10 Wrestlers Who Allegedly Got Other Wrestlers FIRED
5. John Cena / Alex Riley
More of an indirect example/accusation, in that Alex Riley blames John Cena for his push crumbling to dust.
But, in an era where the process seemed to pause and restart constantly for so many of his midcard peers, he never got another one. He was finished after Cena took a dislike to him, so it's almost one and the same.
A poor reaction to a rib, the belief that the rib was an excuse to make Riley look like an a**hole in front of the boys, who really knows how it all started. It's worth bearing in mind just how fantastic Riley was on season two of NXT. This is nowhere near close to the old Attitude Era lot being sh*t-scared of the Rock when he was on the ascendency, but man, Riley was fantastic. That he never realised his potential elsewhere obviously makes any apparent paranoia on Cena's part difficult to buy - but everybody not named Riley looked a t*t on that game show. Riley owned it.
Arn Anderson, who agented many of Cena's marquee marches, weighed in last year on his ARN podcast. His interpretation is that Riley once no-sold a piece of advice Cena tried to give him. This circulated around the office and the locker room and all the way back to him.
Riley has alluded quite strongly over the years that he has...something on Cena that could prove detrimental to his career. He told the Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling podcast in 2017 that "I am not in the habit of destroying anybody's career," and that his shedding light on said incident is a "moral" quandary.
He's also gone a bit wrong, Riley, sadly, so he might not be a reliable narrator.