Austin Theory & John Cena WWE United States Championship Match Set For WrestleMania 39

Arguably the best US champ in the past decade will vie for the title one more time.

by Scott Carlson
Austin Theory John Cena
WWE

For weeks, fans have been confidently predicting a WrestleMania match that would pit an up-and-coming superstar against one of the true legends of WWE.

Monday night, it became official: John Cena will challenge Austin Theory for the United States Championship.

Advertisement

Theory had been taking potshots at Cena in recent weeks as Raw boasted of the 16-time world champion's return in his hometown of Boston. On Monday, Austin wasted little time in coming out and challenging Cena to a title match at Mania... but Cena declined.

Theory made the mistake of pushing it, and Cena spent the bulk of the segment shredding the current US champ, calling him a "generic kid in fancy sneakers," a guy who's gotten countless opportunities and still sucks to the point where fans don't care about him and they have to pipe in fake crowd noise during his matches.

Advertisement

It was an epic burial that saw Theory take the brunt of it and see his only dig - at Cena's bald spot - get weaponized back at him.

The match itself could be more than fine - Theory is pretty decent in the ring and can be led to a really good match. But Austin will need to come ready to spar if he gets another crack at Cena with the mic. Otherwise, it won't matter if he wins at Mania, because he'll already be toast.

In this post: 
John Cena
 
Posted On: 
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.