Anticipation is gearing up for John Cena’s final match next weekend at Saturday Night’s Main Event, and WWE and Cena are revving those gears with a media blitz of career retrospectives and interviews.
Those efforts took Cena to The Bill Simmons Podcast for a lengthy chat. Despite both men hailing from the Boston area and sharing a love of pro wrestling (and business ties to WWE), the hour-plus discussion was the sports-talk pioneer’s first interview of Cena.
One part of the conversation we found particularly interesting involved Cena’s long-awaited and much-critiqued heel turn from the first half of his retirement year. In retrospect at least, the Never Seen 17 says he knows it was never going to be meet the expectations of fans who’d been wanting him to break bad for years:
“I think a lot of people were wondering, ‘What would happen if John Cena turned heel?’ Then when I did, it left a taste in people’s mouths that they didn’t like it. They wanted other stuff — ‘I wanted a music change, a uniform change, I wanted him to act like this.’”
More than the little details that would have helped sell Dark Cena, he knows there just wasn’t enough time to for them to deliver something great:
“I got 11 months to do this, 36 TV appearances. It takes five years to get a guy over, regardless. If you turn him, it’s gonna take a year or two on television for it really to sink in, especially if you really want to get into it and be able to flip, and then get a performer to get a nice flip on the other side when it’s time to turn again. I don’t have the time to tell the right story.”
Still, Cena offered a strong denial when Simmons asked if he had any regrets about how his final year as an in-ring performer played out. True to the principles he’s always advocated, whether that be on towels or on Twitter — Cena says he’s proud that they weren’t afraid to try turning him heel in his final year, and he’s proud of the effort he put into it:
“Not at all. What is perfect? Here is what I do know – perfect is never achievable. I think that’s a sucker’s chase. When I look back on it, could I have given any more than I did? Not a bit. I overprepared. I tried go to every corner of my emotional well-being.
The cool thing is, when the audience began to turn, we turned. They helped it out. That dynamic was a little bit ahead of schedule for let’s say Cody and I, but it made for a great showing for the summer. ‘Let’s try John like this, I know we have limited time, but let’s do something really big.’
“Okay, it didn’t work, didn’t mean I didn’t give my all.”
Let us know if this changes your view of Cena’s Elimination Chamber-to-SummerSlam eve heel run You can watch Cena and Simmons entire conversation below.
