John Cena's wrestling career ended on December 13, 2025. He announced this would be his last year in wrestling, and WWE did what they do best - take an easy, feel-good story and twist and mangle it into a bizarre and barely comprehensible caricature. There is no room here for coherence. This is WWE, not some stupid wrestling promotion.
Cena's ascendance in WWE came when they had comfortably defeated all of their American business rivals. Having bought in to their own myth-making, WWE believed that their adherence to "ruthless aggression" was key to their success. They would proudly tell anybody that listened, and even those not listening, that they fought Ted Turner and they fought the US Government and they fought Wall Street's dislike of pro wrestling and, like the scripted babyface wrestlers that brought them to this level of business prominence, they won every battle (except for the battles they did not win, of course, like their attempt to break in to the movie business). Fighting was what they knew, even if they were in the business of faking it, and so fighting is what they would do. The only problem was there was only one group in the pro wrestling world left to fight: the fans.
With their healthy monopoly over an industry that once supported multiple regional promotions around the country, WWE was completely un-tethered from any need to respond to audience wants or desires. Vince McMahon was free to create a babyface hero that embodied his vile and perverse ideas of morality and bravery. John Cena was brash and annoying, rude, disgustingly pro-military without every coming close to actually serving in the military, and able to justify any means as long as he would emerge victorious in the end. He was the good guy because he won and he won because he was the good guy. Cena excelled at this role. He was the face of a company happily sliding into cultural irrelevancy (while mirroring the depravity of the culture) as long as they could keep their tv ratings from slipping more than the national average.
The Match: Cena has always been willing to stretch the WWE's main event style to its limits. He is great at selling a beating, and the timing for his big comebacks is as good as WWE timing ever is (it's fine). This match is no different. Gunther is great at playing up the crowd's hate, and then the finishing stretch (as it were) is memorable for being so outside of WWE's norms. They still had some big kick-outs, but ultimately Gunther won by wearing Cena down. Cena smiles as he taps out to a sleeper hold. It's all so different from WWE's normal production that it almost succeeds as both a wrestling match and (more importantly to WWE in 2025) as a "moment."
And so, since this was a different ending to a different story, the WWE crowd hated it. I would rather talk about the match itself, since that is what I sat down to watch, but it is still a WWE main event style match and the work itself is secondary to the booking and reactions. The pacing was good enough. The selling was fine. They do what they do for a bit and then it's over. Or at least that's how it usually works, but the finish to this one was outside of WWE's norm. There is a lot of wrestling in this world, so usually it is fun and interesting when somebody figures out a slightly different way to do this thing. But this is WWE. The crowd is conditioned to react to "moments," not matches. The live crowd's reaction was so over-the-top shocked and stunned that I briefly wondered if WWE did away with the live crowd as we know it and was now running shows stocked with an audience of actors and extras.
Cena's initial push was met with hostility and derision from the existing fanbase, and WWE "never gave up" until those fans aged out. The "Super Cena" name, coined 15-20 years ago to describe the standard layout of a WWE main event where "Cena Wins, LOL," was even being chanted during this match in a positive way. The fans were pleading for a Super Cena, and were instead given a human being. Humanity being on display in a WWE match is shocking, of course, and so the crowd did not have a catchphrase to chant in response. And what is a match worth if we can't chant along with the victor? What is humanity worth? Not a WWE moment, apparently.
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