5 Ups & 8 Downs From John Cena's WWE Retirement Tour

4. Cena, Styles Do A Tribute Act

WWE Crown Jewel 2025 John Cena AJ Styles
WWE.com

John Cena and AJ Styles had a surprisingly great rivalry during the autumn of Cena’s career in 2016-18, but running that back in 2025 was fraught with the same issues that many of John’s matches presented: How could they do anything that even remotely approached what they produced nearly a decade earlier?

The answer: Don’t even try.

Styles and Cena instead wrestled the equivalent of a cover band performance, with both men borrowing moves from some of their greatest rivals, with Cena cribbing from Randy Orton, Rusev, Miz, Bray Wyatt and others, while AJ channeled Samoa Joe, Frankie Kazarian and Christopher Daniels.

The result was a match that very blatantly told fans to not take it too seriously and to just enjoy the finisher spam with a wink and a nod. Thankfully, the fans understood the assignment and cheered along with all of it.

This was a bit of a risk: Not everyone could pull this off, and if the fans didn’t buy in, it would have fallen flat on its face. But it turned out that it was the perfect call and delivered a truly unique, fun moment for everyone.

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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.