If I Can Be Serious For A Moment 08.10.09: You Really Can’t See Him

BANNER!

It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! It’s…SuperCena!

It’s not often that the WWE commentators make a statement with which I agree. In recent months I’ve found their attempts at banter to be largely forced and unfunny, and their observations about talent to be marketing guff. Gorilla, Jesse, Roddy and Bobby they are not. However when JR and Michael Cole refer to John Cena as the most polarizing WWE superstar ever, they are only slightly exaggerating. There have been more popular faces, more hated heels. You’ve had people like Bret Hart, who were hated in the US but blew the roof off with cheers in any other country. Cena’s different. When I do the pay per view reports, I always mention the approximate percentage of cheers to boos, and it varies wildly from city to city. Even the internet fans are split on the man that is arguably the face of WWE today. Why is there such a dichotomy? Why aren’t WWE addressing it?

From Ruthless Aggression to Hustle, Loyalty and Respect

John Cena’s debut was a little more auspicious than that of his nemesis, Randy Orton. What’s hard to believe is that it was a full 7 years ago. Kurt Angle was in one of his “open challenge” periods and was looking to show everyone just what “ruthless aggression” was all about. Here it is, for those who’ve forgotten:

Despite this promising start, Cena was bland. Like a lot of people who came up at the same time, they had no real gimmick or character to speak of, and were all about displaying “ruthless aggression”, Vince’s new buzzword at the time. The West Newbury native would feud with Chris Jericho before teaming with Billy Kidman in a tag team title tournament. When the pairing lost in the first round, Cena would turn on Kidman, thus becoming a heel. He remained gimmickless until a Halloween episode of Smackdown produced this:

Although some people have claimed that the gimmick shift was due to an overwhelming reaction to Cena’s costume and much pleading from Cena himself, it seems clear that the plan all along was to turn Cena into a freestyle rapper. Before long he would be saddled with Bull Buchanan, now rechristened “B-Squared”, who lasted only slightly longer as Cena’s enforcer than Red Dogg, who would become Rodney Mack. Cena would start wearing throwback jerseys, normally for the rival team of whatever city he was in at the time. During this period we saw the first hints of division in the fans as some of the “smart” internet fans started cheering for Cena’s freestyle raps. His star was rising so quickly that he got a brief title feud with Brock Lesnar in February of 2003. This feud is the one that gave us the F-U, which was named as a mockery of Lesnar’s F-5 finisher. I couldn’t find a clip where the announcers actually tell us the name, but I’m fairly sure it was after this:

By the time Survivor Series rolled around, the reaction to Cena was so favourable that he was turned face again, joining Team Angle against Team Lesnar. Cena would end up as one of the two survivors of the match, along with Chris Benoit. He has stayed face ever since.

This also marked the start of the decline of the Doctor of Thuganomics in the eyes of the smart fans. Cena would start a feud with Big Show, which led to him winning and then customising/defacing the US Title in the now-(in)famous spinner style. Some people were displeased with “his” decision to do that to a belt with so much heritage, if a belt awarded to a chosen wrestler in a fixed “sport” can be said to have a heritage. His film The Marine was a harmless action romp that met with some fierce dislike from wrestling fans, thus alienating him from another segment of the audience. When he made it to the main event of WrestleMania, a spinner version of the WWE Championship followed. Soon after, as the first One Night Stand PPV approached, the boos in the audience for John Cena were becoming audible on air. This was despite his refusal to join the invasion of One Night Stand by WWE talent. Many attribute this dip in popularity to Cena’s move to Raw, which meant that his raps had to be toned down for a live show. As the risqué raps were what got him his following in the first place, this reasoning makes sense. The FCC had already made some waves about some of Cena’s more questionable freestyles while he was still on SmackDown though, so to blame it on Raw seems a little harsh. The situation got worse and worse throughout the next 12 months, forcing the announcers to acknowledge it on air and to try and find a reason for it. It did nothing but worsen the effect though, culminating at the second One Night Stand:

Despite continuing to polarise the crowd, Cena has not experienced a reaction like that since. For a long time WWE fought the crowd reaction, booking Mr Word Life against nefarious characters and evil foreigners, but the reaction to his opponent seemed to have little effect on the reaction to Cena himself. Feuds with King Booker, Khali, Umaga and Randy Orton did nothing to improve the situation. That brings us to the current day, when we’re still faced with John Cena beating almost everyone that is put in front of him with little effort, all the while cutting promos that sound scripted and appearing on every possible media outlet to promote WWE and its products.

Hustle. Loyalty. Reject.

John Cena is far from the only wrestler to elicit a mixed reaction from a crowd. Indeed, some of the biggest faces in recent history only became faces because the crowd started loving them when they were heels: both The Rock and Stone Cold fall into this category. Even more recently we’ve seen fans start to cheer for MVP, Mr Kennedy, Umaga and John Morrison before they had been turn face, either causing WWE to turn them or caused by WWE’s decision to turn them subtly. Unlike all of these guys (except Umaga, who never fully turned face), the mixed reaction to Cena has continued for over three and a half years, and in that he is unique.

Not only has the reaction continued, but it’s feeding itself and at this point is self-perpetuating. The more the Cena fans cheer him, the madder the haters get. How dare these ignorant, clueless marks have an opinion of their own, and worse yet an opinion that is not the same as theirs? Don’t they know that as smart fans, we know everything about who to cheer for, and Cena isn’t it? Let’s boo louder! CENA SUCKS! Of course, for their part the Cena fans hear this, and they too get mad. How could these unwashed, pony-tailed basement-dwelling geeks tell us who to cheer? This guy is cool, he wins all the time and he’s funny and he doesn’t break the rules! What a great role model! Let’s Go Cena!

Look at pro sports. A lot of people who did not grow up in an area where there was a professional team will support the teams they see winning: the Yankees, Manchester United, the Lakers, the Patriots. They don’t know why they’re supporting that team, but why not? I mean, what sense does it make to root for a team that isn’t winning? By and large these people are casual sports fans, the ones who don’t appreciate the nuances of good play. They just like seeing people they like winning. The Doctor of Thuganomics falls into this category, without question.

Not only is the reaction feeding itself, but the writers are feeding it too. The harder they tried to make everyone love Cena, the more people in one segment of the audience resented it, making them boo even louder. This started off as the opposite of what they wanted, but now I’m not so sure.

If You Can’t Beat Them, Work Them

In recent months, I’ve noticed a subtle change in the way the Chain Gang Commander is being handled. Instead of doing everything they can to stop the “smart” fans from hating him while the women and children love him, Creative seem to be focused on driving a wedge into the emerging schism and widening it. Whatever else you can say about some of Creative’s decisions, I don’t believe they are always stupid. You cannot manufacture the kind of heat that Cena gets from certain segments of the audience, yet the very things that garner this heat are the things that make him popular with other segments. Having spent months trying and failing to make Cena into the next Hulk Hogan, a case can certainly be made to say that they stopped trying and went with the flow instead. You can’t fight the tide, you can only swim with it and wait for it to ebb.

Take Cena’s rapping, for example. Once he released his album in 2006, he pretty much stopped cutting rap promos on his opponents. As we mentioned above, these promos were instrumental in triggering his initial surge in popularity, and once they got watered down and then died out, some people lost interest. However, he was now all of a sudden accessible to a new group of fans: children whose parents weren’t comfortable with the nature of his freestyles and battle raps. As the Doctor of Thuganomics persona died out and was replaced with the hard-grafting yet goofy “Hustle, Loyalty, Respect” character we have today, so the makeup of Cena’s fanbase changed. When they became aware of what was happening, Creative tried to combine the cornball family-friendly stuff with the more edgy things that the 18-30 male demographic wanted to see For example, take this segment from Cena’s feud with JBL:

Yes, that really does say “poopy”. Although having three men destroy a limo with sledgehammers would normally be met with a decent pop, the graffiti that Cena utilised was perhaps less in keeping with the spirit of what he was doing. The whole thing fooled none of those it was meant to fool: the 18-30 males saw through it and just kept on hating.

I find it hard to believe that at this point, the writers are not aware of the situation. Anyone can tell that even on the best of nights, the crowd is only 60% for John Cena. Even knowing that, Cena’s promos have not changed. It is possible to be edgy and appeal to the smart fans without being R-rated, yet there has been a conscious choice to keep Cena’s promos at a family-friendly level. Sometimes they take up the intensity, but the basic level of the promo remains the same. Far from trying to hide from it, the announcers and Cena himself acknowledge and even seem to enjoy the duelling crowd reactions to his character.

You Can’t Wrestle!

It’s a chant that is levelled at Cena in the “smart cities” – places like Philadelphia, Toronto, New York – and is often cited as a reason for the fans’ dislike of the man. To be fair, he does exhibit a very limited moveset in his matches, and the last time he added to it was at One Night Stand 2006, when we first saw the second-rope Rocker Dropper. It’s not helped by the tendency to book Cena in matches where he either wins quickly or spends most of the time on the receiving end of a beating, so the little offence he does get feels even less fresh.

The question is, WHY has John not been given any new moves in three years? If WWE management are so concerned about Cena’s popularity, and they know this is an issue, surely it’s a simple matter to change some moves around? Although Vince McMahon has been repeatedly quoted as saying he’d get rid of the wrestling aspect of his shows if he could, surely that doesn’t mean that your top name has nothing new to add? Every top wrestler in WWE has a limited moveset, but most of them will occasionally break out other moves in big matches. Not Mr Cena. Of the other big names in WWE, only HHH has changed his moveset less often, but he vacillates between heel and face so regularly that it never feels as stale.

It’s also worth pointing out the difference between “can’t wrestle” and “doesn’t wrestle”. Khali can’t wrestle. Stone Cold Steve Austin didn’t wrestle. Cena probably falls somewhere between the two. He’s not horrible, but he’s no Kurt Angle. Regardless, there is potential there for him to expand or modify the moves we see from him every week. Like Stone Cold and Hulk Hogan before him, he either chooses or is told not to do so. There’s a school of that that says if you diversify a moveset too much, the fans won’t pop for the trademark spots because there will be too many of them. This is probably not true of the hardcore fan (as evidenced by Ring of Honor), but the casual fan certainly fits this profile. Most people don’t know a dragon suplex from a dragonfly, so why go to the trouble of using it?