The True Story Behind John Cena's WWE Heel Turn
WrestleMania 36 gave us a glimpse of what could have been.
WrestleMania 36 wasn't just, ahem, too big for one night, but it was apparently also too big for a single (WWE) universe.
One of the unquestionable highlights of an otherwise subdued part two of the stripped-down supershow was a positively barmy Firefly Fun House contest, in which John Cena confronted both his fears and his past. It also gave long-term fans a glimpse into an alternate reality many hoped for, but which never came to fruition.
At one point in the madcap match, which saw Cena run the gamut of a tight-trunked Kurt Angle-challenging upstart, chain-laden rapper rejecting Ruthless Aggression and an '80s throwback every bit the caricature he became, the feed cut away to the opening credits of WCW's Monday Nitro. Shortly after, Bray - bedecked in the colours of the nWo Wolfpac - channeled Eric Bischoff in introducing the coolest cat in all of wrestling: 'Hollywood' John.
The Face never Ran the Place down in Atlanta, GA - he was but a UPW pup when the Monday Night Wars reached their ceasefire - so this was obviously a reference to The Prototype's pray-saying, vitamin-eating prototype, Hulk Hogan - albeit a version of Hogan Cena crucially never mimicked.
That was the point. In 1996, Hogan, a perennial babyface for much of his mainstream career and the industry's key needle mover, did the unspeakable and the unthinkable when he traded his defining clean-cut persona for the dark side. In one fell swoop, a hitherto unimaginable heel turn established the New World Order (or 'New World Organisation', as he fumbled during his Bash at the Beach promo), and immediately injected WCW with a degree of cool Titan Towers' meteorologists could only dream of.
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