John Cena Had Very Different Plan For Retirement Tour

John Cena’s career is almost over.

On December 13, John Cena will wrestle his final match at Saturday Night’s Main Event. On the special card in Washington, D.C., that will see NXT stars take on main roster names, Cena will square off against Gunther or LA Knight.

Knight and Gunther are set to meet in the finals of the Last Time Is Now Tournament on SmackDown, with the winner going on to wrestle Cena.

The 17-time World Champion’s run began back in January when Raw debuted on Netflix, and despite his reduced schedule, he’s acknowledged that things haven’t always been easy.

John Cena Had A Different Vision For Retirement Run

During a new interview with Bill Simmons of The Ringer, Cena reflected on his final year with WWE, admitting that he took on too much outside of the ring.

“‘Hey man, 36 dates must have been easy this year.’ I did too many jobs. I was in Budapest, flying to Indy, do Indy, fly back, land, go film. Doing that until post-WrestleMania. Back and forth to Morocco, Budapest, all these crazy places that weren’t easy commutes.

You think you can do it, ‘I’ll sleep on the plane.’ You don’t. It doesn’t happen. Then, you get upside down and you’re super fatigued. I threaded the needle just enough.”

Cena went on to reveal that his original idea was to do what he described as a “full year” with WWE that included 220 dates, and no other work outside of wrestling.

“The plan, originally, was to do a full year. This goes to show my ignorance of the business. I wanted to do 220 dates. Just take the year off from everything, hop on a bus, do a full WWE calendar, and totally say goodbye. Thank goodness the business isn’t like that anymore. I’d be done. They only needed me for 36.”

On the latest episode of his podcast, WWE Executive Bruce Prichard denied that John Cena had ever buried talent. Prichard said that, in fact, the opposite was true, and Cena had done more to elevate others than several legendary names.

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H/t to Fightful