Cena def. Ryback: The Big Mistake

[Big Red Machine]

As many of you know, I am a John Cena fan. I usually enjoy his promos, I think is matches are certainly WWE main event quality, and he does deliver on PPV, more often than not. His Last Man Standing match with Umaga is (in my opinion) a five star match, one of the best matches in WWE history and easily the best Last Man Standing match of all time (and I think his match with Punk from Money in the Bank 2011 is even better than that). You’ll almost always find me on the “LET’S GO CENA!” side of the dueling chant and am rarely one to use the label “Super Cena.” I tell you this because I want you to know exactly where I am coming from when I say that Cena’s win on Sunday at Payback was an example of Super Cena, and it might well do a lot of long term damage to the WWE.

It is well known that if you do something too much, people will get tired of it, and this seems to happen even more quickly than usual where wrestling fans are concerned. Fans are tired of Cena always coming out on top, and they have been for years. Do you know when the last time John Cena lost a feud was? The summer of 2011 against CM Punk. That’s almost two years! In that time, he has come out on top over the likes of Kane, Dolph Ziggler, Big Show, The Rock, and Brock Lesnar.

Fans are also tired of Cena slaying the big bad monster. WWE has a history of bringing in a big monster just to feed him to a babyface, and in recent years, the babyface in question has always been Cena. In late 2011 Kane returned from an injury with his old, vicious, sadistic persona and started a feud with John Cena. Two months later, Cena had won the feud. WWE brought Tensai in as a monster, and within two months, Cena had slayed that monster as well. Hell, even BROCK LESNAR jobbed to Cena in his first match back! While that may have worked in the 80’s (although they took a lot more time to building their monsters up back then, which made it work better), now it just feels repetitive and predictable. It is hard for fans to get excited about a new monster because they know it will inevitably be fed to Cena.

With Ryback, though, the fans actually did manage to get behind him. Despite having absolutely no direction whatsoever for his first five months and doing nothing but squashing jobbers, Ryback got over. HUGE. To the point that WWE felt confident enough in him that they were willing to put him in a WWE Title match in Hell in a Cell as his first non-squash match on a PPV. People often somewhat derisively compare Ryback with Goldberg, but I think that the comparison is more valid than just the fact that they both wrestled a bunch of squashes. Goldberg’s push (and the fact that it worked despite being in many ways the exact opposite of what was popular in wrestling at the time) is often described as WCW catching lightning in a bottle. There is no reason in the world why it should have worked, but it just did. Ryback, while not as over as Goldberg, was similar. Tensai was a big monster who (re)-debuted around the same time as Ryback, but he never caught on with fans. Neither did Brodus Clay as a big monster on NXT, or almost every other time WWE has tried bringing in a giant monster over the past ten years (Umaga being the lone exception), and Ryback wrestled squashes for much longer than any of the other monsters. People should have gotten bored with him by the beginning of the summer… but they didn’t. They got more and more into him. Even after being eliminated from the Royal Rumble by Cena, being pinned in a match against the Shield, and losing to Mark Henry in a horrible match at Wrestlemania, people were still into Ryback. When he turned heel on John Cena and went to challenge him for the WWE Title, he still had enough build behind him that even the moist skeptical fans had to admit that Ryback beating Cena for the WWE Title was a real possibility.

Then Ryback could only take Cena to a draw at Extreme Rules, despite Cena having an injured limb and a stipulation designed for Ryback to exploit that, and finally lost to Cena at Payback without getting so much as a single win against him. Wrestling fans want to believe that the best will happen, but when you burn them too many times, they lose faith and stop investing in the characters and angles. One of the contributing factors to the demise of WCW was that the nWo came out on top so often that the fans stopped believing that the babyfaces would ever get the heat back from them. The ROH fanbase stopped believing in Tyler Black as the “next world champ” because every time the moment seemed perfect for him to win the belt... he didn’t. Fans are skeptical of TNA’s ability to pay off an angle well because they have failed to do it so many times over the past seven years. With all of the momentum Ryback had within the WWE fanbase as the guy who could possibly beat Cena clean and win a feud against him, I have to ask: has Ryback’s loss here broken people’s ability to believe that anyone will ever be able to do so? And if so, how , much damage will that do the fans’ investment in the next guy who seems like he might be the one? Only time will tell.

[DevilWithin]

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The night when John Cena was sayin FEED ME MORE! And the whole building was too,was when they had the lightning in the bottle with Ryback. Regardless of the booking corner they were in with undefeated vs huge title reign, he should have won the belt.