John Cena Reveals How Rock & Travis Scott’s WWE Disappearance Affected Tour

John Cena opened up about The Rock’s disappearance from WWE TV following Elimination Chamber while in conversation with Cody Rhodes.

The Champ appeared for his first post-retirement interview on What Do You Wanna Talk About? With Cody Rhodes. They spoke about the retirement and the Farewell Tour at length, along with an insight into his next plans.

One of the segments of the interview was dedicated to The Rock and Travis Scott appearing at Elimination Chamber for John Cena, and then disappearing from WWE TV. This led to the heel turn being a wasted opportunity. However, The Champ claimed that plans are always subject to change, and when they do, the important thing is to work with the tools available in hand and move forward.

You know what I have to do? I got to get back on the field. I just can’t waste my time, I can’t invest my time in something that is never going to come to fruition. I admire the fact that people criticized it like, ‘they didn’t have any long-term bookings for this?’, they might have, that sh*t changed!

If the critical spot is like ‘moment of heel turn’, great. Afterwards, the audience’s expectations were ‘I want a new personality’, ‘I want a new gear’, ‘I want a new sick theme song’, and all this. Yeah, those were all great ideas. You know it takes at least two years to get a guy over. So if I am going to do that and we got to call it quits in December, I don’t know if there is enough time for a turnaround.

So now the tools I have to work with are like play within confiance, develop your why, okay! I am in an abusive relationship. Alright, that makes sense. I can lean into the polarisation of the audience and say all the things I didn’t want to say.

John Cena explained why The Rock’s disappearance wasn’t a disaster for the Farewell Tour

The Champ walked down the hypothetical path where The Rock and Travis Scott remained on WWE TV until August. If that happened, fans wouldn’t have gotten some of the dream matches, such as Cena vs. Styles or Cena vs. R-Truth. Never Seen 17 claimed that what they built by pivoting from original plans was beautiful.

Let’s walk down hypotheticals. Let’s say everyone that showed up at the Chamber is active until August, that robs us of John Cena-Randy Orton, that robs us of John Cena-CM Punk, John Cena-Ron Cena, John Cena-AJ Styles, John Cena-Logan Paul, me and you [Cody Rhodes] for the last one, mano-a-mano. So yes, the story that might have been, might have had starpower and gravity and who knows what. But, what we got by just being, ‘these are the pieces left. What can we build?’

What we got, for me personally, was beautiful. I am not trying to change anybody’s mind. I have released art into the world, and they can think how they want about it. I am just also saying like, is it a wise investment in time? and what I have learned about like credible wrestling critics, of course, you want chatter, you want clickbait. Let’s analyze what happened. I was in the ring with you. I was in the ring with Randy and Punk and Ron Cena and Logan Paul and AJ Styles. Man, it was really loud.

Make TJR Wrestling your choice for news by clicking here.