wrestling / News

John Cena On Scaling Back His WWE Work, Not Being Able to Handle the Schedule

October 4, 2019 | Posted by Jeremy Thomas
John Cena Image Credit: WWE

– John Cena did an interview for Sunday Today that will air on NBC this weekend, and a clip from it has come online. You can see the clip below, in which Cena talks about why he’s scaled back his WWE work and his future with the company:

On his WWE future: “When do I walk away? And when do I walk away with essentially a sense of mental and physical sanity? And I’m right at that precipice. Like, I feel great, I’m in the best shape of my life. It’s not that I couldn’t continue. But I think from this point on, me continuing, I run the risk of tipping that balance the wrong way.”

On if he feels like he’ll walk away from the company: “No, no. I will never walk away from WWE. I will never — that’s the great thing about WWE, you can perform in any capacity. And as long as I’ve made a promise in the in-ring aspect of things, as long as I can keep up with the current product, I will perform. Now, the opportunities that I’ve been awarded keep me from being in the ring, and I actually think that’s good because it makes any time that I’m invited back to WWE super, super special. And that’s the way it should be.”

On tapering down the amount of time he spends in the ring: “If I didn’t have these opportunities, I still would be taking, actively taking more time off. Because my body just can’t handle the schedule anymore. It’s a lot of performances a year. And I love it so much, I don’t ever want to take time off. You can essentially take as much time off as you want. But when I turned 40, I looked in the mirror and said, ‘Hey man, I know you really like this. But instead of 250 performances a year, from here on out, just do it 100 times a year and do it well.’ And then it became, ‘Just do it 50 times a year and do it well.’ And now it’s like, ‘Hey, you really have to prepare to get ready to perform, and then really recover after a performance. So it’s not that I — what’s that country song? ‘I’m not as good as I once was, but I’m as good once as I ever was.'”

article topics :

John Cena, WWE, Jeremy Thomas