The Magnificent Seven: The Top 7 Times John Cena Could Have Turned Heel

Yes, Cena was a heel early in his main roster run with WWE, finding his footing as the Doctor of Thuganomics, which gave way to a white hot face turn. And there’s no question that a face turn was right. Cena became the definitive hero of his generation, and it’s difficult to argue against him having done so, given his longevity and general success in the role.

Still, you have to wonder, what if Cena had turned heel again? He wouldn’t necessarily have to stay heel with any permanence, but there were plenty of times when a vocal portion of the audience was calling for the turn and when it’s debatable if it might have been in the best interest of the character and the WWE product to have taken a detour, refreshed the gimmick, and see what happened.

From the vantage point of summer 2017, I’m not here to say any of these turns should have happened. By and large, I think WWE wound up right, and despite antagonizing some fans, the long face run has preserved Cena’s place as WWE’s franchise player and facilitated quite a few good-to-great feuds, especially as WWE began to play with the definition of a face and, for example, pit Cena against CM Punk and later Daniel Bryan as different kinds of faces, each of whom different fans could cheer for. Moreover, WWE has effectively kept an ace up its sleeve—we could have gotten a memorable heel turn a decade ago, but we still might get the turn any time now and if or when it does happen, for all this waiting, the crowd response will be nuclear.

This column is looking at seven particularly tantalizing, logical, and interesting moments when WWE could have pulled the trigger on that long-rumored heel turn.

#7. The Summer of Punk, 2011

While WWE has grown increasingly bold over the years about playing with Cena’s face status, and outright welcoming fans to cheer the opposition when they pit him against IWC darlings, I dare say that the effect was never more pronounced, nor more strung out than when CM Punk challenged John Cena in 2011.

WWE caught lightning in a bottle with Punk at this time, allowing him to cut his Pipebomb and follow up worked-shoot promos, and devising a clever angle that bent reality, played the Chicago hometown crowd at Money in the Bank to perfection, and set up Punk to become a long-term main event talent. Given Punk’s ascension and how irresistible he was to fans at the time, it easily could have been a time for Cena to slip out of the top face role and to have, in particular, given Punk a worthy heel rival.

The main argument against Cena turning at this time—and why it rarely comes up as a suggested time for a turn—was that it wasn’t necessary. Fans were as fervently behind Punk as they would have been had Cena been a full-fledged heel—maybe more so for the feeling they were backing Punk against Cena as a representative of the WWE corporate machine.

#6. WrestleMania 29, 2013

While the WrestleMania 28 Rock-Cena match felt like a true dream match and the star wattage and long-term build arguably compensated for a match that was just OK, the WrestleMania 29 match was generally met with a cooler reception. Fans weren’t clamoring to the see the two go at it again, The Rock appearing was no longer as novel as it first was, and CM Punk loyalists were miffed at his year-plus title reign not landing him a WrestleMania main event.

I’m actually an apologist for the WrestleMania 29 main event in the sense that I feel it was a better match than the one the guys had the year before, and I particularly appreciated how the ending riffed off of the previous year’s finish. Just the same, to make this more than an inevitable passing-the-torch and Cena-gets-his-win-back moment, this one could have been really special had Cena pulled a Steve Austin from twelve years earlier, deciding he needed to beat The Rock and would do so by any means necessary, before turning heel when the lights were on brightest at WrestleMania. Had things gone down that way, Cena could have had Ryback waiting for him as a face challenger and avoided Ryback’s lukewarm heel run that year altogether, maybe thrown Triple H at him for a one-off; all that, not to mention that fans would have been all too eager to cheer Mark Henry against Cena until Bryan was ready to take the crown from him at SummerSlam.

#5. WrestleMania 22, 2006

At WrestleMania 21, John Cena got his well-deserved coronation. He’d spent over a year on a steady rise through the ranks and was a totally fair, well-built pick to defeat JBL and co-lead a new era with Batista on opposite brands.

While the year to follow started well enough, it also saw Cena hate begin to sink in. Fans were clearly not all for him when he hopped to Raw and started working with Chris Jericho, and when Kurt Angle challenged Cena in the fall, there was no question fans backed the Olympic gold medalist. When Edge cashed in the very first Money in the Bank on Cena that January, the huge response from the crowd wasn’t just a matter of Money in the Bank being exciting or Edge being over—fans were elated to see Cena go down.

Cena recovered the title and found himself opposite Triple H at WrestleMania 22. Despite smart fans traditionally having beef with The Game, and despite him playing the heel, the Chicago crowd and most hardcore fans were all too ready to back the familiar legend over this kid who they were rejecting en masse.

Triple H would be a face—and a very popular one—by summer anyway. Cena was floundering as the face of the company. It would have been a completely logical time to pull a double switch at WrestleMania. The main argument against it—which I do feel has merit—is that at that stage, the turn would have actually been too predictable, and a turn of this magnitude deserved to be a shock.

(Note—I almost made it its own entry, but, working opposite RVD at One Night Stand shortly thereafter was also on my radar, but I felt the timing and rationale were too close to this pick, not to mention the parallels and overlap of RVD in ECW and CM Punk in Chicago).

#4. Mr. Money in the Bank, 2012

In 2012, John Cena became the most over-qualified Money in the Bank winner of all time. Most of the briefcase’s beneficiaries have been up and comers who got a boost; occasionally they’ve been guys with no clear path to the world title who got one invented for them. This, however, was a case of the establishment guy, whom no one would bat an eye at getting arbitrarily shot into the main event picture, getting the briefcase.

The angle wound up being a vehicle for the first cash-in that didn’t result in a title win, as well as CM Punk’s heel turn, both of which were reasonable ends to justify the means. One other, arguably even more intriguing possibility, though, would have been Cena turning heel on Punk at this juncture.

As it worked out, Cena scheduled his cash-in for a then-special three-hour episode of Raw. But what if he announced those intentions, only to blindside Punk by cashing in early? Sure, it would have been out of sync with Cena’s usual character, but there’s a fair argument Punk would have been over enough to hold up his end as the pure face, and there was some built-in logic given Punk had taken the title from him a year before, and now Cena felt the need to resort to desperate measures.

#3. The Royal Rumble, 2017

From here, we shoot forward to near present day. AJ Styles had reigned over Smackdown for months and was a revelation—super-talented, super-over, and still feeling fresh on the WWE landscape given he was still in his first year on the roster. While he’d won the WWE Championship from Dean Ambrose, he’d unofficially taken the mantle as a top guy when he he beat John Cena with some shenanigans at Money in the Bank, then beat him clean as a sheet in an epic encounter at SummerSlam.

So this was the third go-round, the first with championship gold at stake, and the first with WrestleMania implications. Cena had begun his slide into part-time status, while Styles was steadily gaining fan support for sheer quality of performance, despite playing a heel.

With a stadium crowd and big expectations, I have to admit it—I smelled a double turn.

I probably should have known better after over a decade of following Cena’s face act, but WWE did hint at it with Cena showing flickers of arrogance and a heelish demeanor in the build to the match. The double turn would have made sense and perhaps could have set up one last Cena-Styles go-round with their face-heel alignments reversed for WrestleMania. Alas, it was not to be.

#2. The Great American Bash, 2007

This pick might seem out of left field, and hindsight tells us WWE was in the right not to make it happen. Just the same, The Great American Bash featured a first-time dream match of sorts as Bobby Lashley, new to Raw after tours of Smackdown and atop ECW, challenged John Cena.

This was a face vs. face match and a good one that we’d probably remember better had Lashley not wound up leaving WWE less than a year later, such that WWE would largely sweep his legacy under the rug as he went on to a longer tenure with TNA.

It makes reasonable sense for Cena to have stayed face, and for him to have beaten young Lashley so he could remain a mountain for the younger star to overcome down the road. WWE was clearly serious about Lashley, though, given the push he got rubbing elbows with Donald Trump at WrestleMania 23 and feuding with Vince McMahon himself. If WWE had wanted to pass the torch from Cena to a star in many ways cut from the same cloth, it could have made a great deal of sense for Cena to have gone rogue here and whether it was at the Bash or in a rematch down the road, put over Lashley strong.

#1. SummerSlam, 2013

Over the summer of 2013, WWE seemed to recognize what it had in Daniel Bryan and went all in a monster push that culminated in him beating John Cena clean at SummerSlam. One of the subtexts of the feud was Vince McMahon and WWE management doubting Bryan’s main event viability in a nicely meta story for the real life underdog who was about to make his mark.

While we can debate the execution all day long, it was sound enough strategy for Triple H and Stephanie McMahon to turn into heel authority figures who backed establishment champion Randy Orton against Bryn heading out of SummerSlam. The angle made logical sense and gave Bryan a twinge of Steve Austin flavor as he rose up against his bosses and the machine.

The thing that could have really pushed this storyline a few notches hotter? Sub out Randy Orton for John Cena.

For sure, the story would have needed some tweaks, and it’s unclear if WWE always meant for Bryan to get his just desserts at WrestleMania or if they meant to move on from him. In any event, while Orton quickly felt stale as the top heel for having occupied that space so much in earlier years, a Cena heel turn at that point in wrestling history might have felt like a revelation, still fit in the Bryan vs. the establishment story, and felt all the sweeter for Bryan finally overcoming Cena (and maybe still some combination of Orton, Batista, or Triple H) at WrestleMania 30.

Are there other times when you think Cena could or should have turned heel? Lets know in the comments.

Read more from Mike Chin at his website and follow him on Twitter @miketchin.