Max though is more age appropriate, where Punk now has that weird thing where a guy who is approaching 50 all of a sudden has a better head of hair than he had at 35. Better than most people have at 35 for that matter.

all these promotions can't produce the matches that AEW does on the regular so it makes sense to so they're going to try a different route but also what they think of as their storytelling is usually actually far worse than their matches

it might be tolerable if five different promotions hadn't already declared they were going to focus on storyline in response to AEW and none of them ever produced a good story. pretty sure NWA promised to focus on storytelling, maybe Control Your Narrative did too, where are all these good stories

Anyway, I guess to sum up I'd say that Cena is an all time great, but certainly not the greatest of all time. The tragedy is that I think he had the tools to actually BE the GOAT but they were half squandered. But he was so talented that they couldn't be squandered completely.

Cena is an apologist for his powerful rapist boss buddy, but the prior generational ace beat women and the one before that was an unrepentant racist so uh, I guess that counts for progress in today's world? Kind of? Help me here

In terms of generational top stars Cena was the "Best soldier" that WWF/WWE ever had. There's good and bad to that. PR machine. Kind of robotic. The least selfish. Never had a messy temporary breakup with the promotion.

Even just within his home promotion, Hogan and Austin were undeniably more important. Hogan's boom turned WWF national and Austin's boom brought it back to power. Cena never triggered a boom, he captained a ship with little competition through calm waters.

I don't think he's the greatest wrestler of all time or close to it, but he should be in every HOF as a slam dunk. Despite what people might tell you this week, he is absolutely not the most important wrestler in history, that is fucking insane. You can argue he's not top 10.

He had the charisma and size/body/look that he could've given far less effort than he did in the ring and gotten away with it, but instead he busted his ass for most of his career and kept striving to do more there even after he had the top spot. He deserves huge credit for that.

The heel run of Cena kind of sums up his career: He rarely had the special ability to take bad, D-level material and make it good, but he did have the special ability to survive being in D-level shit and come out unscathed.

"John Cena Sr. recalls encouraging Mercedes Mone on indies" was also an honest to God headline today. Not John Cena. His Dad.

I'd also say that house shows pay long term dividends in terms of developing talent and testing ideas, but I wrote a whole column about that.

www.patreon.com/posts/burnin...

And from a cold business perspective, they're probably right. When you make so much money from TV deals, risking market burn out or injuries for shows that aren't part of those deals is penny wise/pound foolish. But it still sucks.