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

6. A Dismal Reboot

CM Punk John Cena 2025
WWE.com

If you were watching WWE in 2011-13, there likely was one thing that gave you hope during those dismal years: CM Punk and his rivalry with John Cena.

The two had great chemistry and delivered some of the more memorable matches and segments on WWE television during those years. When Cena announced his retirement run, questions had to start swirling about how they would reignite that feud one last time.

It turns out that bringing two past-their-prime superstars together with their roles reversed didn’t work how fans would have liked. When they feuded in 2011, Punk was raging against the machine, and Cena was WWE’s living avatar. In 2013, he was the paranoid heel desperate to hold onto (and then regain) his championship when he and Cena tore the house down on that memorable Raw.

In 2025, Cena’s wooden heel persona versus Old Man Punk was a far cry from what longtime fans might have envisioned. And no, Punk dressing up in a Chicago Cubs throwback jersey and rapping did not save this.

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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.