.”
You can check out Cena’s comments in the video below.
(H/T to Fightful for transcribing the above quotes)
