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This was a Last Man Standing match for Cena’s WWE Title.
Aside from a few genuine apostates, those who have looked something so pure and correct in the face only to go, “it’s pretty good!” in response to, I think nearly everyone who’s ever seen this match has fallen in love with it.
For some people, they were kids seeing not only John Cena against a genuine monster for the first time, but the greatest and easiest formula in professional wrestling in an environment that hadn’t seen it on this level in years. Others maybe came to it years later, and saw something wonderful. There’s also the boring option, regular grown adults watching at the time who happened to see something incredibly sick. Personally, having started to grow bored with ROH in late 2006 and expanding my tastes more in early 2007, this was the match so great that I not only became a whole ass John Cena fan, but began watching the WWE again after like a year and a half away, relapsing into that nasty habit that took another seven or eight years to break completely. The real credit to this match is that I’ve never held that against it.
Every one of them fell in love with this for a great reason, and they might not all be the same reason, and they also might not be the same reasons they love it now. Every one of those reasons is correct, because all of them are part of just why this is what it is.
This is great in nearly every way a match like this can — and should — be great.
What stands out on this watch that either didn’t the last time I saw it over a decade ago, or that fell through the gaps since then, is just how well this thing is not only constructed, but in a rarity for the WWE, also how well it’s filmed. It feels like, at least relative to the Kevin Dunn approach, the ideal version of this sort of production. The way the camera cuts when Cena hurls the steps over the top into Umaga’s head lands at the perfect moment so you never see (probably) arms or hands go up to block it too much. The blocking of the shot when Cena falls into the steps in the ring and comes up bloody, from the other side with Cena’s head in the valley, so he rises up cut open, is one of the best ways to disguise a blade in recent wrestling history.
The match is also so well plotted out, not even getting into things like the what or the why of the way the match unfolds. Each little part of this — Cena’s hurt ribs, the struggle to even knock Umaga down, Cena getting cut open, the comeback — not only has enough time to breathe, but they build on each other perfectly. I think sometimes, the early parts can move a little slow, and I wish Umaga got a little color of his own, “if it bleeds, you can kill it” being one of my favorite tropes there is, but that get every other thing imaginable correct. Each thing is this new mounting challenge for Cena. Once he pushes past the injury, somewhat, he still has trouble with the size. Once he starts to push through that, even just a little bit, he gets cut open. It’s the rare case of a slower, or at least more regular wrestling centric, start to a WWE gimmick match working, both because there’s a point to it and these pay offs that come with it, but also because it’s all so well done on a nuts and bolts level.
On a performance level, it is immaculate.
So much of the credit goes to John Cena, and that isn’t a mistake, but before that, it’s worth noting how great Umaga is in this match. He isn’t asked to do as many different things, an unbeatable monster finally running into something that doesn’t break, but he nails the beats perfectly. The brutal offense, the cut offs, the selling in general, but also the gradual increase. It isn’t just that it finally happens, it’s how, and the transition that makes that not only work, but feel like a genuine accomplishment. The way feeling no pain turns into feeling some, to the famous ending. The way he takes longer to get up each time but still looking unbeatable every time he gets up so even as John comes back, it balances hope and hopelessness. Most famously, there’s the moment at the end, when Cena gets the ropes around his neck and Umaga displays, through his eyes alone, the first ever appearance of fear in the history of the character, offering up as much of a feeling of victory for Cena in that moment as the actual ten count, if not more.
The match revolves around Our Hero, and it would be a lie to suggest otherwise, but if Umaga wasn’t as committed and great as he was, the entire thing would have felt so much less genuine and landed with so much less force than it did.
John Cena though man.
There are hundreds of great John Cena performances, and a handful of the truly elite ones. Your Lesnars and various different Punks, some of the earlier ones against Randy Orton. There aren’t a whole lot of picks I would fight against, really. My personal favorite comes at Money in the Bank four and a half years later, but a lot of that has to do with a more complex narrative and the transformation Cena undergoes in that match.
When it comes to pure mechanics and babyface heroics though, I don’t think any of them can stand up to this.
On the most basic level, Cena’s surface level physical selling is outstanding. It starts with the taped up ribs, which always matter and always hinder him. As pictured above, Cena goes to such great lengths to communicate the struggle, purposely doing normal things in a messier way to sell the damage, on top of just holding his side, or the usual stuff that he also always does well. Cena is the rare talent to regularly sell the weight of large object he’s lifting to hit people with, but this is his finest performance there, because there’s an extra element of pain behind the struggle of every lift. When he gets cut open, not only does he hit a genuine gusher, but he carries it off so well. The stumbling, the wooziness, slow blinking, the loss of energy and coordination (a great little moment to sell this where he intentionally gets a foot caught on the middle rope coming back inside, not to slip and fall, but just portraying not doing something basic as clean as usual, because he’s so beat up), all of it.
Cena also has one of the greatest single fire-up comeback spots ever, based around and enhanced by blood.
To illustrate how good Cena is here as a beat up, selling his ass off, all-time great fiery comeback babyface against a monster, rhere’s a moment in this match where, I swear to God, it sounds like Jim Ross yells, “how about Sting?!”.
He’s so great that he sends JR fifteen years back in time, and you totally get it.
When it comes to the smaller things like body language and facial expressions, Cena is just as good, if not better. Cena’s had a lot of matches coming to the ring serious and tense, but before the bell, he looks maybe not so much resigned to a fate, but less confident than ever. There’s a weight to it, that even for someone who excels at putting weight behind major major matches, you don’t often see. He never looks surprised or gets all theatrical when Umaga keeps getting up, and even in the end when he chokes him out, Cena stands there like he’s expecting him to get up again. It’s so unlike what we think of as John Cena, big and animated, shouting his way through it, and I love this match and performance for that. It not only makes those fire up moments stand out so much, Cena seeming to realize at points that this is possible, but also adds so much gravity to every other moment.
It all ties in perfectly and enhances the pretty simple narrative of the match in a larger sense, beyond the construction and escalation, the why behind the what and how of the things that make this work like it does.
Three weeks prior, John Cena was the first guy to beat Umaga, but barely escaped and certainly didn’t do it in any definitive way. In a match that, by definition, guarantees a clear winner and loser with no arguments, John Cena has to do what he couldn’t before. The beauty of that is, in part, the struggle in each step of the process just as much as the forward progress, and that John Cena never stops moving forward, eating the elephant one bite at a time because there’s no other way to do it. It’s also how the match backs him into a corner as a character.
Cena, like any well booked top babyface, is not someone who hasn’t been through it on the way here. JBL and Edge and Triple H and Kurt Angle and all these guys, challenges put in front and gradually overcome, all of that. The thing is though, he never really had to get violent. He got bloody in the I Quit match against JBL in 2005, but JBL gave up because he was a coward in the end. He was the one who bloodied up Triple H (great proto political hit work that failed because Cena was too great, but this isn’t the time for that), and when he got past Edge, he was giving a slippery heel the beating he had earned for the last year plus, but it wasn’t like this. Pushing through some bullshit isn’t this level of survival, and what he has to do to beat Umaga is so much more guttural and grimier.
Beautifully, again, the match takes its time and brings everyone there. After the initial burst with that great throw into the steps, everything Cena does, he either gets cut off doing because he is just throwing his fists and power out there, or he does by avoiding Umaga. Dodging him running into the steps, moving when he tries a splash through the announce table, things like that. The entire point though is that, unlike their first match, John Cena cannot win like he usually does. He cannot simply muscle his way through, and more than anything, he cannot escape and run away with the win a second time.
John Cena only wins when he gets up, looks it in the eye, and does it himself.
He blocks the use of the steel beam after Umaga’s manager Armando Alejandro Estrada takes down the top ring rope, beans the big guy with it in the head, and chokes out Umaga not once but twice — resulting in that famous visual of him covered in blood, pulling back, and shouting, while Jim Ross declares that even a monster has to breathe — before standing back and watching to make sure, covered in blood and seemingly ready to do it again if he has to.
John Cena keeps the title, finally gets past his greatest challenge, and in the process, takes the first leap from being a great wrestler to not only being arguably the best in the entire world (I vividly remember a conversation with a friend around when this happened, and really wondering if in Bryan’s injury absence at the time, if John Cena was the best wrestler in the world now), but also one of the greatest of all time.
Truly.
Because while Umaga helps make this great and lends the foundation of the match, it’s John Cena who I think makes this one of the greatest matches of all time.
Even after the match is over, there’s something from John Cena that stands out so much, with the simplest facial expression and motion. There’s not elation in victory, just this nearly vacant stare, and the most exhausted salute John Cena’s ever thrown out there. It’s up there with Toshiaki Kawada finally beating Mitsuharu Misawa and finding that the victory changed absolutely nothing as the greatest post-match expression ever, the best portrayal of shellshock or single match PTSD in wrestling history, and not only does it tie the entire thing together, but it actively makes it better.
To me, as much as the punch flurry or the famous finish, that’s the match.
Performance and narrative and production and beautiful action all working hand in hand in hand like they rarely ever do, enabling something genuinely special from two great wrestlers, including one of the greatest of all time as he first becomes that, and using every tool in the promotional tool box to make it even better.
I mention, relatively often, the idea of the machine working like it’s supposed to.
WWE as this gigantic and expensive piece of equipment that has the power to do things other places rarely can. Through the money to pay the majority of the best wrestlers alive, in theory, the production experience and quality, the minds on staff that include even more all-time greats to help everyone out as best they can. All of that. In the last fifteen to twenty years, it hasn’t run as often or as smoothly as anyone could like, but it’s a thing I use to point to this idea that, at a high level, this is what the richest and largest wrestling company in history ought to be capable of.
This machine, in its purest form, in ways the people behind it intended it to run rather than times they were pressured to even turn it on in the first place, may never have run better or more smoothly or with greater accuracy than it did on January 28th, 2007.
HANDWERK 
All time great review.
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