8 Hyped Wrestling Matches RUINED By Backstage Politics
1. John Cena Vs. Cody Rhodes (WWE WrestleMania 41)
Circling back to the intro, the board-level politics that now define the Road To WrestleMania contrived to ruin the Sunday main event in 2025. This should have served as a lesson to TKO to stay in their lane, but corporate America itself is defined by people who have assumed major positions of power despite not knowing what the f*ck they are doing.
The Cody Rhodes Vs. John Cena programme wasn’t going to be anything special. All-babyface feuds are tricky. The idea, presumably, was for Cena to defeat Cody at ‘Mania before passing the torch back to his protege and retiring at the hands of a heel; that way, Cody would have been firmly established as Cena’s successor, and perhaps challenged on the Grandest Stage by the guy who ended his hero. This did not happen.
Instead, with Elimination Chamber ticket sales lacking, TKO called on the Rock, who had a bizarre Captain Ahab-level obsession with harpooning a top babyface and turning them heel for no good reason. Triple H resisted calls to turn Cody heel, which was a deranged suggestion not unlike casting Hulk Hogan as a bad guy in February 1989. Instead, to boost sales for a single show, Cena turned heel. This was stupid. Nobody wanted to see it - it wasn’t 2011 anymore - and Cena was useless in the role, which probably wasn’t shadow-booked by Vince McMahon but absolutely felt like it, what with the weird “each and every one of you” stuff. Each and every WWE fan loved Cena by 2025!
The match itself was rotten. Cena was so thrashed physically that he bumped and fed like a pensioner gingerly sitting down on a park bench. Then, infamously, because he was the Rock’s mate, Travis Scott interfered and in doing so made the Iron Sheik at WrestleMania 17 look like Triple H running away from the press.
Incredible how they got it right at SummerSlam by simply doing what made sense all along.