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

2. Cena’s Last Stand As World Champion

WWE SummerSlam 2025 Cody Rhodes John Cena
WWE.com

After such a terrible turn as a heel, John Cena’s face turn would live or die by how it was received in his first match afterward.

Cody Rhodes coaxed Cena to admit the error of his ways and to repent, which John did, but if his match at SummerSlam fell on its face, fan investment would have waned and critics would have started writing Cena’s epitaph.

Fortunately, Cena turned back the clock with his best singles performance in eons. Sure, they needed to use the street fight stipulation for some smoke and mirrors, but Rhodes and Cena were on-point that night and the match solidified his return to the Cena of old. There even was a nice callback moment when Cody hit Cena with a piledriver, a banned move that CM Punk used to try to put Cena down way back in 2013.

What’s more, this allowed Cena to have at least one good, honorable world title defense – and his final PLE main event – on his 2025 resume, though he lost his 17th world championship when Cody pinned him.

Advertisement
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.