6 Times Wrestlers Lost A Match In Order To Move Up The Card

by John Bills

1. John Cena - SmackDown '05

John Cena has been The Face That Runs The Place for over a decade now, but it is easy to forget that once upon a time he legitimately was the most popular performer on the entire roster. Cena's transition from Ruthless Aggression to the Doctor of Thuganomics touched a nerve with the WWE Universe, and by the end of 2004 it was only a matter of time before Cena was crowned king.

Cena spent much of 2004 holding the United States Championship, a title he won from Big Show at WrestleMania XX and subsequently traded with Booker T and Carlito Caribbean Cool throughout the year. Cena finished runner-up in the 2005 Royal Rumble to Batista whilst still holding the US Championship, and much of the build towards Cena's WrestleMania 21 championship match with JBL centred around the secondary title.

That is because Cena actually lost the title during the feud to JBL's 'Chief of Staff' Orlando Jordan on an episode of SmackDown in March 2005. This led to OJ and JBL tossing Cena's spinner title into the trash, fuelling the fire further ahead of Cena and JBL's meeting.

Cena proved victorious at the Show of Shows and soon introduced a brand new spinner belt for the WWE Championship. The Leader of the Cenation was still the hottest thing in pro wrestling, although that was soon to change. What is often forgotten is that his rise to the top required him to lose to Orlando Jordan along the way.

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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.