Ask 411 Wrestling: How Unusual Was It for John Cena to Lose His Last Match?

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Through Hel Stryer and brimstone . . . it’s Ask 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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JN is staring up at the lights:

Timely question about the “time-honoured tradition” of wrestlers losing their last match. When did this tradition begin? What were the first major instances of this? And what are some notable examples besides John Cena? This can get murky because wrestlers are notorious for not staying retired, but I’d ask you include “retirement matches” if the wrestler came back a few times afterwards. Also – Can you provide some examples of wrestlers NOT going on on their back, so to speak? I’m sure there are a few that happened because the wrestler did not intend on retiring but injuries or other circumstances happened. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about winning their “retirement match” – Has it happened? And who has it happened to? Lots of questions in here, no worries if you don’t get to each and every one.

First off, the concept of a wrestler having a big sendoff in a match built around their retirement really didn’t become popular until the 1980s. Thus, the “time honored tradition” of losing your retirement match wouldn’t have had a chance to start until then, either.

However, there is another concept that losing your retirement match is closely related to. As most of you reading this will know, the United States used to be divided up territories, with each territory being exclusively promoted by one booking office. Wrestlers would have a run in one territory for several months to a couple of years and then move on to another territory. It was traditional for a wrestler to lose their final match in a territory, with the idea being that if one wrestler was leaving the company and one wrestler was staying with the company, the guy who was staying got some extra credibility from the victory while the guy who was leaving really didn’t need the win, as he’d be moving on to a new set of fans who knew nothing about his record in the prior territory.

If you tie the notion of losing your retirement match to the notion of losing your last match on the way out of a territory, then it goes back to the very beginnings of the territory system in the 1930s and 1940s.

With that established, lets’ move on to JN’s other questions. Who has won their retirement matches and who has lost their retirement matches?

This will not be an exhaustive list. I’m not hunting for every retirement match ever, but I’m going with notable examples. Also, for purposes of this question, we’re going with matches that were promoted as retirement matches. We’re not including a wrestler’s final match if it was not built up as a retirement match in advance – for example the Rock vs. Steve Austin at Wrestlemania XIX. Also, we’re not taking matches off the list just because a wrestler came back and had matches after the fact. In other words, we’re 100% talking about how the match was talked up before it happened and 0% what happened in the wrestlers’ career after the match.

I am also not including matches in which the “retirement” was clearly an angle and it was planned from the beginning that the retiring wrestler would ultimately be returning – for example Randy Savage vs. The Ultimate Warrior at Wrestlemania VII.

The earliest billed major retirement match I could find occurred on August 23, 1980 at the Philadelphia Spectrum, where Gorilla Monsoon put his career on the line against the Intercontinental Championship held by Ken Patera. Patera won the match, sending Gorilla out on his back.

Though he would come out of retirement several times, about one year after Gorilla stepped away from the ring, Verne Gagne had a billed retirement bout. It occurred on May 10, 1981 and also served as a celebration of Gagne’s 55th birthday and 32nd anniversary of becoming a professional wrestler. Gagne came into the match as the AWA World Heavyweight Champion – after all, he was the booker – and his supposed last match was a title defense against old rival Nick Bockwinkel, which Gagne won at the St. Paul, Minnesota Civic Center.

Later in 1981 – specifically on October 4 – Bruno Sammartino wrestled what was billed as his last match at the Meadowlands Arena. He managed to get a win over George Steele in a match that headlined even over the evening’s WWWF Championship match of Ivan Koloff winning via decision over Bob Backlund.

The year after that, another regional legend, Fritz Von Erich, had has retirement match on June 4, 1982 in Irving, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Not only did Fritz win his retirement match, but he actually won a championship in his retirement match, defeating King Kong Bundy for the NWA North American Heavyweight Title, later known as the World Class Wrestling Association North American Title. Von Erich immediately vacated the championship upon winning it, and it was awarded back to Bundy shortly thereafter. Oh yeah, much like Gagne, Von Erich was the guy booking his own retirement match.

Speaking of Texas, let’s talk Terry Funk. The Funker first retired on August 31, 1983 in All Japan Pro Wrestling in a match where he and his brother Dory Funk, Jr. faced off against Stan Hansen and Terry Gordy, the latter of whom was being built up as AJPW’s newest foreign heel. Funk’s retirement had been announced two years in advance, giving him more than double the retirement tour of John Cena. Unlike Cena, he did pick up the fall for his team in that bout, pinning Gordy with a top rope sunset flip.

On October 29, 1986, Captain Lou Albano had his retirement match at the Glens Falls Civic Center in Glens Falls, New York. He teamed with the British Bulldogs, who he was managing at the time, to defeat Johnny V, Brutus Beefcake, and Greg Valentine. This match aired on WWF Superstars on November 16, 1986. It’s worth noting that, though the Captain won in his retirement match, this is a bit different circumstance than usual, as he was already primarily thought of as a manager and he was teaming with the Bulldogs, so this could be seen as a mechanism to use his retirement to put the Bulldogs over instead of putting Albano over his opponents in his final bout.

The very next year featured Roddy Piper’s supposed retirement match at Wrestlemania III in the Pontiac Silverdome, where he not only defeated Adrian Adonis on the way out of the WWF but also shaved his head to really embarrass him.

January 20, 1992 saw what was billed as the retirement match of Dino Bravo, taking place on a WWF house show in his homeland of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Bravo actually did pick up the victory over the Barbarian here, though the fact that the match was only for the local crowd and not televised may have had some bearing on that decision.

Two-and-a-half years later, also in Montreal, Jacques Rougeau defeated Pierre Oulette in a battle of the Quebecers that was billed as Rougeau’s retirement match. This main evented a WWF house show on October 21, 1994. Interestingly, Scott “Raven” Levy was in Oulette’s corner, and after this match Rougeau was back wrestling in the WWF before Levy was, even though Rougeau is the one who was billed as retiring.

Moving on to 1997, we get our first women’s match on this list, as WCW Women’s Champion Akira Hokuto defeats Madusa at the Great American Bash pay per view in a bout with both the championship and Madusa’s career are both on the line. I remember being legitimately shocked by the outcome of that match back in the day in a way that not many wrestling match outcomes shocked me. It seemed like the stipulation existed for Madusa to finally get the belt after already having dropped a couple of matches to Hokuto.

On the very next WCW pay per view, the 1997 Bash at the Beach, Kevin Sullivan and Chris Benoit met in a death match with a retirement stipulation. Even if you don’t remember the match itself, if you remember the rest of WCW history, you’ll know that Sullivan lost here.

Oh hey, Terry Funk is retiring again. This time he loses to WWF Champion Bret Hart on September 11 at the independent show known as Terry Funk’s Wrestlefest in Amarillo, Texas, which was immortalized in the documentary Beyond the Mat. Though originally promoted as a retirement match, the Funker eventually backed off that claim and said this would just be his retirement match for the Amarillo market. However, he even backed out on that one, having two more matches in the city during his career.

On April 4, 1998 in the Tokyo Dome, New Japan founder and legend Antonio Inoki wrestled his retirement match and, interestingly enough, there was a tournament to determine his final opponent just as there was with the recent John Cena retirement. The tournament, which actually had its semifinals and finals on the Inoki retirement show, was won by Don Frye. Frye would go on to lose to Inoki in the main event of the evening.

Cactus Jack went out on his back, as Mick Foley dropped the fall in his purported retirement match with Triple H at the No Way Out pay per view in the year 2000 in Hartford, Connecticut.

Here is a somewhat obscure one. On the November 27, 2000, Scott Steiner met Stevie Ray on WCW Monday Nitro in Rockford, Illinois with Steiner’s World Heavyweight Championship on the line against Stevie’s career. The Genetic Freak retired Stevie Ray in that match, and Stevie did honor it until WCW went out of business and he started working for the upstart WWA group.

We previously saw Akira Hokuto in Madusa’s retirement match, and now let’s look at Hokuto’s own. On April 7, 2002, Hokuto retired on a GAEA Japan card in a match that saw her team with Meiko Satomura against Ayako Hamada and Chigusa Nagayo. Hokuto did pin Hamada with her legendary Northern Lights Bomb finisher, after which she celebrated with her husband, Kensuke Sasaki.

Sticking with the women, Trish Stratus not just won her retirement match but also captured a championship in it, defeating Lita for the WWE Women’s Championship at the 2006 Unforgiven pay per view in Toronto. This may be the only way in which Trish Stratus and Fritz Von Erich are at all similar, aside from their being Caucasian hominids.

Probably the most well-remembered retirement match of the last twenty years occurred at Wrestlemania XXIV when Shawn Michaels told Ric Flair that he loved him and then kicked his face off. Of course, Flair honored the time-honored tradition and lost there . . . though it’s not the last we’ll be seeing of him in this answer.

Two years later, Shawn Michaels himself did the honors for the Undertaker, losing his retirement match at Wrestlemania XXVI, at least until some of that sweet Saudi blood money got him back into the ring.

Moving on to the year 2013, puroresu legend Kenta Kobashi laced up the boots for the last time on a retirement show titled “Final Burning” promoted by Pro Wrestling NOAH. His last match was a star-studded eight man tag, where he teamed with Jun Akiyama, Keiji Muto, and Kensuke Sasaki against Go Shiozaki, KENTA, Maybach Taniguchi, and Yoshinobu Kanemaru. If you know anything about those eight names, you can probably guess what Kanemaru was booked in the match to do. If you said “the job,” you are correct. Kobashi pinned Kanemaru with a moonsault press to go out on top.

Joshi legend Manami Toyota had perhaps one of the most unique retirements on this list. An entire show built around her retirement was held on March 17, 2017 on a show promoted by a group called OZ Academy. Toyota actually had 50 retirement matches on that show, with the gimmick being that she would wrestle a variety of opponents, gauntlet style, though each match until the finale would have a one-minute time limit. Throughout those matches, Toyota had a variety of wins, losses, and draws, though the final three matches were against her protege Tsukasa Fujimoto and did not have the time limit. Toyota won the first two of those matches, but Fujimoto took the third and final.

Wrestle Kingdom 14 on January 5, 2020, played host to the retirement match of Jushin “Thunder” Liger. It was a tag bout with Hiromu Takahashi and Dragon Lee taking on Liger and Naoki Sano, a former long-time rival of Liger who had largely been away from New Japan Pro Wrestling since 1990. Takahashi was able to defeat Liger clean in the middle of the ring with his finisher.

July 31, 2022 saw Ric Flair’s last match on an event uncreatively titled “Ric Flair’s Last Match.” But wait, didn’t we already see Ric Flair’s last match? We sure did. However, this is his last match after that last match. Flair and his son-in-law (at the time) Andrade Almas, teamed up against Jay Lethal and Jeff Jarrett, a team that really should have been called “Triple J” but wasn’t. An obviously out of shape Flair, at age 73, pinned Jarrett with the figure four leglock, in what was probably the first time he won a match with his finisher in the preceding 30 years.

On February 21, 2023, Keiji Muto, also known as the Great Muta, had an interesting final night as an active professional wrestler. It was on a show built around his retirement, called “Grand Final Wrestling Last Love.” The promoted retirement match for Muto was against Tetsuya Naito, which Muto lost. Puroresu legend Masahiro Chono, who himself had retired nine years early, was on commentary for the match, and after the bell Muto laid down a challenge to Chono, referencing the fact that the two had their debut bouts against each other 39 years earlier. Muto and Chono went at it one last time, with Chono picking up the quick victory since Muto had won the debut match between the two.

One of Muto’s greatest rivals retired the year later, in March 2024 at AEW Revolution. Of course, I’m talking about the man called Sting. He and partner Darby Allin came into the match as the company’s Tag Team Champions, not just retaining the belts but also ending their run as a tag team undefeated.

So, as you can see, even though there is a supposed “time honored tradition” of putting over your opponent in your last match, as you can see results from the wrestling world from the past 45 years are really all over the place.

Tyler from Winnipeg envisions a clash of the titans:

Did Hulk Hogan ever face Jerry “The King” Lawler one on one?

Yes, twice. On February 9, 1981, Lawler defeated Hogan via disqualification at the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis, Tennessee. The, on July 18, 1981, the two men wrestled to a double count out in St. Petersburg, Florida. Neither one of those matches were filmed or televised as far as I know, so you have no chance of ever seeing them.

Also, if you’re curious about other Hogan singles opponents, back in 2020, I listed every singles opponent Hogan ever had. Yeah, that’s how I spent lockdown . . . basically doing the exact same thing I do when I have total freedom to leave my house.

Luis from Brazil has very muscular thumbs:

Who is the wrestler with the most appearances in official WWE video games?

I’m not a big video game guy, so I decided to check with some folks that are, namely the folks that run The Smackdown Hotel.

According to their database, the Undertaker has the most video game appearances with a total of 64. However, if you only count what the website refers to as the “main series” of WWE games, then Taker drops to 25 appearances and is tied with Kane and Triple H.

What exactly counts as a “main series” WWE video game is beyond me but, again, I’m not much of a video game guy.

Donny from Allentown, PA is still showing his face around here:

In 1986 when the Machines debuted in the WWF, Andre was introduced as the Giant Machine in their first interview. Looking through house show archives from the whole time the Machines were there, I can’t seem to find one actual time the Giant Machine participated in a match. Whenever it was a six man tag it was always the Super Machine, the Big Machine, and either Capt Lou Albano, The Hulk Machine, or the Piper Machine. Can you recall a time during the Machines’ run that Andre wrestled a match as the Giant Machine? I only recall him appearing in interviews

Giant Machine did participate in a handful of matches.

Two of them were televised. On August 26, 1986 at the Providence Civic Center in Rhode Island, the Machines defeated Al Navarro, JJ Jackson, and Rick Hunter. This ultimately aired on WWF Superstars on September 13.

The very next day, August 27, the WWF taped television at the Hartford Civic Center in Connecticut. In a match that aired on Wrestling Challenge on September 28, the Machines defeated Navarro and Jackson again, though this time Hunter was replaced by Tiger Chung Lee.

Giant Machine also had two house show matches. In both of them, he teamed with Super Machine against King Kong Bundy and John Studd. Those matches were in the Tacoma Dome on August 15 and in Heritage Park in Colonie, New York.

So, we could find record of two Giant Machine matches in the WWF. That’s not entirely surprising, as the team only lasted in the company for about two months.

That’s not the whole story, though.

The WWF Machines were actually inspired by a gimmick that Andre saw when touring with New Japan Pro Wrestling. In 1984, a team called the Strong Machines debuted, though eventually one of them (Junji Hirata) spun off and became a singles act as Super Strong Machine.

Andre wrestled SSM on one occasion, after which he decided to become a Machine himself, wearing a mask as Giant Machine a year before he did it in the WWF. Bill Eadie joined him as Super Machine, and they had numerous matches together in NJPW in August and September of 1985.

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.