Chris Masters Recalls Starting Career In UPW With John Cena, Training With Him

Chris Masters got his start in pro wrestling alongside John Cena, and he recently reflected on their early days together. Masters and Cena both started out in UPW in California in the late 1990s. The two would eventually of course end up in WWE, though Cena signed with the company a couple years before Masters and debuted almost three years earlier in 2002. Cena, of course, retired from the ring in December at WWE Saturday Night’s Main Event, capping off a record-breaking career while Masters remains active on the independent scene.

Masters recently appeared on Insight With Chris Van Vliet and during the conversation he recalled working with Cena in UPW. He specifically recalled a moment where Andrew Bernardski gave Cena a rough legdrop that he speculated “almost killed the franchise before he ever became the franchise.” You can see highlights below:

On Starting In UPW Alongside John Cena:

“Yeah. So I don’t know this for certain, but we might have even started the same day. So yeah, my earliest memories are with Cena and there’s another guy named Bad Boy Basil, UPW, I was only 16 years old.”

On Training With Cena:

“So I can remember some of our trainings together. I remember one practice specifically where, do you know Andrew Bernardski from The Program? He’s a big dude. But anyways, he was training with us, and he went to give a leg drop off the second rope, and literally landed with all of his ass on John Cena’s head, almost killed the franchise before he ever became the franchise, and it was clunky as hell, man.

“Some of the stuff I remember, because I remember us working some tags and stuff over there, because it was originally in Huntington Beach, it was maybe three months in that I was doing a leapfrog, and again, with Andrew Bernardski, and I didn’t clear him. So I kind of landed on him, and then landed on my ankle, fractured my ankle. I tried to keep training on it, but I knew something was wrong. Literally, a month had gone by, and I couldn’t extend my foot. So, long story short, I ended up having surgery, and then I took a couple of years off. In that time, Cena obviously got signed, went to OVW, and then I ended up coming back to UPW a couple of years later, by the time I was 18.”