John Cena vs. Umaga, WWE Royal Rumble (1/28/2007)

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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.

I remembered the blood and the big stuff, but a Cena bump and sell this great gets lost in all the bigger stuff. the total commitment. pic.twitter.com/XOjKGganUy

— killer spelled backwards (@ElHijoDelSimon) January 11, 2024

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.

the real stuff pic.twitter.com/15ytOpU3Wp

— killer spelled backwards (@ElHijoDelSimon) January 11, 2024

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.

****3/4

Batista vs. John Cena, WWE WrestleMania XXVI (3/28/2010)

This was for Batista’s WWE Title.

Maybe I am out to lunch, but I love this match.

It is entirely possible. I love lunch, ater all. I have never run into anybody who liked this match, or even just this match up as much as I do. It isn’t as flashy as Cena’s matches against independent greats or as ambitious as his work against smaller WWE project guys like Edge or Randy Orton, so combined with the two pay-per-view gimmick matches that followed this not being on the level of this or the inaugural SummerSlam 2008 meeting, it often gets forgotten. I’m not really even saying that it’s some top five Cena pairing (might not be top ten), but I’ve always had a real soft spot for this pairing, and especially for this match.

Narratively, I think it’s some of the better hand-in-glove, machine working like it’s supposed to, where the wrestlers and promotion find a wonderful mutually beneficial balance style work of Cena’s career as the Ace, and in Batista’s career period.

After finally collapsing under the weight of trying and failing to be The Man on Smackdown (mostly, save like a year on Raw where he broke Cena’s neck in what was previously their only ever meeting as top stars) for the last half-decade, Batista comes back around to steal the WWE Title from John Cena. What followed over the month between that and this was the greatest character run of Big Dave’s career, with no one ultra-memorable piece, but a ton of great little lines and the super super memorable SPOTLIGHT PLEASE bit. Not only was it super entertaining, Batista finally with something that felt like it genuinely suited him rather than trying to fit into a pre-ordained role, but the contrast provided made for a very very interesting story. In order to get the title back, Cena has something very sorely needed at this point, an entirely new challenge. Not only a guy who’s bigger, stronger, and who both beat and injured him in their only ever meeting, but the only real generation rival left (in the WWE), and a total character contrast in every way.

You don’t just get a chance at this every month, so for once I am not going to hurl the company under the bus (although with better planning and an ounce of care, they could have it far more often than they do), but it’s something close to the ideal situation, as a match that not only feels big in terms of the fight aspect of throwing stars at each other, but interesting from a character perspective too.

It’s, maybe secretly, one of the better WWE Title match builds of the entire decade.

The match itself also rules.

Cena and Batista succeed in large part because they either seem to know their limitations or simply have better judgment than most, both in terms of what’s best for them, but also given their spot on the card as the semi-main event. They are not interested in a whole lot of nearfalls or shortcuts, the drama of the thing is better served with just a few of them, and instead have the sort of match that, when done correctly, always impresses me so much.

Again, it’s that WCW main event style.

Huge momentum swings, what feels like very little wasted time or unnecessary movement, what feel like a constant attempt to be trying to win the match as quickly as possible as you imagine actual fighters might want to do if this shit was real, and above all, a real feeling of importance to everything. They nail every single important bit of a match like this from the obvious basic mechanical execution to the dramatic swings to the basic feeling of a match like this, with significant help from it happening in a gigantic stadium this time.

It’s always a pleasure when a match like this works out, and with these two, it ought not to be a surprise at all.

John Cena has had to — and will have to in the future — play to the egos and ambitions of others in many of his feature matches, but more than anyone to come along this century, he is such a Sting guy. Batista, a little more quietly, has always had the predisposition for this sort of wrestling in him too. The natural impulse is to look at the big Undertaker match from three years earlier, a tremendous display of huge momentum swings and a match where it always felt like every shot was a try at a finish,  but there’s a lot more on his resume that fits the bill when you dig into television work against CM Punk or MVP or Finlay. He needs a little help, but as a guy who is all big dramatic swings for way way way beyond the fences, he’s perfect for this. 

The match itself is relatively basic, but it all works like it should.

Big Dave overpowers Cena like before, but as a meaner version of himself, also attacks the neck he hurt a year and a half prior. The construction is especially impressive, not only never really letting Cena breathe or have a full comeback, but doing it in such a way that doesn‘t so much feel like they’re prolonging it and trying to subvert expectations, but feels like Batista simply has him figured out. Cena feel under the gun in a way he hasn‘t in a long time, not like the fake Overcoming The Odds stuff you would get against a Big Show or whoever that he was always going to beat, but in a way where the comeback feels like a real achievement.

Add in a few great cut-offs that Batista‘s size makes feel grosser than usual like the FU block into a DDT, along with the expected repeat of the mid-air Batista Bomb counter, all leading into a more final flurry, and they manage to thread they needle, creating a large scale struggle worthy of a huge building, but without the match ever feeling like it’s trying to be a Great Match, as so many others going forward would fail to do. 

Dave, in the end, makes the mistake he was always going to make as a wrestler and a character, and most importantly, it‘s also the exact one that John Cena would never make. 

He gets a little shaken up when the previous big move fails, tries to repeat the Batista Bomb without any variance in the set up or anything preceding it. In effect, getting lazy and leaning on natural advantages, while John Cena never does. He manages a shocking sunset flip counter to the third Batista Bomb, into the STFU, and while it‘s not the best possible finish to the match (top rope FU probably), it’s still a pretty great thematic end to the struggle when the big man taps out, rather than try to fight anymore. When faced with having to do real hard work, one of them kept going and the other one didn’t. Not everything ought to be so black and white, but in this case, with a hero and villain this great, it feels nearly exactly right. 

Cena overcomes a major setback that he couldn‘t in their first meeting, adapts to Batista in a way that Batista failed to adapt to him, and on the biggest show of the year, finds a way to achieve one of the few things he hadn‘t previously, through that wonderful combination of like mostly guts and enough brains to make it work. Ideal babyface stuff on display, showing once again that the simplest concepts not only can still work when done this correctly, but that more often than not, they’re the best concepts around.

The best match on the show.

***1/3

Brock Lesnar vs. John Cena, WWE Backlash 2003 (4/27/2003)

Commissions continue, this time from longtime friend/financial supporter of the blog, @beenthrifty. You can be like them and pay me to write about anything that you want. Usually, people just want wrestling matches, but you ought to not let that limit you if you have a mind for something more ambitious. You can purchase these things by going over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon, where reviews currently go for $5 per match (or $5 per half hour started, if you want a movie or TV episode or something, so like an 80 minute movie is $15). If you have a want for something that cannot just be solved by multiplying a number by five, drop into the DMs, and we can talk.

This was for Lesnar’s WWE Heavyweight Title.

Sure, yeah, it’s not even close to the level of the matches they would have against each other nine or eleven years later. It’s not the best match of the night (from my memory that’s Goldberg vs. The Rock, but hey, also maybe Team Angle vs. Los Guerreros, just looking at the card), let alone one of the best of the month, year, or decade. It’s not especially ambitious and it isn’t the smoothest match in the world, and if it’s great, it’s just barely great. But I liked it a lot.

Above all, it’s a pretty interesting match that feels so far away that it’s almost from another world.

Part of that comes down the pure optics of the thing.

Brock Lesnar as an old style white-meat pure athletics ass raw power babyface against John Cena, the opportunistic and ruthless young heel, both wildly different from what they would become. John Cena so much so that, literally, he comes out in a Yankees jersey to get heat in Boston in the sort of behavior he would later stand in total contrast to. Beyond just who they are, it’s also a fairly different match for what the WWE Title eventually became. Fifteen minutes of pure heel/face wrestling with some bloodletting, cheap heel bullshit, and very little in the way of nearfalls in the attempt to create drama, instead opting for a simple satisfying story.

The other thing is that, in a larger sense, it’s the sort of thing you just don’t see a lot of anymore in wrestling.

A hot young heel in John Cena with the best gimmick and promos in the company recently, getting the chance at something big as soon as they start to catch real fire, rather than having to prove something for like six months before even getting the chance. Even more than that, it’s quality micro and macro booking. Not only did this start with a smaller angle on TV three months earlier and bubble underneath an Angle/Lesnar WrestleMania program, but in the four weeks going into this match, an unproven Cena got television wins over Eddie Guerrero, The Undertaker, Chris Benoit, and Rhino. Only the last was clean, and there was interference against Undertaker, but as a young cheating heel, simply beating top guy through bullshit means is enough to constitute a quality build. To put a bow on it, while it seems simple — ambitious heel goes after the top babyface, gets half-legitimate upsets on the way there, opening up a “well, maybe” that makes this just interesting enough — it’s the sort of thing that you rarely see anymore, and a willingness to simply ride out the hot hand that can make wrestling so much fun.

Lesnar and Cena then also have a wrestling match, which is also pretty good.

Things don’t go perfectly smoothly. Lesnar is clearly still trying to put together a babyface comeback routine and Cena likewise hasn’t really nailed down his own routine in control yet. You watch this and you’re not only seeing two future all-time greats figuring out who they are by doing the opposite, but not really having nailed down who they are even as the opposite of who they’ll become. Still, there’s a real charm in that. Not just seeing Cena the heel, but Cena the heel working a heel routine from decades past, stalling and cheating and working a cut. Likewise, Brock working powerslams and spinebusters and really beating Cena’s ass and making him pay whenever possible, it’s so different, even from other Lesnar face work like the prestige suplex-fests against Angle. There’s a lot of character to a match like these from these two.

It’s pure formula from two wrestlers in roles that now feel wildly incorrect two decades and change later, having become all-timers in totally opposite positions of the ones held in this match, but the effort is there. Both from them and the promotion itself, giving them exactly enough time to try some stuff out, cutting them off before they get in over their heads, and most importantly, never trying to make this more than it is. Cena is legitimized by getting there and not getting murdered like last time, there’s no cause for him to kick out of anything, the joy in this moment is in Lesnar shutting him up, and in not overcomplicating the issue, the match succeeds at everything it wants to do.

Brock avoids the chain, hauls the little shit up for the F5, and that’s that.

Imperfect match, great pro wrestling.

John Cena vs Umaga, WWE New Years Revolution (1/7/2007)

It’s another piece of commissioned writing, this time again from friend of the program @beenthrifty on Twitter. You too have the ability to pay me to watch and write about whatever sort of wrestling you’d like, or I guess other stuff too, I’m not your father. Head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon to do that. The going rate is $5 per match, with an extra $3 tax if you’re purposely trying to make me suffer and hate-write something, because that’s just not a fun thing to do. Hit the DMs if you have an idea more complex than just counting the number of matches you want. 

This was for John Cena’s WWE Title.

It’s not the Cena vs. Umaga match, of course.

That doesn’t matter though, because this is still so god damned great. It lives in one of the biggest shadows in all of recent wrestling history, and it exists alongside a lot of matches like that. Usually, the matches that live in those shadows to this extent are rematches of these big iconic matches. Joe vs. Necro II, a Joe/Ki follow up years later in PWG, the “other” Punk vs. Cena matches. THINGS OF THAT NATURE. Usually, matches like that aren’t the sorts of things that we, or I, think of as tragically living in the shadow of another, because that shadow hasn’t been created just yet. This is a little bit different in that this not only comes first, but is also very much devoted to setting up the big one.

Usually, with a match that so obviously sets up another, it suffers from being held back and from obviously caring more about the future than the present.

Such is not the case with this match, which may be the most impressive thing at all.

The other most impressive thing here, on top of that, is that this match is clearly just their take on one of the oldest standards in the Great American Match Book, only to stand out because of the efficiency and force of talent that they play this particular edition with.

Nothing about this match reinvents the wheel.

Cena vs. Umaga is simply a modern re-emergence of the same medium vs. big match up that’s worked all throughout wrestling history. Lawler against all the Memphis monsters from Bigelow to Kamala to Gang. A billion Hulk Hogan matches. Bret Hart and Yokozuna. You might have a pet favorite here that you’d like to throw in, mine might be the brief CM Punk vs. Mark Henry series in 2012. The most famous example, or at least the most widely cited one, is the famous 1992-1995 series between Sting and Big Van Vader in WCW, given both the amount of times they got to have matches like this, the variety of different matches they got to have, and the regular quality of all of those matches (someone pay me to watch all of them and write about them on here).

So nothing about this is all that new or unique. It’s a wheel, innately, you kind of understand how and why it works.

This is, however, perhaps the best ever version of the wheel that we’ve ever seen.

You can argue Sting and Vader, for the reasons listed above. It’s an option I won’t dispute too heavily, although obviously the major Cena/Umaga match may be the best ever version of this sort of a thing, and this version of the Cena/Umaga match is still one that I think is better than almost every Sting vs. Vader match, save maybe one or two, and it’s not all that far of a gap. The Vader/Sting matches put an emphasis on excitement and action in a way that’s made them so durable, but also that sometimes undercuts the struggle of Sting, which isn’t so much the case here, in a match all about the struggle. Your mileage may vary on what’s better, but I prefer the struggle. I’m not quite ready to say Umaga is better than Vader, but in this series, he puts forward a better performance as a pure monster than I think I’ve seen Vader ever give, or that I’ve seen almost any wrestler in history ever give.

It’s all quite basic, what they do here, but I loved it. Even more than I remember, which was already quite a lot. I would have already gone to bat for this as one of the more underrated matches of the 2000s, but I came out of this second watch an even bigger fan of this iteration of the classic pairing.

The thing that works so well about this is how well they commit to every inch of it, and how much they get out of every single piece of the match. It’s a match in which all the pieces matter, and the sort of match that still floors and astounds me fifteen plus years later, because of all the things they did right or all the little extra touches that they put in that nobody would have ever expected or demanded out of them. It’s a match up that, based on their other work together and the work of both Cena and Umaga in matches like this, is probably always going to be great. The sheer EFFORT of this one in particular though is what makes this such a special match, despite the monolithic shadow it lives underneath.

If we can go back to the idea of this being a tried and true thing, there are certain beats you’re always going to find here. A struggle to lift the monster, a series of cut offs, Our Hero outmaneuvering and dodging the big guy, things of that nature. You’ll find all of that here, but it’s just so much tighter and done with so much more conviction than usual.

Really though, again, this match goes from “great” to “really really really great” because of all the small touches throughout the match. This is, as expected, where John Cena shines and really elevates the material. Between Umaga’s nerve hold and his work in the body, Cena is given so many chances to get creative with his selling, and it’s one of my favorite Cena selling performances ever. The way he sells nerve damage in the left shoulder minutes after the nerve hold is great in an obvious way, but the gem is the way he specifically sells the shoulder in the process of being hurt, showing it starting to become less useful, and trying to fight it, but ultimately not being able to. The joy can come from seeing the result of something, but there’s even more of it to be found in the process itself, and that’s maybe the most beautiful part of this match.

Somewhat less flashy is his response to the body work, but there’s something so charming about the way he repeatedly takes moments where the big guy is down to stretch on the ropes or walk around weird. It’s not exactly the old Bret Hart thing, but there’s some shared DNA to it, going about the motions without making a huge show of it, but communicating in a relatable working-man sort of a way that you are not healthy at all.

Both of these aspects contribute greatly to the one overarching theme of the match, the thing that this match commits its whole entire ass to, and that does so much for them as a result.

John Cena cannot handle Umaga.

That’s the story of the match, it’s what they come back to time and time again. A lot of other wrestlers and matches would betray that so as to try and have a Great Match, but thankfully, someone realized that with wrestlers this great (and also this over in their roles), that you can have an actual great match simply by letting it be. Commit fully to the bit, and achieve something wonderful.

Cena never even makes a real comeback, at least in the way that we have this idea of the John Cena comeback. He lifts him once for the Proto Bomb, but never for a slam, and never for the Attitude Adjustment, then the FU. There’s this great thing they do where Cena’s hope spots become bigger and longer, but still always get cut off, and in increasingly brutal ways. It’s not a unique idea for John Cena, it’s a formula he’s employed to greater success than most, but it’s done especially well here. Not in all the most creative ways exactly, but in the most effective ways, so as to illustrate the severity of his challenge and the steep climb ahead of him just to avoid losing.

Umaga isn’t quite as great as Cena in 2007 — really only the greatest of all time and a handful of others were — but he is remarkable here. He stumbles, staggers, and eventually bumps without losing anything. His offense is nasty as hell, real crisp, but also interesting. Never repetitive or dull, and really incredible at selling on Cena’s occasional comebacks. He immediately seems to get Cena’s mindset of always doing more and more with the hope spots, always selling just a little more each time, before an even bigger cut off.

Two perfect performances that match up this well together is a rare thing, one that I think John Cena’s only ever found once or twice outside of these 2007 Umaga matches, and it leads to a kind of perfect synchronicity here. Two wrestlers, at the peaks of their powers, with the same exact ideas and visions, coming together to create something really really special.

At the end, removed of the full use of his left arm, and with his ability to lift PERIOD hindered, Cena is left with only his wits about him. One might not expect much in the moment, after Cena’s career so far has been largely predicated on strength and power, but he’s able to dodge Umaga once in the corner, kick him back again, and get a real high stack roll up to just barely survive.

The perfect ending to a match like this, adding a new dimension to the superhero babyface.

You can craft a thousand stories to tell me someone is tough and powerful and cool, but what a hundred other things couldn’t do, this match does. It’s one thing to be shouted at that John Cena is this or that, but this is a match that actually bothers to show it. He’s a survivor, not because he took a lot and fought back and won with what he always wins with, but because he was outmanned and slowly had all of his weapons taken from him, only to not give up and to find a way in spite of that. As opposed to so much other early Ace Cena booking, this is one of the first signs of the sort of real and genuine heroics that would go on to make him one of the best of all time.

It’s not the best version of this. You went into this review knowing that, I went into this viewing knowing that. That’s not the end of the world. Given how great the follow up to this match was, all that really means is that on this night, a near-perfect pairing simply had a really great match and not, you know, one of the greatest matches in wrestling history.

***1/2

Shawn Michaels vs. Mankind, WWF IYH: War Games (9/22/1996)

Back to that Black Friday Sale commission work. This one comes from Darren. You too can buy a review of any match you’d like over at www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon at $5 per match. If you’d like more (or less? I can review parts of a match if you are short on cash?), we can negotiate in the DMs. 

This was for Michaels’ WWF Title.

To get it out of the way, yeah, there’s a bullshit finish. I don’t especially care. I think this is a great enough match to where the lack of a real finish simply means this can’t be even greater than it already is. Given that we get twenty five plus minutes of what this looks like before than and given that it comes right about at what would logically be the end of the match, it doesn’t feel like I was robbed in any way. To me, nothing fundamentally changes about the way I view this match because it ended with a disqualification instead of a pinfall. It’s the right fight to have a lot of times, especially with regards to matches in this company, but it doesn’t feel like much of a real issue here.

As for the match, it’s one of the all time conundrums.

Here, we have a match in which work on the hand plays a major role in how the match unfolds later on, hitting on not only a WHAT IS THE NAME OF THIS BLOG? level but also hitting on one of those other little tropes I love a lot, a match suddenly changing at an unexpected moment as a consequence of something that happened.

On the other hand, it’s a Shawn Michaels match.

However, this is one of the best Shawn Michaels matches ever.

It’s not exactly a secret that I don’t like Shawn Michaels.

Much of that specifically has to do with his second run, which I find overrated to the point of feeling gaslit sometimes. It’s not to say he’s never had good matches, but it’s a career of stuff that I rarely loved, while seeing these stunning reactions. That and everything he did personally, including the obviously fake back injury and cloaking himself in a cross upon return. While the first run evoked the same hyperbolic praise that one is accustomed to with most periods of Shawn’s career, the two years or so prior to his back “injury” in 1998 saw the best versions of Shawn that could have ever existed, and are the only two years of his career that I have very little issue with. The 1997-98 bad guy run in particular is the best work of Shawn’s career, as it felt like the only Shawn run ever when he was actually being true to himself (that is, a appallingly loud and obnoxious piece of shit), but 1996 saw most of the best babyface work of Shawn’s career as well, despite unbelievably offputting things like ending pay-per-views by stripping and having Vince McMahon on commentary with off-the-charts levels of lust in his eyes and voice for everything Shawn did.

In a near career year, this is the best of all of those matches, and the best match Shawn Michaels ever had as a theoretical good guy.

The trick, shockingly, is that this doesn’t look much like a Shawn Michaels match at all.

For once when tasked with someone different or who doesn’t fit perfectly into some Shawn Michaels bullshit epic, Shawn’s response isn’t to try and shove them into his match anyways regardless of what the opponent does well. Mick Foley isn’t going to fit into a normal Shawn Michaels match, and so this is something different. For once (outside of working with friends, in which case he’ll move heaven and Earth to accommodate them and shine them up), it’s Shawn Michaels crafting a match around what someone else can do and the gifts that they have. So here we have a more grounded, more of a sprawling sort of a match, and definitely one with more thought put into it than usual.

After a hot start, Shawn begins using Mankind’s manic nature against him and wrestling a smarter match than usual. He suplexes Mankind on the floor once and his leg hits the steps. Much later in the match, he barely avoids the Mandible Claw two or three times, and then attacks the right hand. Beyond the desperation present in these attacks that makes this match feel different and like a real challenge that puzzles Michaels, it’s also something that succeeds because of the way it’s done. Shawn Michaels is not so smart that he necessarily plans to trip Mankind up, outmaneuver him, and take a leg away and then go to the hand to disable the Mandible Claw, but smart enough that when things happen, he takes advantage of them. It’s a great choice, because while the former wouldn’t feel quite right and is much more of a Bret Hart style attack, Shawn Michaels succeeding because he’s a lucky opportunist is exactly on the nose enough to play as genuine.

What also plays as especially smart is that while Shawn is capable of exploiting situations in front of him, he’s not an actual technician and has no follow through. Mankind is hurt, but the whole deal is that he has a higher pain threshold than anyone else in wrestling. When he can do things like get Shawn off the leg, Shawn never goes back to it. He’s so rattled by Mankind doing things like using a ringside casket as a weapon or being willing to do things out in the aisle that he never goes back to the leg. The same thing comes with the hand, as Mankind does every other move he can think of and even, stunningly, a try at a fancy cradle. It’s both an incredibly neat way to tell the story but also a perfect explanation for why a scatter-brained mostly-flash wrestler like Shawn Michaels would go back to the work he knows.

As one may be able to tell, this all succeeds to the level it does because of Mankind.

He’s incredible here, a virtuoso performance in terms of this sort of a thing. When the matches takes different directions, such as focusing on his knee or later on his hand, he spends the rest of the match still focused on these things and never allowing them to fade out of mind. They’re pieces here that could easily become elements that feel like a waste of time in the hands of someone far lesser, but Foley is always hobbled because of the knee from that moment on. With regards to the hand, he doesn’t go out of his way or make a show like with the constant hobbling, but he holds his hand in a certain way that feels real and natural as someone who’s hurt a hand and still had to work with it. A clear effort to keep it as still and tight to the body as possible, whenever possible. More than that, the choices he makes on offense to sell the Mandible Claw being taken away are the exact sorts of interesting approaches that I wish more people would take. It’s more than just communicating that this is physically disabling, it’s the thought about how this changes the match.

It’s not just one great approach to selling that Mankind takes in this match, it’s two of them, and he does them both perfectly.

That isn’t to say that Shawn is worthless here or that this is some kind of masterful one man performance from Foley in which he weaves something beautiful around Shawn Michaels which renders Shawn as little more than a piece of the set. That’s not fair. Shawn’s good here. He’s not asked to do too much more than his usual pieces of offense and simple work in terms of the new directions the match takes, but he turns in one of his better performances anyways. He’s able to nail all the character beats well and the moments where they’re not on the same page and just trade these great punches and scuffle about are the rare time when Shawn being a real shithead actually benefits the match.

For once, everything works.

It’s another example of what happens when the machine runs like it’s supposed to. An interesting match and an interesting story, not only with people who have the abilities needed to pull it off, but shape the story to those abilities. Mankind turns in perhaps his best antagonistic performance ever, and I’ve never seen a Shawn Michaels match with him cast as the hero in which he delivered a performance as good as the one here. It’s a match clearly designed to establish toughness in him as he’s able to use Mankind’s game against him in the end with the table spot and superkicking a chair into Mick’s face right before the non-finish, but honestly, it works. At least in this moment, it does. He’s not Bret Hart, he’s not John Cena, he’s no Punk or Bryan, but for once, he captures that sort of a classic champion feeling. Catering the match to an opponent, coming off as an actual blue collar wrestling champion instead of the fortunate Golden Boy he often comes across as, and wrestling a match with thought to it. For once, he feels like the sort of babyface I could actually like. It’s the highest compliment I could ever give him.

Fittingly, the one time Shawn Michaels conducts himself like a top babyface worth cheering for, it results in one of the best matches of his life.

****1/4

Yokozuna vs. Bret Hart, WWF House Show (1993)

Another Black Friday Sale commission here from the man Big E. Vil. You too can pay me to watch and review basically anything over at www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. That’s $5 per match, and if you have designs on other things like a series of matches or a full show, we can talk about it in the DMs.

This was a steel cage match for Yokozuna’s WWF Title.

I strongly suspect that my dear old online friend Biggie meant to request their famous MSG fancam cage match from August 13th, 1993. I know it’s one of his favorites. Before I had this blog or a Twitter account and we were just sending each other match recommendations on a message board like 10 or 11 years ago, he put me onto that one, and I liked it a lot. Either that or the one that was taped for Coliseum Video during their run of house show cage matches in the late summer and fall of 1993.

HOWEVER.

He sent the link to this instead, a cage match with a shorter runtime than the MSG fancam and with Bret in different gear and shot from another angle. So it’s clearly not that match. I looked on cagematch and even put my guy/our friend the robot Cody (@The_Corwo on twitter) on the hunt, as he has a knack for hunting things down when even I can’t find them. We were able to rule out 9/11 in Boston as this is obviously not the Boston Garden, and he also ruled out 9/12 in Springfield, MA. His best guess was 8/19/1993 in Stockton, CA, which is a fairly good guess as a lot of 1990s WWF house show fancams came out of Stockton. However given that I don’t know for sure

It’s probably not what he intended, but it is the match I’m watching.

As expected, it’s a blast.

These two are a lot of fun together. I don’t think they ever had the ideal match they seemed capable of, but these cage matches feel like the best version of Yokozuna as champion. Yokozuna’s a textbook guy who had awesome squashes but was less productive in “real” matches, but in these house show matches against Bret (and later in his team with Owen Hart in 1995), we see what he could have been all the time. He’s particularly great at showing ass for the top babyface without undercutting his entire monster deal, equally as capable of Bret dodging him for a big momentum swing as he is cutting him off with the simplest thing in the world. To the match’s credit, they’re great at mixing up whether or not the cut off comes from Fuji’s interference outside or by Yokozuna doing it cleanly, a great little wrinkle that adds to the mountain that Bret has to climb.

For his part, Bret is as great as always, and while I like Yoko, you’re not going to find great 20+ minute Yokozuna matches against anyone else. The composition is immaculate, and Bret’s performances in these matches are quietly among his best. Bret’s equally sympathetic and energetic. Equally as capable of looking like he’s about to lose as he is looking a move away from victory. Especially electric are the moments where he gets Yoko reeling before getting the knockdown. It’s an impressive thing that they’re able to go to the well as often as they are without it getting too old, and it’s just as impressive how many different ways they have of doing what’s essentially the same spot.

It’s a house show though, and this only ends one way. Bret’s cut off at the top of the cage by Fuji with the powder to the eyes, and he’s slowed just enough for Yokozuna to make it out the door to hang onto the title yet again.

A not unbelievable amount of fun as you should have always had those expectations sky high, but a ton of fun none the less.

three boy

Bobby Lashley vs. Drew McIntyre, WWE WrestleMania 37 Night One (4/10/2021)

This was for Abobo’s WWE Title.

The highlight of the first hour of this show was less so this match and the half hour preceding it, in which they had to stall for a weather delay before Vince finally just insisted the show went on anyways despite all the rain. A great show of who had it on the fly (Kevin Owens mainly) and who absolutely didn’t (Seth Rollins, still one of the worst talkers in the history of media).

As for the match, I can tell you with great certainty that it happened.

It definitely took place. Not bad, not especially great, but functional and fine. A return to form, which is to say mediocre to good but in front of people (non-hostages) this time.

The best version of this is eight minutes of bombs and some prop bumps but yeah whatever. The second half of this got closer, as Drew hit a big silly dive and they traded cool power moves. But on the whole, it’s that classic thing they do of adding too much onto a thing that seems very self evident. It’s the WWE. People get shoved into boxes they don’t fit into. Interesting edges get rounded off so they can it into the shapes that one (1) person in the world finds more interesting and sexually exciting. You get what you get outside of that. Sometimes it’s a match being good. Other times it’s a good heel keeping the title and one of these unbearable anointed ones eating shit for a moment, however brief.

 

Randy Orton vs. Daniel Bryan, WWE Hell in a Cell (10/27/2013)

This was a Hell in a Cell match for the vacant WWE Title.

Shawn Michaels is also the special guest referee, which feels very fair given that the last time he was a referee, he interfered in the match to try and help Triple H achieve his goals, and that he has a near fifteen year history of doing that.

This is the forgotten match between these two. Given that these two face off fairly regularly from June 2013 through April 2014, it’s entirely fair to have some matches fall through the gaps. It’s especially fair when that series features two (2) long television matches, a famous television gimmick match, several legendary angles, and a WrestleMania main event. Relative to that, this is a fall pay-per-view match with some bullshit attached to it, and which is marred by everyone getting mad at it for the WWE clearly trying to move on from Bryan and trying to end the feud here. It also is probably like the fourth best one on one match they had during that span of time, and never really has that big time run at the end and feels distinctly unfinished, but does so in a cool way.

Fortunately, this is a great enough pairing to have a great match just by virtue of having fifteen to twenty minutes to work with before that!

It’s Bryan’s first time inside the Cell and he puts on a totally manic performance. Gross throws into it, hurling his body at Randy against it, and even has the courage to miss a Tope Suicida and cream himself on the cell wall. Inexplicable that he had a broken neck a little over six months later. Orton spends most of this in control, but without breaking out any of his biggest offense yet. Shawn and Randy have tension over basically nothing, so Triple H meanders down to yell at Shawn. He accidentally gets hit when he pays more attention to his friend than the match, and the Cell is magically opened so that he can come in.

Bryan sees Hunter there, correctly assumes the worst, but falls for the ruse and gets Hunter with the knee finally after two and a half months. Shawn sees it, is actually fine and required no attention at all, and hits Bryan with the fucking kick and Orton pins Bryan to regain the title.

Shawn Michaels is too stupid of a character to have planned this, I think, but it feels deeply obvious that he got played once again from the guy who’s been using him for eighteen years now. Or maybe not! Shawn then pretends to be very sad the next night and showed up with “he’s my best friend” as an excuse, even saying explicitly that Hunter needed him to be there for him before slowly revealing more and more of himself, getting less sympathetic and more condescending, before Bryan grabs him and yanks him down into the hold until referees pull him off. The way Shawn talked the night after, it all felt like a plot, but it didn’t feel like one in the match itself. Or maybe that’s just a great plot. Who knows? At this point, they’re doing so well with all the different conspiracies, especially the double-crooked ref angle in September, that yeah, sure, fine. I don’t know. Either way, fuck him. Bryan snatching that motherfucker down into the hold and making him tap felt fantastic.

It’s another screwjob, and the fact that they followed up Bryan finally attacking this fucking loser by shunting him off into a Wyatt Family feud to try and stop this is FASCINATING. It’s basically the fall 1998 Steve Austin storyline, your top babyface gets screwed and screwed and finally looks ejected from the title picture before coming back to it for Mania. Again, to think you can start that process and then bail halfway through is one of the most arrogant things ever in the history of the company.

Again though, it’s very to stay mad when absolutely none of it works.

I usually say it about the WWE doing dumb stuff and you having to accept it because fuck, it’s the WWE, right, but it goes the other way here. You started something with Bryan. There are ways to eject on it, but screwing him over in story and throwing him aside isn’t it. They’ve gone too far now to back out without outright beating him clean, and with all the injuries, they’re too scared. Something was started, they don’t know how to stop momentum like this anymore, and it’s going to be seen through whether they like it or not.

You can’t half do it here. They paid their money at SummerSlam and they got in line with all the stuff in the fall.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

***

 

John Cena vs. Daniel Bryan, WWE SummerSlam (8/18/2013)

This was for Cena’s WWE Title.

Most unfortunately, John Cena has a fucked up left elbow and he’s gutting through this before taking time off. In some way it telegraphs the proceedings, but the existence of both Money in the Bank contracts allows enough wiggle room in the moment for it to not be completely obvious. Another piece of that is the voice in the back of your head. The one that exists to temper your most fantastical expectations. The one that tells you to calm down, because the best wrestler in the world is NOT going to beat a classical WWE Ace, especially cleanly, no matter how good the build is. Hogan never really put over Savage or Flair or Hart. Austin or Rock never cleanly put over Benoit or Guerrero.

No matter how clearly and purposefully the build and the last four months seemed to point in one direction…you know, fucking chill out. This is how people get their hearts broken.

Or is it?

I badly wish the match lived up to the build up or to the occasion.

I have for years.

I’ve felt disconnected with this match for close to eight years as, despite loving both of these men individually and loving the thing that they built together, I don’t love this match. I’ve always wanted to, but on a third watch, it still just didn’t do it for me beyond a sort of base level you’d expect from the literal greatest professional wrestler of all time and a fellow top thirty to forty guy too. In a lot of ways, it’s similar to the sort of 2015 and beyond PWG JAWN stuff that I don’t entirely love.

It’s much more forgivable here on account of the one arm.

And yet, it’s the sort of pure back and forth movefest sort of spotfest that feels beneath each man, and like the sort of thing they showed themselves better than twelve months before with a vicious and delightful television match. All in all, it feels like it suffers from Cena’s injury, but only ever on a micro level. Bryan has been better than a match like this for something like eleven or twelve years now. John Cena has gotten more than this from infinitely worse wrestlers than Bryan too. It’s not a mindless match, but it’s a dumber and far less considered match than these two showed themselves capable of twelve and a half months prior. And yet, within those confines, it somehow isn’t quite dumb enough? It feels stuck between two worlds. A pure bombfest that just sort of exists, not dumb enough to be the most bombastic version of what Cena’s future versions of this would become and not smart enough to stand above their previous work together. I don’t really see what anyone loves about this one, I think so so much of the praise here is just elation about the result. I absolutely get it, but in a world where Bryan has since gone on to win more World Titles and even a WrestleMania main event, I don’t think we need to prop this up as a singular match anymore.

I’ve never totally been able to square away the quality of this match on a bell to bell level with all of the things it got right in the build up and then on a larger scale. Because parts of this land perfectly. The most obvious and overt thing is the follow up to the “PARODY OF A WRESTLER” interview by Cena instigating a slap fight to prove himself once and for all, as the end of this two year journey that began at Money in the Bank 2011. You also have all of these wonderful little touches that I loved, and that I wish came together in more of a coherent package. The ways in which Cena is constantly one-upped and topped. The ways Bryan is stuffed and shut down, only to find new avenues and to find new pieces of offense, Most importantly, the way Cena avoids ever giving up the big finisher kickout, but still comes out of this feeling wholly and completely defeated.

In the end, Bryan simply outdoes Cena.

There is no major counter. There is no significant moment to it. On some level, I wish there was. To their credit though, they think less of the match and more of the future. Less about the dramatic quality of the match in the moment and more about what the most impactful way to do the thing is. For as much as CM Punk gained in the last two years from being ready and prepared and having big counters ready to go, I’m not sure that Bryan doesn’t wind up gaining even more through casually just being presented as better than John Cena in this match. He avoids the big impact finish. Their submissions seem to counter each other out. And most importantly, he has a second option while Cena is at a loss, and the running knee aka Busaiku Knee Strike not only gives Bryan the impactful win, but gains him the largest prize of his career.

No bullshit to it. Not even a minor distraction. Cna’s arm is hurt, but because of the way the match it worked, it never quite seems to matter. Bryan goes after it once, and it doesn’t exactly set up the finish. Cena rarely ever seems to be bothered by it in the match. When he loses, the arm never feels responsible, it feels like a loss that he was always going to take, and again, it’s majorly to their credit that they did this instead of a more obvious thing that would have muddied the waters. It’s the cleanest loss of Cena’s career, for another twelve months, and comes at the perfect time to make the absolute most of it.

For the next seven or eight months at least, the torch is passed.

I certainly do not believe the WWE intended for this match to operate as such. Perhaps they felt Cena’s bum elbow would be enough to provide him an out. It’s a credit to Cena for rarely selling it and to Bryan for rarely working it, resulting in this obvious injury never once feeling like a reason Cena lost. And yet, it’s one of the only times in the entire history of the company where this happened.

Like when he became the first man to beat The Shield, or like when he finally overcame Sheamus or Randy Orton, intent doesn’t really matter all that much. For the first time ever, John Cena drops an entirely clean victory to someone who wasn’t already established by the time he became The Man.

The result is that now, even more than with Punk’s slightly more questionable win twenty five months previously, Bryan now comes off as the guy. If not that, then as Batista did when he cleanly beat Cena at SummerSlam five year prior in the last 100% clean loss, at least as a complete equal.

It doesn’t matter what comes after this.

It doesn’t matter that Triple H reveals his duplicity by attacking Bryan and allowing handpicked protégé Randy Orton to cash in his Money in the Bank to steal the title. It doesn’t matter when the next night on Raw, Triple H goes on for a third of an hour and discusses how the WWE doesn’t want certain sorts of wrestlers to be their champions, or that The Shield reveals an alliance with Triple H and the McMahons, implying a long scale conspiracy to rob CM Punk against The Rock all along. None of it matters, because of what happened in this match. Whatever happens following Bryan’s knee is once again overpowered by Cena the next night on Raw literally handing the microphone off to Bryan and declaring him, in front of the people, God, and the audience in perpetuity, as the rightful champion. Yet again, what the WWE is too cowardly to do, John Cena seems to go out of his way to get done on his own.

It isn’t quite in the same ballpark as the other most obtrusive match in the WWE in the first part of the decade, but the result is largely the same. John Cena sneaks one in with the help of an all-time independent wrestling darling, and this time with the bullshit entirely confined to after the bell, passes the torch in near totality, only ever picking it back up following horrific injury.

The match isn’t half as good as everything surrounding it, but if it was, it would be the greatest match of all time.

***

John Cena vs. Mark Henry, WWE Money in the Bank (7/14/2013)

This was for Cena’s WWE Title, and happened as a result of the infamous Salmon Suit Angle.

These two both became actual great wrestlers around the same time in early 2006, and since then, this has seemed like a can’t-miss pay per view match. It felt like the window closed when Mark Henry got hurt in 2012 after the stellar three-match series against CM Punk, but luckily, we get it here at the last possible moment in which it could have still been great, and it is REALLY fucking great. There’s some weird revisionist history where now Henry HAS TO WIN or else his career was shit when this was already sort of the deal in the fall of 2011 when he won the Big Gold Belt, but like always, you should put absolutely zero stock in the WWE party line. Enjoy for what it is and what the wrestlers themselves put in front of you, because this is a blast.

It’s classic Cena vs. Monster stuff, first of all. A formula that so rarely ever comes up short. Sadly, it feels very much like the condensed version of that. It’s the sort of formula that usually requires two or three matches to get the full measure of, but we only get the one here. Given what comes next for Cena, it’s very very very very hard to get mad at this feud being a little bit truncated, but it’s also always going to be a thing that I think about with this match.

Just how good would their Last Man Standing match have been?

It doesn’t matter, worrying about those sorts of things will drive you insane. It’s the WWE. Consider what you got and be happy something as good and untainted as this got through. It’s pure title match stuff. Cena can’t lift Mark until he can. Cena can’t manage the size until he can. Mark isn’t what he was as a brick wall in years past, this isn’t quite on the level of Henry’s work in this role against Rey Mysterio, Matt Hardy, Finlay, etc. in the 2000s or CM Punk or Daniel Bryan in the last two years, but there’s enough there for this to work, because so much of it is mental. He’s lumbering when he has to be and selectively and relatively fast when a situation calls for it. There’s never a moment of this when he doesn’t seem both dangerous and capable of beating John Cena.

For Cena’s part, it’s classic Ace stuff. Very few in Cena’s role in WWE history have had as firm a grasp on all the little things like John Cena does. The selling is superb of course. Not just of the size difference or the harm done to his back by Henry’s attack, but in small details too. I’ve never been so easily impressed by big flashy vanity sells, but something as small and miniscule as the way Cena pushes his palm against his knee when he’s trying to lift the big guy up on his shoulders really got me here. Once again it’s the sort of little touch that makes it feel real because it’s the sort of thing someone would do it this was real.

The match winds up being another of these things in the WWE over 2013 and the first half of 2014 that is weirdly faithful to history and that makes a lot of sense. Henry tries to suffocate Cena slowly after quickly setting the tone with a show of force like he did to Randy Orton, not slowly inching in like he’s done against smaller guys. It’s a cool little touch and for anyone paying as much attention as me (note: you should not do this), it’s a nice callback to Henry’s previous kayfabe greatest performance, the only other match where he’s won a major WWE title. The attention to history and story doesn’t stop there though, as Henry winds up losing the match for the same reasons he got the match, and it’s this lack of confidence.

Cena kicks out of the World’s Strongest Slam, and Henry can’t handle it. He loses focus and tries to get there with trickery now. He brings in chairs to distract the ref so he can use a revealed steel turnbuckle, only for it not to work and for Cena to send him into the steel turnbuckles instead. Sadly, it’s not the finish, despite making the most thematic sense, but it’s a great little spot in here. Cena’s able to escape a repeat WSM attempt after that, before getting down into the STF for the win.

Not all that it maybe could have been, but a match that I’m so happy that we finally got to see on a more major level.

***1/4