John Cena’s Reason For Retiring From WWE Involves Other Talent
While speaking about his limitations in the ring, John Cena is also focused on stepping aside to help other WWE talent as well.
The 17th and likely last WWE Championship reign in John Cena’s career ended at SummerSlam when Cody Rhodes defeated Cena in a brutal Street Fight match. It was a match that lasted over 30 minutes, featured numerous weapons, and received heavy praise for its quality.
When John Cena spoke to the crowd in Montreal on WWE SmackDown, he was overwhelmed by cheering and the fans chanting his name during a memorable 20-minute promo. It was evident that Cena is getting more emotional as his 2025 retirement tour continues with less than five months to go.
An important message that Cena brought up is how WWE will continue to thrive without him because of how talented the roster is.
While reflecting on his career in a video by People, Cena spoke about his own place in WWE while also making it clear that he would take to take the spot of another talent because he hung around too long.
“I started to assess physically where I was and assess the current program, and the current program in the WWE is spectacular. Like surgically perfect. The athleticism is far beyond anything I’ve ever been capable of. The talent pool is extremely deep, and I remember being a young 20 something in Kentucky.
Wrestling in front of 20 people every night crossing my fingers and hoping to get a call to come up to WWE television and thinking that call would never come and I kind of made a promise when I got on television and when I started gaining some notoriety that I should be as graceful exiting the business or try to be as I was excited to enter.
I openly made a promise to be like, when I’m a step slower, I will go because there will be kids just as hungry as I am who have earned a shot to see if they can make it.
I would hate to, just because I’m hanging around too long, I would hate to take a dream away from a kid like me and maybe not have the opportunity to have someone have an impact on the business.”
John Cena Suggested Retirement Tour To WWE
The discussion continued with John Cena explaining how he conceived the idea for a 2025 retirement tour, drawing parallels with rock bands that have done similar things as a way to thank fans for supporting them for so long.
“So I’m 48, I’ll be 49 next year, been on television 23 years with WWE and it was either the norm, just to kind of drift out of the mix and then come back every once in a while or just announce your retirement through like a social post or a press conference but I approached WWE with an idea and I said, ‘I think the business and the fans have been good to me over the years, I will take this block of time and stand down from most everything and let’s try to give our audience something that they can have closure if they wanted to see something one last time’.
This is something that a lot of rock bands do, a lot of rock bands will do like farewell tour number four and five. Getting on stage and playing music is very taxing, but the physical nature of what we do in WWE, I have my health.
My health and my dedication to my partner are the tip of my spear in life right now. So I think every time I go out there, I just wanna make sure I’m able to give my all, but it’s time to step away.”
Next up for John Cena as far as WWE PLE’s go is a match against Logan Paul at the August 31st Clash in Paris PLE in Paris, France. It should be one of the loudest crowds of the year for one of Cena’s final matches.