10 Wrestlers John Cena Couldn't Get Over
1. John Laurinaitis
Many of you may get cold sweats at the mere thought of this one, but there was that ill-fated Over the Limit PPV back in 2012 where John Laurinaitis returned to in-ring action to battle John Cena. To say that the crowd went mild would be an understatement.
In the past decade of WWE, it’s genuinely hard to imagine a performer who was as channel-change-inducing as Big Johnny. Hell, even Triple H’s arduous, tiresome Reign of Terror was even at least slightly more engaging than those days when Raw was dominated by the presence of John Laurinaitis.
As an on-screen character, the reaction to Laurinaitis varied between disinterested and off-putting. So, how do you go about getting Johnny over as the top heel in the company? Why, you put him up against the poster boy of WWE, John Cena.
The use of Laurinaitis as an authority figure felt like it lasted a decade – in reality, the former Dynamic Dude was a regular on-screen presence from 2011 to 2013 – so painful were his bumbling, monotonous promos and his constant involvement in the company’s biggest angles.
Laurinaitis absolutely sucked and served no purpose other than to act as a legitimate annoyance to wrestling fans. That was backed up at the aforementioned Over the Limit event as working against John Cena didn’t even manage to get fans to genuinely react to Laurinaitis in the way that WWE wanted. Even more surprising, Laurinaitis actually got the win over Cena thanks to interference from Big Show.