10 Things That Must Happen During John Cena’s WWE Retirement Tour

9. Compete In King Of The Ring

John Cena The End
WWE

When discussing things John Cena has not accomplished in WWE, one of the oddest misses has to be that he has never wrestled in the King of the Ring tournament.

While that might seem impossible, there are some circumstances that prevented him from entering the seminal WWE tourney. The 2002 KOTR tournament wrapped up just four days before Cena debuted on SmackDown, answering Kurt Angle’s open challenge. There wouldn’t be a King of the Ring held again until 2006, which was a SmackDown-branded tournament, while Cena was a Raw talent.

By the time the next tournament rolled around in spring 2008, Cena already had main-evented two WrestleManias and was a three-time world champion, hardly the resumé for the King of the Ring, which long has been seen as a tournament for rising stars rather than wrestlers already at the apex of their careers.

However, given Cena’s struggles in singles matches in recent years, entering KOTR in 2025 could make for a fun, compelling story as he tries to compete with the younger stars of today to get back into the world title scene (though he likely shouldn’t win the tournament). It also would check an item off his WWE bucket list.

In this post: 
John Cena
 
Posted On: 
Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.