For John Cena, the time is now
Cena is destined to win the Royal Rumble–and here’s why
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Extra Mustard is a weekly column looking at the highs and lows–and everything in between–in combat sports and beyond.
When Sting wrestled his final match last March, he wasn’t expected to win.
Pro wrestling has a long and storied history of wrestlers losing their last match. This was accomplished in magnificent fashion in 2008 at WrestleMania XXIV, when a teary-eyed Shawn Michaels ended the career of Ric Flair.
Despite multiple returns from Flair, that moment still stands.
But back to Sting. At 64, he had spent his run in AEW working multi-man matches. Last March, as he prepared for his last match, he was one-half of the tag team champions. Conventional wisdom had him losing to The Young Bucks, then getting an emotional ovation from the crowd on his final walk to the back.
“Losing is good,” Sting told me 10 months ago. “You’ve got to lose. If you lose right, it gets you over even more.”
But in this case, we’ll never know what would have happened had Sting lost. Instead, his finale turned out to be something entirely different, where they captured the spirit of his career in one match. On top of that, The Young Bucks’ Matt and Nick Jackson, who are AEW EVPs, and AEW owner Tony Khan decided to rewrite history: they wanted Sting to go out with a victory.1
Did he need to win? Of course not. But was it a genuinely memorable moment?
Absolutely.
All that brings us to John Cena, who returns on Saturday to the WWE ring for the Royal Rumble. Last summer, he announced that 2025 would be the final year of his wrestling career. So while he will wrestle through December, that makes this upcoming WrestleMania his final one. And considering that is WWE’s signature event, and he is one of wrestling’s all-time greats, it only makes sense to have him main-event one last time.
But as Cena admitted during promo on the January 6 edition of Raw, he hasn’t tasted victory in a televised singles match since 2018. Fortunately, there is a path to the main event of WrestleMania 41: he can win the Royal Rumble on Saturday.
Already a two-time Rumble winner, Cena has the chance to make magic at this year’s event. There will be plenty of drama the instant his music hits, and you know the story will be crafted to make it seem like Cena is in peril every time he is nearly eliminated.2
A year ago, Cody Rhodes won his second straight Royal Rumble. His momentum carried him to WrestleMania 40, where he finally defeated Roman Reigns in the main event of the two-night affair. It was a feel-good moment, with Rhodes winning the world title standing as WWE’s equivalent to The Happily Ever After fireworks show at Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World.
A moment like that is in play again for this year, this time with Cena turning back the clock to defeat Rhodes and regain the title he hasn’t held in eight long years. And if Cena wins the belt at WrestleMania, he will set a new WWE record with world title number 17.
Plus, unlike Rhodes’ feud with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson from a year ago, Cena will do all the little things–subtlety and nuance were always his strengths–to ensure Rhodes comes out of this feud even better than when he started.
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