10 Wrestlers Who Turned Down Title Reigns

2. The Rock

Shawn Michaels World Title
WWE.com

That wretched JBL run with the WWE Championship sure is coming up a lot here. Eddie Guerrero requested to drop the title in the summer of 2004, The Undertaker wasn't overly keen on taking the belt from Latino Heat, so the world was given Blackjack Bradshaw as a main event talent. We all know how the reign ended, of course, with John Cena picking up the first of 16 world championships in an underwhelming match at WrestleMania 21.

Was Cena always in line to dethrone JBL? From a certain point on the calendar, it did seem as though Cena was the next cab off the rank, but reports at the time suggested that WWE management wasn't so sure. Funnily enough, they weren't entirely sold on Cena as the face of the next generation, so they made a play for The Rock to come back and dethrone the dastardly Texan.

Unsurprisingly, The Rock declined the opportunity. Rocky was well and truly in Hollywood mode by that point, and doing battle with Justin Hawk Bradshaw in a semi-main event at WrestleMania 21 wasn't going to light up the schedule, no matter how many Hollywood tags the company added to the event. Cena ended up getting the rub, and the rest is history.

Contributor
Contributor

Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.