It's the first day of the post-John Cena era for wrestling fans. The former WWE Champion retired on Saturday in a crushing loss to former World Heavyweight Champion Gunther. But enough about what happened, that's already been taken care of on the results page. The Wrestling Inc. Staff also broke down what worked and what didn't in the Loved & Hated column.
All that's left, besides the crying, is to look at the December 13 edition of "Saturday Night's Main Event" and decide who looked like a winner and who looked like a loser. Now, this will not be a literal account of who won and who lost. While someone like Gunther came out of the night a victor in both result and spirit, sometimes a winner is a loser, like Cody Rhodes, and sometimes a loser is a winner, like John Cena. You might not agree, but luckily these are my opinions and I'm only beholden to myself.
Enough bloviating and introducing from me. I don't have the sponsorship deals WWE does and can't get away with stalling and running a commercial, so instead, let's just get into the Winners and Losers from Saturday's big show in the nation's capital.
Whoever you might be, dear reader, I hope that when the time comes to call it a day and walk off into the sunset, you, me, and everyone else can do it with the peace and serenity of John Cena. The closing image of Cena's retirement match, trapped in the clutches of Gunther's Rear Naked Choke, smiling, as if to say, "It is accomplished," before tapping out, will likely go on to be one of the most iconic moments in wrestling, buoyed even more by the intense crowd reaction, but more on that later.
John Cena has always been known as a cold and calculating superstar. He's been compared to a robot. But the performance on Saturday was possibly Cena's most human. Sure, he's looked vulnerable in the past against guys like Brock Lesnar, but Cena went over the top with his need for the crowd support, begging them repeatedly for them to carry through the trials and tribulations of wrestling Gunther. Nowhere was this better showcased than in the closing stretch, where Cena begged, pleaded with the WWE Universe to give him the strength for one more Five-Knuckle Shuffle, only to get caught in the move that would eventually end his career.
Cena was cautious throughout the match. There were shades of his Super Cena persona, but for the most part, he was an old man with his back against the wall, and in doing so, Cena delivered possibly one of his career-best performances. There was an inevitability to the ending, and yet Cena had me believing that one more Attitude Adjustment was all it would take to break Gunther's hold and put the match to bed. But there wasn't one more Attitude Adjustment, and Cena knew it before the rest of the crowd, letting his face fall in acceptance and allowing himself, just this once, to give up.
There was much worry ahead of "Saturday Night's Main Event" that disgraced former chairman Vince McMahon would show up in Washington, D.C., and pay tribute to the successor to Hulk Hogan, Steve Austin, and The Rock. After all, Vince is known for his willingness to defy people's expectations, and WWE tends to move like it's bulletproof in the eyes of media scrutiny. I had cynically resigned myself to seeing him. Which is why I was legitimately surprised to see Vince relegated to an old clip in one of the night's many video packages.
The tide is surely turning if WWE and TKO Group Holdings didn't feel bold enough to bring out Vince one last time to say goodbye to Cena. He's a shadow, always threatening to overtake any WWE proceedings. But his grasp on WWE seems to finally be slipping. Granted, there are enough toxic personalities in WWE that removing Vince is akin to skimming a dirty leaf out of a pool that's covered in algae, but he was still one of the biggest, dirtiest leaves in the pool, and he'd already blown back into the waters once before.
I will probably eat crow for this. It's always possible Vince was tucked backstage somewhere no one saw him and got to have his moment with Cena in private, but a win is a win, and if the egomaniac was relegated to backstage or, better yet, completely away from the proceedings, then all I can say is "Good. So long, Bozo."
I am the one-millionth person to say this, but WWE has not been as real as it was when the crowd was dumbstruck, angry, sad, and wounded by Gunther defeating John Cena. Dvorak's 9th Symphony never sounded so ominous. Fans were accosting Gunther after the show, chanting "AEW" at Triple H for booking the finish, and overall making it clear that Gunther is officially a made man.
People hate this guy, now. It's beautiful. Gunther has been a heel who has been too good for people to actually boo him, as the machinations of wrestling allow a certain distance for fans, but that distance has been erased with the tremendous display that Gunther put on against Cena. It doesn't matter how smart you think you are; if you don't like the way things went down on Saturday, then Gunther won, and a lot of people didn't like the way things went down on Saturday.
WWE and Gunther cannot take their foot off the gas. There should be no rehabilitation. There should be no time for fans to start to get used to this. Not since Brock Lesnar ended The Undertaker's streak has WWE been in such a position, and Gunther has many more upsides than the aging Lesnar did in 2014. Hell, if he hadn't already been thoroughly retired, I'd say Gunther should retire The Deadman one more time, just for the heat. Gunther has retired Goldberg. He's retired Cena. By the rule of threes, he's not done yet.
Ok, I need to talk to all of my fellow Millennials. If you were born between roughly 1985 and 1995, then it's time to accept that we're old, and getting older by the day. John Cena has retired. R-Truth passed the comedy-filler baton to Joe Hendry. A nostalgic, sentimental video package was set to Temper Trap's "Sweet Disposition," famously featured in "500 Days Of Summer," a pillar of Millennial culture. Last night was as much a goodbye to us as even those of us with even the most arrested development have aged out of the eye of the culture.
Je'Von Evans and Leon Slater had a standout showcase last night, their hands raised as "the future" by AJ Styles, and as commentary pointed out, neither man had been born when John Cena debuted in 2002. Me? I was beginning to study for my Bar Mitzvah and looking forward to the 7th grade, and if you were born in my age range, you're similarly dealing with the Inexorable March Of Time. It's like Zack Sabre Jr.'s theme song says, "Young punks grow old."
Cena's retirement was a reminder for us to take our retinol and maybe add a little more stretching to our daily routine. Someday, a Zoomer wrestling writer will share a similar sentiment when Daniel Garcia or Kendall Grey hang up their boots, but it's our turn to be the losers of the endless culture war at the heart of wrestling, the old guard vs. the new guard, which sees minds change, reputations grow or shrink, and all those other unpredictable parts of getting older.
Paul "Triple H" Levesque has always been a better heel than babyface. He loves to be booed. You could see it in the way he reacted to the crowd during Cena's post-match farewell. He finally got the crowd to stop kissing his ass and say, "Yo man, what the f*** was that?"
It's gotta be a weird position to be a wrestling booker in the big 2025. Sure, Levesque has done all he can to pull back the curtain and reveal that every moment is scripted and every choice thought through. In that position, it's very easy to give the fans what they want. It takes a strong booker to understand that, crowd reaction be damned, Gunther is the future of this business. Gunther is such a good wrestler that it can be hard for fans to hate him, after all, they all know it's a performance, and he's just doing his job. They finally forgot that on Saturday, and as much as it pains me, that means I have to hand it to Levesque. He made the right call, with the right guy, and the resulting match was possibly one of the best in either man's career.
Levesque might finally understand what it is to be a creative, instead of a figurehead. At times, it would not be wrong to wonder if Levesque's booking is just an extension of his long-running authority figure, but Saturday, he felt like, for once, a producer.
Ok, now that I've gotten all the praise for Levesque out of my system, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that he is completely and totally f***ed. Think about it, he's the guy who has to follow up on this show. It's up to him to capitalize on all of this glorious heat that Gunther has accumulated. It's up to him to win back the fans he burned, whether those fans are rational or not. It's up to him to steer the ship, and it has not been smooth sailing for much of his tenure.
After all, while he's the guy who gave Cena the right ending, he's also the guy who nearly screwed it all up with a poorly thought-out heel turn. Sure, stars like AJ Styles, Brock Lesnar, and even Chris Jericho are rumored to be retiring in 2026, and Gunther can't submit all of them. Hell, if Gunther taps out Jericho or Lesnar, I'm not sure he'd ever be able to be a heel in the eyes of WWE fans again.
Let's face it, Levesque has his back against the wall, and has about 24 hours to capitalize on it. If Gunther doesn't find a way to keep this heat buring in the hearts of WWE fans quickly, they will move on to the next thing. As I said, the Millennials are getting older, and the Zoomers don't have the attention spans we did (not that ours were ever all that great), and so he will need to keep the moments coming at an even quicker clip.
