John Cena admitted that he and Cody Rhodes failed in the WrestleMania 41 Night 2 main event, where he set a WWE record with his 17th world title.
In a new interview with Yahoo Sports’ Uncrowned released on Monday, Cena revealed that he brings up his own match when he talks to WWE’s young talent. He wants them to not be afraid to take risks or fail.
“I think it’s a great template for when I talk to young talent,” Cena said. “And I try to do this all the time, I remind them to swing big and don’t be afraid to fail. A lot of them think I’m talking from a glass house of like, ‘Yeah, sure, it must be easy for you, because you, you never fail.’”
“And then I’ll look back, especially on that last year because the retirement tour did have a lot of eyes, and I’ll say I took a big swing at WrestleMania and we stunk up the joint,” Cena added. “We failed.”
But for Cena, the most important thing was how he responded to that failure, up until he finished the story with Rhodes at SummerSlam last year.
“But what did I do?” Cena said. “I got back up, we dusted ourselves off, course-corrected the ship, and we culminated with a fantastic finishing of the story, as Cody would put it, at SummerSlam.”
Rhodes was the first entrant Cena announced for the John Cena Classic tournament, which will pit stars from Raw and SmackDown against talent from NXT. Fans will vote to determine the champion. The show will take place on December 14 at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, as a special episode of Raw.
Cena had a different story about the match back in July. In the second season of WWE Unreal on Netflix, he said the slow pace was intentional, as part of his promise to ruin wrestling following his heel turn.
Cena and Rhodes received only 3/4 of a star from Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter for their WrestleMania 41 match. But the SummerSlam rematch, a Street Fight in which Rhodes regained the Undisputed WWE Championship, received five stars. It was Cena’s first five-star rating in 14 years, since his Money in the Bank 2011 match against CM Punk.