411 Wrestling Fact or Fiction: Did John Cena Have the Best Heel Turn of All Time?

Welcome back to the 411mania Wrestling Fact or Fiction. I’m your host Jake Chambers.

Today we’ve got a mini-Cena heel turn special, since that might be one of the biggest news items to come across our desk in a long while. And I’ve called upon frequent guest and always active commenter, the wonderful and infamous D2Kvirus to help me wrestle with the aftermath of such a momentous moment.

So without further ado, let’s all get caught wearing the next man’s sweater!

Statement #1: John Cena had the best heel turn of all-time at Elimination Chamber.

Jake Chambers: FACT – I’ll say this begrudgingly, because I think “best ever” depends on the generation. And I think for this generation, it will be considered by them to be the best ever. If you were a kid when Andre showed up with Bobby Heenan to challenge Hogan on Piper’s Pit, that was a pop culture shifting moment. If you were a teen when Hogan turned nWo, or Austin teamed up with McMahon, those were era defining pro-wrestling culture moments. Do I think this Cena thing is as big as any of those heel turns, nah, but I’m not online streaming my face 5 seconds after it ended shouting “cinema!” And apparently there’s a lot of people like that, or along those lines. That’s the fandom today, and this is their moment. When I’m in the glue factory, the impact of those older moments will while be churned up with me, just like Zbyszko / Sammartino before me, and where Cena / Cody will be after.

D2Kvirus: FICTION – No matter which way you look at it, Cena’s heel turn cannot be considered the best heel turn ever. Case in point, the head says that Hogan’s heel turn in WCW and the formation of the nWo is the go-to answer for best heel turns in wrestling because that caused a monumental shift not just in WCW’s booking but in the industry as a whole as it made WCW the hot product… but then my head remembers that Hogan’s heel turn led to my least favourite booking trope in wrestling, namely the post-match beatdown segments which last longer than the match which preceded it, which I hated when the nWo did it, I hated it when Evolution did it, I hated when The Authority did it, I hated when the Inner Circle did it, I hated when the Bloodline did it, and I hated when I laboured this point by at least two stables too many.

Yet while the head says Hogan, the heart says CM Punk’s heel turn in the summer of 2005 as that was a hell of a lot of fun and the ROH fanbase genuinely believed that Punk was the egotistical hypocrite he was portraying, which as we all know is nothing like what he’s like in reality as the last two or three years have demonstra…oh.

Even in terms of the potential of the vaunted Cena Heel Turn, there were so many better times to do it: the obvious one was turning heel on The Rock for pretty much the same reasons he turned on Cody and it has to be said WWE did lay some groundwork there as we had Michael Cole hammering home Cena having his Worst Year Ever because his PPV win/loss record was nowhere near as bad as when he was wearing the colours of local sports franchises to get cheap pops only to back away from the setup the moment he won at Twice in a Lifetime, while the favourite scenario of pretty much every wrestling Youtuber a decade ago was having him cheat to end The Streak which never came close to being an option, so instead what we wound up with was a part-timer in the headline spot at WrestleMania in 2025. Has anybody said “New Era” yet…?

Statement #2: The Wrestlemania 41 live audience will boo “heel” John Cena.

Jake Chambers: FICTION – Which makes you kind of question the concept of a “heel” turn, no? During that actual turn by Cena, the crowd was already cheering. Not sure what Cena can do from this point forward that will legitimately make him get boo-ed then. If he cuts a couple of “brilliant” heel promos in the lead up to the show, won’t that only make the audience like him even more for being a great heel? It makes the dynamic of everything very weird, especially when you’ve got HHH and The Rock doing a press conference 15 minutes after Elimination Chamber talking about the moment as a performance piece rather than trying to maintain even a shred of kayfabe (like Cena did, which also only garnered him more praise for being a “brilliant” heel). The irony is, Wrestlemania has had multiple examples where Cena was was boo-ed more than anybody else on the card and already was hated by the majority of “cool” fans in the crowd, and now that he’s doing what they want him to do, which is act evil so they can “really” boo him, they will all just cheer him. It really wasn’t this confusing when Hogan turned bad, people just hated him.

D2Kvirus: FACT – As amusing as it might be to have the crowd cheer Heel Cena (Heena?) which causes Michael Cole to throw up his arms thinking live crowds exist for the sole purpose of trolling his commentary, the reality is that a crowd actually being allowed to boo John Cena for the first time since Dawson’s Creek was on the air is likely to do so with relish, knowing full well that for the first time in decades the phrase “Bizarro World” will not be uttered by any commentator.

That being said, working on the basis that Cody wins (LOL) there will likely be a “Thank you Cena” chant that breaks out after the match, because at this point Cena isn’t the overpushed Vince avatar which is why fans turned on him so hard for well over a decade and the fanbase has had a chance to miss him, or at the very least the crowd will respect Cena for coming back when he really didn’t have to and, unlike Batista in 2014, isn’t being placed above somebody the audience clearly wants in that position in a way that made that year’s Royal Rumble a fascinating trainwreck in its latter stages.

Statement #3: Cena’s run will be so good this year that he actually won’t really retire.

Jake Chambers: FACT – Oh, there’s a real good chance of this. I never truly bought Cena as “retiring” anyways. NO ONE EVER RETIRES IN WRESTLING. And I think if Cena really kills it as a heel, then he will definitely remain on. He’s not old in pro-wrestling years, certainly not by today’s standard. And in Hollywood, sure you can be in 5 franchise movies one year, but that could easily dry up the next. And Cena is neither the respected actor Batista has become (despite his current DTV actioner run) or the box office draw Rock is (despite not really pulling in big money for his solo, live action stuff recently). Check this space in 12 months and let’s see if Cena is really retired.

D2Kvirus: FACT – …but for a different reason, as while I see the heel turn being something Cena wanted to tick off his bucket list (and probably wanted to tick off his bucket list at least a decade ago) I can’t see it being what he wants to end his career on, so I’m wondering if they’re banking on “Thank you Cena” chants after the match and using that as a basis to build towards a match at SummerSlam where Cody & Cena team up against The Rock and… somebody who I honestly can’t think of right now, which certainly makes sense given SummerSlam will be over two nights this year so there’s room for other title matches and so forth across both nights so nobody would be bumped off the card so The Rock can ten minutes devoted to his entrance or whatever.

¡SWITCH!

Statement #4: The “who attacked Jade Cargill” storyline is a good one.

D2Kvirus: FICTION – Fun fact, this was the hardest question for me to answer. Mainly because I couldn’t decide which of the seventeen snarky comments which immediately came to mind to post, which necessitated me having to lie down in a darkened room for a half hour due to the migraine this caused.

Is a “Who attacked Wrestler A” storyline a good one? Obviously yes, provided the performer is compelling enough that they can keep the audience engaged for the weeks if not months it takes to come to the conclusion like finding out who ran over Austin and how long it would take to circle it back to Triple H anyway, or for the storyline to peter out and be quietly dropped and we’re supposed to forget such as the age-old question about who attacked HIDEO in the NXT parking lot.

And this just isn’t going to happen with Jade Cargill, because it feels less like a storyline to build to her return from injury that Austin’s run-in with the bonnet of a car was, and more like a cover to send her back to the Performance Center due to her debunking the argument that “aura” is more important than wrestling ability due to some of her performances over the last year being far worse than any of her clunky displays during her zombie TBS title reign and actively diminishing from Bianca Belair at this point.

Jake Chambers: FACT – I’m going to stretch what I really consider “good” here, but at least for a WWE Paul Levesque Era storyline this is something. I had no clue why she’d be out for as long as she was, but, of course, that’s the logic of the WWE anyways: some people can get attacked in a parking lot and need months to recover, some can come back from more heinous beatings in the ring and be back the next week. To be fair to D2K, I sent him this before the Naomi/Bianca confrontation on Smackdown, but I don’t know if he’d have loved that melodrama any more than I did. Again, it’s something. Any mystery is generally something I’ll be at least curious about, I guess, even if it did take months to get to really the only reveal possible (and included a terrible obvious swerve with Morgan/Rodriquez). The more I write, the more this sounds like a FICTION answer, but still, I’ll stick with it.

Statement #5: You were excited to see the Hardy Boys back in a WWE (adjacent) ring in NXT.

D2Kvirus: FICTION – While I was always an Edge & Christian mark above all else, back in the days where I would listen to rapcore unironically I was still a huge Hardy Boyz fan. And I needed to say this before I say anything else because, honestly, I haven’t felt excited by the Hardys for so long that my malaise may actually be of legal drinking age here in the UK as the vast majority of Hardys matches feel like what Now TV subscribers must experience when streaming Hardys matches from the Attitude or Ruthless Aggression Eras due to the matches almost looking like the matches they used to have only at a fraction of the speed and with certain spots having the very real danger that we might see somebody’s pelvis shatter into dust on a move they used to execute with such aplomb back in the days where we the PS2 had three GTAs rather than the modern world where GTA V has three PlayStations, or were part of the Broken Universe which I just could not get excited for once it became watching Matt Hardy’s forced meme for the week, leaving us with matches which are presented as something that should be exciting but in reality is as disappointing and mildly dispiriting as booking a holiday and then learning that your flight will be departing from Heathrow Terminal 5.

Jake Chambers: FICTION – We get sold on these weird nostalgia comebacks, I think mainly for the Hardys only (or maybe the Rock ‘n’ Roll Express) where every time they comeback somewhere we are supposed to forget how back they were last time around (it’s kind of the Bray Wyatt syndrome but with added nostalgia). The Hardys suffer from a very common problem that we can shake in US wrestling, and that’s no matter how old a wrestler gets they still want to wrestle like they are in their prime, and we all have to pretend that’s what we’re seeing. I’ll give Matt Hardy some credit, that he did get over on a gimmick in his previous TNA comeback that did try to shake him off that faux “extreme” ring-style from the Attitude Era, but alas he’s gone back to the nostalgia play. And really, how far off are we from seeing a Dudley Boyz vs. Hardy Boyz match in a WWE adjacent ring in 2025?

Statement #6: The Sami Zayn / Kevin Owens feud peaked long before their Unsanctioned Match at Elimination Chamber.

D2Kvirus: FACT – For me at least, my favourite iteration of the Owens/Sami feud was the 2016 edition, as that started at the Rumble with Sami as a surprise entrant and him eliminating Owens, carried through them tearing each other apart during the Intercontinental ladder match at WrestleMania, gave us a damn good match at Payback and culminated with a superb match at Battleground where Sami finally proved he could beat Owens and was so determined to that he blasted him with a pair of Helluva Kicks to make sure he got the job done, as that had everything you needed: great matches, a storyline which could have written itself but the two made that that much more compelling through their character work, and it finished with the perfect emotional peak which the storyline needed yet did just enough to make you doubt it would never happen which can be summed up with the following gif…

Jake Chambers: FACT – I would agree with D2K there, in fact, I might even want to go back to their last ROH match, but okay… let’s say it worked a bit in WWE. But this idea that they NEED to always fight ruins every single storyline where they are supposedly friends again. It’s impossible to invest in their WWE story due to this consistent flip-flopping. I realize some people who watch this stuff today, WWE in particular, pay a lot of lip service to “long-term storytelling” like it’s some kind of get-out-jail-free card for bad booking. However, for me, the “storytelling” with Sami and Owens in WWE over the years has been flimsy and dull, with good (but not great) matches sporadically an outcome by sheer force of will by two guys who can never apparently be mainstream WWE A-listers.

Thanks again to D2Kvirus who always bringing the heat. He’ll be happy to field any questions, I’m sure, in the comments below.

And if anyone is looking to join in on the FoF fun, just let me know down there as well and I promise not to kick you in the groin and whip you with a weight belt!