The Cena style

[Supremo]

Renaissance Era would’ve came twenty years earlier if they’d pushed those damn cruiserweights.

[thatvinylgeek]

I think a lot of this is that Cena is a product of his time, and the influences of the generation before him. We are getting to the point where him, The Rock, Sting and a few others are the last of the breed of the wrestlers with the "less is more" mindset, something Punk spoke about on his interview last week. I think a lot of matches nowadays no matter the heel face dynamic are very much 50/50 from a work-rate point of view and they share the burden for pretty much the entire match, whereas once upon a time it would be that the heel would do most of the heavy lifting and remain in control for the majority of the match with the babyface having a couple of comebacks and being cut off, before ultimately firing up for the win, hence Hogan's point and invulnerability sections, and Cena's five moves of doom. When they came you knew what it meant and what was going to happen next.

In the current product there is much more of an element of surprise and false finishes to try to keep people on their toes and suspend the element of disbelief, people will win a lot more with other moves and roll ups then they ever did, even after hitting counter pining combos on each other, one may end up with a 3 count, that kind of thing never happened before.

I think it's why matches like Hogan v Warrior were a bit off back in the day as noone was playing the heel role, and having the majority of the offence, back then this felt very different. Even back at WM18 Hogan knew that the match with Rock was not going to work unless that role was very clearly defined so they called the audible and it turned into a pure pantomime match which is exactly what it needed.

I also think it's why a lot of people don't like LA Knight (but I may be wrong), because he tries to work in that style against people who work in a very different way and it's very jarring.

I am not saying either is right or wrong, both are perfectly valid and have their fans, but I def think we are in a very different time where (for a lot of the midcard especially), no one particularly wrestles as a heel or face once the bell rings, and Cena def does.

[BomberPat]

On that point, one of the things Cena was brilliant at was subtly playing the "heel" role in a match without actually working heel, if that makes sense. If he was with a "Cena sucks" crowd, he wouldn't play into it that much, but if he were in a situation where the crowd aren't just booing him but are cheering for his opponent, he would allow them plenty of opportunities to shine, and would modify his own offence slightly. Rob Van Dam at One Night Stand and CM Punk in Chicago are the big obvious examples, but I remember a match he had against Wade Barrett in the UK, where he slowed down the Five Knuckle Shuffle to really look like he was rubbing it in the crowd's face, and generally give it much more of a heel than a babyface delivery, following the old adage that a babyface speeds up while a heel slows down. Never going so far as to actually be a baddy, or to make his fanbase turn on him, but enough to play to the crowd in the building on the night. Eddie Guerrero was similar - if you watch him as a babyface, the Three Amigos is about being smooth and technically proficient, whereas as a heel the transition between each suplex is slower, and the suplex itself has a lot more snap to it, so the same move is used with different intent.

In terms of generational differences, it's hard to say Cena "suffered" given that he became the biggest star in the company in spite of people booing him, but he had the drawback of being the first real post-WCW top star when the audience had shrunk and were generally a lot "smarter" than they had been historically, and came off the back of a few years of the company re-educating the audience as to what good wrestling looked like - before him, we had Benoit, Guerrero and Angle, all of whom we were told were top stars because they were the best technical wrestlers in the world, and, in Benoit and Guerrero's case, had worked hard for years to earn their way to the top. So then John Cena comes along, who's nobody's idea of a technical wrestler, and is on top very early in his career, and he's not fitting the bill - made worse by his Wrestlemania feud with Triple H, where, while JBL had always acted genuinely concerned that Cena could easily beat him in a fair fight, Trips in his infinite wisdom builds the feud around outright saying that John Cena isn't very good at wrestling, and presenting himself as the technical expert (which, in Triple H's case, seems to mean "does an Indian Deathlock sometimes"), knowing full well that "technical wrestler" was something the company had spent the previous three or four years teaching us to respect and care about. 

They then spent the next decade trying to re-re-educate the audience back into the Hogan vs. Monster Of The Month formula, but the genie was out of the bottle, and by the time CM Punk and Bryan Danielson came along, they basically ushered in another cultural shift towards a faster paced, more indie-influenced style, and Cena's US Title run was him trying to show that he could still hang in that environment.

 

I complain a lot about how WWE don't let their heels cheat or generate genuine heat any more but, that aside, I think the days of most matches being a pure "babyface gets beaten down, then comes back in the third act" are behind us not just because of changes in wrestling, but because of MMA. Too many people know what real fights are more likely to look like, and don't buy a guy getting beaten up for fifteen minutes then pulling it out of the bag after all that, and need a little more back-and-forth, a few more hope spots and false comebacks peppered in. 

[air_raid]

7 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

They then spent the next decade trying to re-re-educate the audience back into the Hogan vs. Monster Of The Month formula, but the genie was out of the bottle, and by the time CM Punk and Bryan Danielson came along, they basically ushered in another cultural shift towards a faster paced, more indie-influenced style, and Cena's US Title run was him trying to show that he could still hang in that environment.

Funnily enough, after that particular spate of springboard Stunners and incongruous Code Reds, Cena proceeded to have a belting series of matches with AJ Styles, proving very very well that he could have great "actually great matches" matches and easily keep up with a respected "actually one of the best wrestlers in the world" wrestler from the faster paced indie-influenced (well, indie-forged) crowd, even when he didn't look as much like he was trying to.

Some of his stuff looked naff at times but he was never a bad wrestler. He was a very good wrestler in the ways that mattered most. He made you care about the result and he elicited a reaction.

[Loki]

Cena’s first match in WWE was a cracking and shockingly balanced tv match with Angle, when he looked every bit the future of the company, certainly to me.  They then didn’t capitalise at all and nearly fired him before the infamous Thuganomics Halloween costume.

I am certainly hugely in the minority I know, but I still like the face-in-peril match style.  MJF has a few matches like that last (?) year which were great, and it’s one of the reasons I like LA Knight as mentioned above, he likes to pace his matches like that.

@Supremo’s cruisers may have taken over the business, but a whole card of that is diminishing returns, and there’s far too many shows/PLEs like that nowadays.

[air_raid]

Nobody works babyface in peril anymore?

[thatvinylgeek]

37 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

On that point, one of the things Cena was brilliant at was subtly playing the "heel" role in a match without actually working heel, if that makes sense. If he was with a "Cena sucks" crowd, he wouldn't play into it that much, but if he were in a situation where the crowd aren't just booing him but are cheering for his opponent, he would allow them plenty of opportunities to shine, and would modify his own offence slightly. Rob Van Dam at One Night Stand and CM Punk in Chicago are the big obvious examples, but I remember a match he had against Wade Barrett in the UK, where he slowed down the Five Knuckle Shuffle to really look like he was rubbing it in the crowd's face, and generally give it much more of a heel than a babyface delivery, following the old adage that a babyface speeds up while a heel slows down. Never going so far as to actually be a baddy, or to make his fanbase turn on him, but enough to play to the crowd in the building on the night. Eddie Guerrero was similar - if you watch him as a babyface, the Three Amigos is about being smooth and technically proficient, whereas as a heel the transition between each suplex is slower, and the suplex itself has a lot more snap to it, so the same move is used with different intent.

In terms of generational differences, it's hard to say Cena "suffered" given that he became the biggest star in the company in spite of people booing him, but he had the drawback of being the first real post-WCW top star when the audience had shrunk and were generally a lot "smarter" than they had been historically, and came off the back of a few years of the company re-educating the audience as to what good wrestling looked like - before him, we had Benoit, Guerrero and Angle, all of whom we were told were top stars because they were the best technical wrestlers in the world, and, in Benoit and Guerrero's case, had worked hard for years to earn their way to the top. So then John Cena comes along, who's nobody's idea of a technical wrestler, and is on top very early in his career, and he's not fitting the bill - made worse by his Wrestlemania feud with Triple H, where, while JBL had always acted genuinely concerned that Cena could easily beat him in a fair fight, Trips in his infinite wisdom builds the feud around outright saying that John Cena isn't very good at wrestling, and presenting himself as the technical expert (which, in Triple H's case, seems to mean "does an Indian Deathlock sometimes"), knowing full well that "technical wrestler" was something the company had spent the previous three or four years teaching us to respect and care about. 

They then spent the next decade trying to re-re-educate the audience back into the Hogan vs. Monster Of The Month formula, but the genie was out of the bottle, and by the time CM Punk and Bryan Danielson came along, they basically ushered in another cultural shift towards a faster paced, more indie-influenced style, and Cena's US Title run was him trying to show that he could still hang in that environment.

 

I complain a lot about how WWE don't let their heels cheat or generate genuine heat any more but, that aside, I think the days of most matches being a pure "babyface gets beaten down, then comes back in the third act" are behind us not just because of changes in wrestling, but because of MMA. Too many people know what real fights are more likely to look like, and don't buy a guy getting beaten up for fifteen minutes then pulling it out of the bag after all that, and need a little more back-and-forth, a few more hope spots and false comebacks peppered in. 

Great minds 😉

[SuperBacon]

Cena is the greatest.

 

[The King of Old School]

Michael Cole calls him the greatest of all time, that will do for me 😎

[Loki]

38 minutes ago, air_raid said:

Nobody works babyface in peril anymore?

And it’s why he’s at the top of the card.  Ultimately wrestling is about good guys overcoming bad guys, not two shooters having an evenly matched back and forth contest and then shaking hands.  Or it should be, for me!

[air_raid]

1 minute ago, Loki said:

And it’s why he’s at the top of the card.  Ultimately wrestling is about good guys overcoming bad guys, not two shooters having an evenly matched back and forth contest and then shaking hands.  Or it should be, for me!

We're old. Kenny Kickpads vs The Pleather Clad Lad should be main eventing WrestleMania because they're obviously better wrestlers than the guys drawing thousands of people to the arenas of the world. We just can't see it because we're brainwashed.

And just like that, the last 20 years haven't happened.

[Carbomb]

Just to check: you guys aren't saying that anyone who's not particularly a fan of Cena automatically believes that some indie button-basher in pleather should be headlining WrestleMania, right? Because that was a really annoying thing that happened on here a lot, back in the day.

[westlondonmist]

12 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

Just to check: you guys aren't saying that anyone who's not particularly a fan of Cena automatically believes that some indie button-basher in pleather should be headlining WrestleMania, right? Because that was a really annoying thing that happened on here a lot, back in the day.

I totally believe that Paul Travell vs James Tighe should main event Wrestlemania every year. 

[air_raid]

25 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

Just to check: you guys aren't saying that anyone who's not particularly a fan of Cena automatically believes that some indie button-basher in pleather should be headlining WrestleMania, right? Because that was a really annoying thing that happened on here a lot, back in the day.

Well, we do still live in a world that the post-Mania prospects of Cody vs Rollins, Punk vs Hunk and the Bloodline fallout aren't enough to keep some people excited and lamenting that Okada or Ospreay aren't coming in. Which is basically the same thing.

14 minutes ago, westlondonmist said:

I totally believe that Paul Travell vs James Tighe should main event Wrestlemania every year. 

If you'd said Paul London vs James Tighe, I'd be with you. Leave the memories alone.

[LaGoosh]

1 hour ago, Loki said:

Ultimately wrestling is about good guys overcoming bad guys, not two shooters having an evenly matched back and forth contest and then shaking hands.

Or maybe wrestling is about loads of different things and that's what makes it fun? Room for plenty of styles and variety.