This was for John Cena’s WWE World Heavyweight Title.
It’s a hell of a thing they did here.
First off, this somehow has to follow their last match, one of the best matches of the decade and one of the best matches of all time. Even with a different result, it would stand in the shadow of this ultra memorable and bloody fight, this thing so far outside of the bounds of what the WWE would normally put out there. So long as it was something resembling a real match, with a major comeback and these nearfalls, even without the bells and whistles of an anything goes kind of a match.
The solution to this is to do something so emphatic and bold that there is no shadow to stand in, because nothing like this has ever happened before.
In sixteen minutes, John Cena has maybe a minute and a half of offense.
Brock Lesnar eats him alive.
Usually when we say something like that, it’s hyperbolic, even compared to the mostly figurative way in which I say that. This isn’t actually vore, you know? It might as well be though. I say, like, “Low Ki ate this kid up” to imply that he smothered him and took most of the match, eliminating any chance for a younger wrestler to shine against a veteran. It’s rarely a positive. It’s virtually never as positive as it is here. Brock Lesnar eats John Cena alive, and it is AWESOME.
He consumes John Cena, or at least this version of him. It can be argued that this little run after Daniel Bryan vacated the title was less the last vestiges of John Cena the Ace as it was John Cena playing the top guy again for seven weeks. You can argue that John Cena stopped being the top guy a year ago when he lost to Bryan in the first place and then a full year before this match, literally passed over the torch. I would, in fact, argue these things. With the rivals of recent years who put doubt into the idea of John’s status either retired or injured, he briefly seemed to have the idea again, but this is emphatically the end of that. Brock Lesnar met this last version of John Cena the Ace, consumes him, and spits out John Cena, the living legend.
It helps too that there’s such a good story to it.
I don’t just mean between the two of them. For the last three years, John Cena’s been involved in a quiet sort of a war against WWE management. Ever since the match of the decade in Chicago, when he made the hugely important character choice that it was more important to do the right thing than to win, there had been something of an attempt to phase John down. Johnny Ace brought Brock Lesnar in to do it. Cena was allowed to fall short against CM Punk in the ways that he never would have been in that Golden Boy prime. Even when he won the title back in 2013, most of Cena’s reign was time buying until corporate choice Randy Orton could be set up with a means to steal the title. None of it worked. It’s John Cena, he’s the best. The one guy who was able to cleanly beat and briefly supplant John Cena was someone people in power wanted there even less than Cena. When he went down, it was right back to Cena. And with nobody left, they went back to Lesnar, hot off the biggest win of his career at WrestleMania. The WWE is remarkably stupid, often caught running away at a full sprint away from telling these sorts of stories, but every once and a while, things just happen to tie together real perfectly like this.
The story between these two is also exceptional, and is told perfectly in the match itself.
In their last match, Brock Lesnar dominated Cena at the bell, spent the match clowning him and making an example out of him, but lost because he got cocky and Cena caught him in a flurry. That never happens here. John Cena runs at Brock and holds his own for a little bit this time, but when Brock takes over, it’s fast and sudden and way more substantial than just an elbow that cracks Cena open. If it bleeds, Brock Lesnar can kill it, but the F5 is a far faster way to the same goal. Lesnar reels one off within thirty seconds and while Cena survives, the match is functionally over. Brock loses control for maybe a minute combined from then on, mixing it up with a series of gross body shots and blows to the head and the infamous sixteen German Suplexes.
Cena has a sudden rally leading to an FU, but Brock kicks out and resumes what he’s doing. He’s even up first, complete with an Undertaker style sit up to really drive his point home. Brock briefly falls back into the same bad habit, leading to Cena dragging him down from his back and into the STF. It’s not only a great allusion to the sort of win Cena pulled out of the atmosphere two years earlier, even if it’s a different move, but this great little callback to SummerSlam’s past. Down at the end of the infamous Nexus elimination match, Cena never got up following the DDT on the concrete, but simply maneuvered his way into the STF from the ground. A nice little nod to the past, when John Cena was capable of still pulling off a win like this.
Unfortunately, John Cena used his miracle against Lesnar last time.
Lesnar rolls over, pummels Cena’s head in with elbows and fists with a renewed sense of intensity and something more feral behind his eyes. It’s like Lesnar finally realized this could happen again if he lets this continue any longer, so he decided not to. It’s a response not just to their match in 2012, but to all of his comeback run so far. The mistakes that almost let CM Punk beat him, that let Triple H look half competitive, it’s all done with now. A second F5 puts an end to it, and Lesnar takes his win, the torch, and the title.
It’s all great, but the match lives and dies on the performances, and they’re pitch perfect too. I wrote about their last match that it was the best babyface performance of John Cena’s career. I stand by it because I think the better babyface performance is probably the one where Our Hero is victorious in the end, but this isn’t too far off. The moment to moment selling is perfect. The bumping on each German Suplex is great. Both men grasp the most important thing about a match this repetitive on paper, which is to make each repetition a little different. Sometimes, Cena goes flying on the German Suplex. Sometimes he’s still recovering and he’s dead weight, jolted back into the land of the living by the next landing. Cena also sells the after effects in a few different ways. The referee repeatedly asks him to stop it, and Cena sometimes wags a finger or says no. Sometimes he doesn’t respond. The highlight is near the very end where he takes a moment, his broken brain taking a little longer to go from point A to point B, before slightly shaking no. The sudden flurry leading into the FU is also flawless. Lesser minds might accuse him of blowing it all off for this flurry, but there’s a panic to his sudden movements, hurling his arm at Brock until running haymakers become running elbow smashes. Later on, his desperation STF is the tightest and best looking STF he’s ever put on.
Once again, the centerpiece of the performance is John Cena’s facial selling. There’s a moment right after the FU kickout and Lesnar’s sit up where it visibly dawns on Cena that he’s going to lose. Brock isn’t giving him half the openings he did before, he might not get another one, and all he can get off are these flashes that do almost nothing. It’s the most sympathetic that Cena’s ever been, it’s as good as any famous Misawa face in one of the tags where he drops a fall, anything else like this in wrestling history. It’s genuine real hero shit, realizing he has almost no chance, that this is going to hurt so much, but moving forward anyways. Money in the Bank was a different sort of heroism, something almost above normal wrestling, but as far as the standards go, this is as good as it gets.
This is Brock Lesnar’s moment, and he’s incredible in it, but this is John Cena’s match.
The big legacy of this match too is that it winds up having a much different effect than intended.
Everyone knows this was supposed to be Brock Lesnar dethroning Daniel Bryan and eating him alive in much the same manner. It’s probably better this way. Doing this to Bryan would have been crushing, but the people crushed by it largely still wouldn’t be moved to get behind Roman Reigns. The next six months show us that pretty clearly. Doing it to John Cena though has a much greater effect because of who John is and has been, with the added bonus that you can do this to John Cena and not really have him lose anything. Everyone also knows Brock Lesnar was set up as the monster for Roman Reigns to eventually dethrone. The JBL to Roman’s Cena, if you would. That all wound up not really happening, largely through a series of wholly unforced errors. The result of this instead is that Brock Lesnar wins so emphatically that he picks the torch up and doesn’t really lose a grip on it until he’s done wrestling (as of June 2021). Should he come back, there’ll be a real question, because he left still feeling like it all belonged to him.
That’s how it happens in the WWE though. Backlund never put Hogan over. Hogan sure never put Bret over. Bret would have put Stone Cold over, Stone Cold didn’t put Rock over until they were both pretty much done. To whatever extent Triple H was ever The Guy, by the time he put John Cena over, he wasn’t anymore. John Cena maybe didn’t have the torch anymore (if he did, it was with a much looser grip), but Lesnar leaves SummerSlam with it all the same, and by destroying Cena like this, it removes the argument that anyone else could even sort of have it (outside of someone who had to give up these titles, an OBVIOUS WrestleMania 31 main event). It’s a torch he doesn’t really put down until coronavirus shuts down everything. It’s June 2021 and it’s fair to say Roman Reigns has it now, and while he beat Lesnar for a title in the past, he sure didn’t get here BY beating Brock Lesnar.
In attempting to create a boogeyman for their future hero to slay, they accidentally just create The Guy then and there. For most of the next six years, the company turns around Brock Lesnar. I wanted to know and actually went and crunched the numbers. In the 2059 days between August 17th, 2014 and the end of the day of April 5th, 2020 (when he last lost the title and his current last match on record), Brock Lesnar held one of the two major titles for 1086 of them. It’s almost two years and 52.74% of that time in total. You can talk about Roman Reigns, but he never really got past Lesnar in any meaningful way. It’s a situation I’m sure we’ll talk about a lot more as the years go on, but he spent all that time as a would-be and eventually a failed successor. A 1a. The Batista or Randy Orton to Brock Lesnar’s John Cena.
You can argue the wisdom of putting the belt and the company on the back of someone who wrestles ten matches a year in an active year (I’m sure someone will Actually Good me here, but you are an idiot). Undeniably though, it happened, and it happened here. It’s one of the most unique matches in wrestling history, especially one of the most unique in WWE history, and if nothing else, it’s almost definitely the best ever coronation of a new #1 top guy in company history.
I wrote about Cena/Punk that it was like a college football rivalry game mixed together with participating in a coup d’etat.
Remove the college football part, and that thing about participation.
This felt like watching a coup d’etat and being on the losing team. Forceful and loud and as hell, a complete slaughter of the last old god remaining, boldly announcing the new order for the whole world to see. It’s over and Brock Lesnar killed it. It’s desperately rooting for someone to get up, who you never had to root for to get up before, because it was automatic. Not entirely because you like him, even if you do, but because he’s the only thing left even halfway worth believing in. The only one left who even has a chance of stopping this. Fitting for the era of the WWE Lesnar presides over, it’s heartbreaking and final and just a total bummer, in the best possible way. It’s so incredibly cool that professional wrestling can do that.
If the last match these two had was one of the most spiritually correct professional wrestling matches of all time, this one isn’t too far off either.
A complete slam dunk. One of the best matches of the year, and more importantly, maybe the most memorable.
****
HANDWERK 