Ask 411 Wrestling: Could We See John Cena vs. Hiroshi Tanahashi in 2025?

Welcome guys, gals, and gender non-binary pals, to Ask 411 . . . the last surviving weekly column on 411 Wrestling.

I am your party host, Ryan Byers, and I am here to answer some of your burning inquiries about professional wrestling. If you have one of those queries searing a hole in your brain, feel free to send it along to me at [email protected]. Don’t be shy about shooting those over – the more, the merrier.

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Josh is angling for a dream match:

John Cena versus Hiroshi Tanahashi. Two aces of their respective companies in their final year of wrestling. Any chance?

Is there technically a chance? Yes, I would say that there is. New Japan has always been willing to work with American promotions, and, over the course of the past few years, we have seen a WWE willingness to work with foreign promotions the likes of which we haven’t seen at any point since the 1990s.

Yes, New Japan is partnered with AEW in the United States right now, but I’m not aware of any exclusivity provision to that deal, plus NJPW as an organization would be smart enough to realize that partnering with WWE would get them infinitely more than they would lose if it tanked their relationship with AEW.

So, if both sides wanted the match to happen, the match would happen. Nothing stands in its way.

However, there is a difference between something being technically possible and something being likely. I don’t think that this match occurring is all that likely.

Why not?

Because it doesn’t really do anything to benefit WWE or John Cena. By and large, the WWE fanbase doesn’t know who Hiroshi Tanahashi is, so the match wouldn’t be particularly meaningful in the United States. This is despite the fact that, on the flip side of things, everybody in Japan who watches NJPW knows who John Cena is, and the match would be absolutely massive there.

At this point, if we assume that Cena is honest about this being his last run – and I think we have to make that assumption for purposes of this analysis – every match and every appearance that he has is a valuable commodity. The last thing you want to do if you are WWE is give one of those commodities away when you’re going to get virtually no return on your investment.

Davors is on lockdown:

Just a quick one for ya. I’ve been playing WWE 2k24 recently and had a cage match between The Sandman and Cactus Jack which Jack won.

My question is did ECW ever have a cage match? I can’t remember there ever being one but I’d have thought it would be a no brainer for the old ECW.

Can you dig up anything I might have missed?

Oh yeah, they had plenty. Let’s run them down!

(Unless otherwise specified, these matches took place at the ECW Arena in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.)

The first ever ECW cage match took place on October 1, 1993 and featured Terry Funk pinning “Superfly” Jimmy Snuka to retain the ECW Television Championship.

Snuka was back in the cage on March 26, 1994 when he pinned Tommy Dreamer on a show called Ultimate Jeopardy.

Shane Douglas and Mr. Hughes beat the Harris Twins when the Franchise escaped the cage on June 26, 1994. This is the rare cage match that opened the show that it was on rather than closing, saving the audience have to sit through cage setup.

Perhaps the most famous ECW cage matches came on Heat Wave 1995 on July 15 when two bouts took place inside the chain link fence. In the first, Luna Vachon defeated Stevie Richards while, in the second, the Gangstas dispatched Public Enemy.

On a show called Gangstas Paradise held on September 16, 1995, we got a six man tag in the cage, with Public Enemy and Mikey Whipwreck picking up the victory over the Sandman, Too Cold Scorpio, and New Jack.

Keeping up the trend of Public Enemy in these matches, they teamed with the Pitbulls and Tommy Dreamer to defeat the Heavenly Bodies, Raven, Stevie Richards, and the Eliminators on December 9, 1995 at the original December to Dismember, not the WWE reboot that, eleven years later, forever sullied that name.

Another multi-man cage match occurred half a year later at Heat Wave on July 13, 1996, this time with Sandman, Terry Gordy, and Tommy Dreamer getting the duke against Raven, “Killdozer” Brian Lee, and, once again, Stevie Richards.

On August 24, 1996 at Natural Born Killaz, the Gangstas, appropriately enough, undid the Eliminators in the confines of a steel cage.

In the fall of 1996, ECW decided that it was going to take the steel cage on the road for some reason, as we’ve got a series of cage bouts outside of Philly. Sandman defeated Raven on September 21 in Middletown, New York, Raven defeated Sandman on September 27 in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and then we had two cage matches on the same show on October 18 in the oddly named Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, with Tommy Dreamer beating Brian Lee and Sandman beating Stevie Richards. After that, all those guys teamed up, with Dreamer and Sandman winning a tag team cage match over Lee and Raven on November 1 on Staten Island, New York.

After that little tour, we have to fast forward to the next Heat Wave event on July 19, 1997, where the Gangstas were once more victorious in a cage match, this time against Bubba Ray and D-Von Dudley.

We go almost a full year before ECW sees its next cage war, with one side being the Dudley team of Bubba Ray, D-Von, Big Dick, and . . . Jack Victory? Huh? They got the better of their opponents, Sandman, Tommy Dreamer, New Jack, and Spike Dudley. This was on June 6, 1998.

At Cyberslam on April 3, 1999, Bubba Ray and D-Von were in the cage once more, this time teaming with Mustafa Saed to defeat Axl Rotten, Balls Mahoney, and New Jack. In a rarity for ECW, they actually did a trial run of this match a few days before, as the exact same bout occurred on March 26 in Binghamton, New York.

And that was it for cage matches on shows promoted by the original ECW. The ECW spinoff promotion Hardcore Homecoming did promote a cage match as part of their fourth event on November 5, 2005, with PJ “No Longer Legally Allowed to be Called Justin Credible” Polaco going over long-time rival Jerry Lynn. WWE’s version of ECW also hosted a cage match on their SciFi Network television show on February 27, 2007 in San Jose California, with Bobby Lashley beating Hardcore Holly to retain the ECW Championship.

And that is, more or less, the history of steel cage matches in ECW.

Bryan wants to birth some nepo babies:

Is there any reason Roddy Piper’s daughter Teal never got s shot in the WWE? I realize genetics doesn’t guarantee greatness: Look at Joe Hennig, David Flair, and RFK Jr. But I thought they would at least try something small with Teal. A feud with Tamina would practically write itself. Did she try out and not make it or not was she just not interested?

Teal didn’t make her in-ring debut until 2019 when she was already 35 years old. Then, not long after that debut, she tore her ACL and had to spend over six months on the shelf. Since then, she’s popped up on a handful of indy shows. If you’re WWE, regardless of who pops is, it’s hard to justify investing in somebody at that age when they have already suffered what for some could be a career-ending injury.

Tyler from Winnipeg is rooting around in his pants for a wadded up sock:

Does Mankind winning his first world title in WWE rank in your top six RAW matches?

No. The match as a match is nothing special at all. Thus, I wouldn’t rank it among the top Raw matches, even though it may very well rank among the top Raw moments.

Chad is hanging around:

Just curious what you think was the worst era for pro wrestling that you yourself have witnessed? For me it would definitely have to be WWE Raw’s “Guest Host Era” from 2009-2010. They put more effort into writing what cheesy skits the d-list celebs would be in than the wrestlers and storylines. That was bad enough, but they didn’t even execute the concept properly. They originally said the G.H.’s would have “unlimited power”, but they rarely had them make title matches or do anything radically different from each other. Soon every Raw basically became a carbon copy of one another, and I was tuning out before long. Thankfully they scrapped the concept in about a year or so. Your pick?

Impact Wrestling in 2006 and 2007. This was during the period of time that I was recapping their weekly show for this very website, and it was amazingly painful. (You can still read said recaps in our archives.) During this period, you had Vince Russo booking at his Vince Russo-iest, where actual in-ring action was ignored, every episode of the show felt like it had twice as many angles as it needed, and there plot had more holes in it than a block of Swiss cheese.

People say that Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff killed Impact, but they didn’t. They just put it out of its misery.

Keith is facing off with me:

Why did Eric Bischoff decide that the luchadors in the cruiserweight division needed to lose their masks?

He’s talked about this on his podcast. Basically, he thought that the masks were inhibiting their ability to sell during matches.

I have no idea how a human being could watch a Rey Misterio Jr. match and say this, because I put Rey, even with the mask, in the same category of sellers with Shawn Michaels and Ricky Morton.

Scott wants to find a loophole:

I often watch past Royal Rumbles in the month leading up to the RR. Today I am watching 2002 and I was wondering, after Maven eliminates the Undertaker he never gets eliminated following the beat down that gets handed to him. Does he have a claim as to being the rightful winner? Could he challenge for the title now claiming that he never got his rightful place in the main event?

No, not really. Even though it is common to say that the only way to be eliminated from the Royal Rumble is to be thrown over the top rope with both feet touching the arena floor, the reality of the situation is that there is plenty of precedent for a wrestler being eliminated from that match or other battles royale when they are injured and unable to compete further. In wrestling, as with any real world combat sport, the referee always retains discretion to rule that a competitor cannot continue.

John M. wants to relitigate Impact:

More than likely, Jeff Jarrett was never going to drop the World Title during Impact’s early days. If they wanted to though, who could they have built the company around (either as champ or not) to get them on the map faster? A homegrown roster member or someone from WWE?

I think the answer is “virtually nobody.”

The first question you have to ask here is what wrestlers who were not in WWE at the beginning of Impact Wrestling that were bigger stars than Jeff Jarrett.

The names that come to mind are Goldberg, Lex Luger, Sting, and Scott Hall.

However, the fact that Goldberg, Luger, and Sting didn’t come on when Impact first launched tells me that they didn’t want to be involved. It would be mind boggling if they just weren’t contacted.

Hall was available and was on the earliest Impact shows but was having significant personal problems to the point that he was not reliable enough to be a world champion.

Jarrett being champion for so much of the promotion’s early days wasn’t just an ego thing. He was legitimately the best option in terms of star power and stability.

That being said, the problem with early Impact wasn’t the world champion. It was the business model. People just weren’t going to invest in weekly pay per view shows, regardless of who the world champion was – especially when there was no free television component or other advertising to tell anyone other than hardcore internet fans that the promotion existed. They would have died in the first couple of months if not for the influx of money from the Carter family to keep them afloat. (Don’t take my word for it, read Jerry Jarrett’s book on early Impact. He’ll tell you the same thing.)

SaintOrleans from Disqus can eat 238 pieces of sushi in one sitting:

Hey who WAS that sumo dude they sent out at Greatest Royal Rumble, anyway?

That was Hishofuji Hiroki, also known by his birth name of Hiroki Sumi.

Unlike former WWF Champion Yokozuna, Hishofuji had a legitimate sumo wrestling background, debuting in professional sumo in 2005 and continuing until 2017. I am not going to pretend to know a lot about how sumo operates, but as near as I can tell from an outsider’s perspective, he appears to have been moderately successful.

When he retired from sumo, he relocated from his native Japan to Los Angeles and has been attempting to make a go of it in the entertainment industry in addition to participating in amateur and exhibition sumo events in the U.S. He has had small roles in John Wick 4 and the Netflix series Sanctuary.

His appearance at the Greatest Royal Rumble was his first and to date only professional wrestling match. The issue of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter that covered the GRR reported that Sumi’s involvement in the show was likely an attempt to satisfy Saudi authorities who wanted Yokozuna for the show, not realizing that he died eighteen years earlier. The same WON issue indicated that Sumi’s appearance in the company was almost certainly going to be a one-off.

We’ll return in seven-ish days, and, as always, you can contribute your questions by emailing [email protected]. You can also leave questions in the comments below, but please note that I do not monitor the comments as closely as I do the email account, so emailing is the better way to get things answered.