John Cena and Cesaro Make Every Moment Count
Cena and Cesaro had all-time chemistry but only wrestled four times over the course of a year. They make every second of that time worth something.
For over a year now, I’ve been searching for the words to describe my almost complete lack of interest in professional wrestling. I know what happened — I lost my job, the chickens came home to roost on several occasions with regard to the long-awaited return of one of my favorite wrestlers, the tenor of the conversations around wrestling as both a business and an artform kept trending towards things I found uninteresting at best, roster shifts happened, I faced a family crisis, I got a new job that has nothing to do with wrestling — but those are all things that go into the bottomless pit that opens up beneath you when you’re suddenly very disinterested in a thing you love, and for awhile now I’ve been somewhat convinced that actually finding the word for it might be my first step in finding my way out of the pit.
I know that’s an odd way of opening an essay about a 2014 match between John Cena and Cesaro, except that, watching this back for the first time in 10 years, I remembered where my level of interest was in February 2014 and where it was a year later, when I effectively stopped writing about weekly wrestling until I was briefly hired as the assistant editor of Paste Wrestling in 2017. The word for what I felt, then and now, was disillusionment.
The thing of it is, it is impossible to watch professional wrestling for any length of time without feeling disillusioned by it eventually: it’s a medium built around raising and smashing the hopes of its audience, and if you get to be a big enough dork about this thing your hopes aren’t just tied to a favorite wrestler winning or losing the big match, but to massive, systemic change for the industry at large. That means something different in 2024 than it did in 2014, and since this is ostensibly an essay about 2014, I will ignore my impulse to moralize about WWE or ponder the orb that is AEW’s place in the industry and tell you this: in February 2014, it felt like everything about World Wrestling Entertainment was about to change.
It did, of course: there was this thing called the WWE Network, once pitched as an actual cable network that’d air old wrestling and reality shows, that instead became a streaming repository of Vince McMahon’s many conquests, the big pitch being that you’d have to be a plain fool idiot to keep paying for pay-per-view when those shows were part of the same $9.99 a month that’d let you watch every episode of WCW Nitro and the soon-to-debut new format of NXT. CM Punk was gone, quitting the night of the Royal Rumble, but it was early days in that saga — that episode of The Art of Wrestling hadn’t dropped yet — and the CM Punk chants that echoed out whenever Daniel Bryan wasn’t on screen felt kind of hopeful.
The real hope was that WWE was on the precipice of change, that they’d learned their lesson from the rise of Punk a few years prior and were listening as fans got behind Daniel Bryan, thrilled to Shield/Wyatts six man tags, and counted out the rotations on Antonio Cesaro’s giant swing. Suddenly, the long, slow grinds of a lot of wrestlers I’d loved were coming to something, in defiance of conventional wisdom about size, promo ability, or the value of tag team wrestling in WWE, and February was when things really caught fire for Cesaro, who lost his first name but beat Randy Orton clean on the same episode of SmackDown a few days before this. Here, against John Cena, the focus shifts from Cesaro’s being a dark horse contender for the title in the Elimination Chamber to the future of WWE itself, specifically the question of who in Cesaro’s generation would supplant the stars of the Ruthless Aggression era, maybe even the star.
For nearly 20 minutes, John Cena works his ass off to suggest that, yes, Cesaro might be that man. It helps, of course, that Cesaro, the once and future Claudio Castagnoli, is one of the best wrestlers of his generation, but there’s something about the way Cena wrestles Cesaro here that accentuates what was an already alluring package. For one, he makes the four inches Cesaro has on him feel like a foot. He’s never straight-up outmuscled by Cesaro, but from the moment the match breaks open with a massive tilt-a-whirl backbreaker, it’s clear that he’s wrestling this as the smaller man. Cena is, as we’ve established, incredible in this role, but unlike in his matches against The Great Khali, Umaga, or even Brock Lesnar, the larger man isn’t relying on brute force to bully Cena, but thoughtful wrestling.
If you’re reading this newsletter you probably already know that Claudio Castagnoli is an elite base. Here, that’s made apparent by how many rolling counters Cena goes for, whether it’s the wonky Cenacanrana, an ad-hoc wheelbarrow DDT, or the way both men roll through each other’s moves for various power displays. It’s matches like this where you can see Cena transitioning into the later, workrate-forward stuff that’d mark his US Title run to varying degrees of success. Here it’s not novelty for the sake of novelty, but invention borne from necessity, because otherwise he finds himself literally and figuratively smothered by Cesaro, even when he’s powering out of a sleeper hold, like so:
Cena’s cause isn’t exactly helped when he manages to create space between himself and Cesaro, either. Early in the match, Cesaro seems to have a sixth sense for where Cena is, using his brief bursts of momentum against him. There aren’t many wrestlers better than Cesaro when the pace picks up, either — as WWE’s in-ring style began to emphasize fast break combos, adjusting to the organized chaos of The Shield and the Wyatts, Cesaro’s combination of strength, speed, and impact made his wrecking ball routine really pop.
There are elements of that here, but what I’m really compelled by is how Cesaro chains things together to give the back half of the match the feeling of an avalanche barreling down a mountain. He bursts across the ring to uppercut Cena from the top rope to the floor, doesn’t follow to the outside, but rather than allowing Cena back into the ring at the seven count, superplexes him from the apron to the ring, immediately rolls him over for the cover, lets his ego get the better of him after two kickouts, finds his way into the STF, struggles to the ropes forcing a break, then leverages Cena into the giant swing. It’s 50 seconds from uppercut to superplex, a minute from pinfall to swing, the crowd absolutely eating up the nearfalls because Cesaro just pinned the WWE champion days before.
The finishing sequence is marvelous, too — Cesaro goes for the Neutralizer, slips the AA, nails his big boot, but gets caught with a gnarly lariat that gets JBL to pop. Recognizing the urgency of the moment, Cena immediately rolls onto Cesaro, deadlifts him into the fireman’s carry, and drops him with the Attitude Adjustment for an emphatic pinfall. Cena’s execution isn’t the smoothest, but so much has been made about wrestling in the Denver altitude, it’s been a long match, and it’s in keeping with the other off-kilter moves Cena had surprised Cesaro with earlier — he had one big swing and came up with a home run.
It’s a fucking fantastic match, y’all. Within minutes, the fans pack in their performative Cena booing routine, and Zeb Coulter and Jack Swagger aren’t a factor until it’s time for Zeb to do his “Yosemite Sam can’t believe he’s been confounded by Bugs Bunny” yelling routine that constituted a good managerial act in 2014. Cena is absolutely exhausted by the end, Cesaro is defiant in defeat, and you get the sense that maybe Cena’s found himself a new all-time rival. So of course we get like three more matches between the two and they never touch again after 2015. The hour-plus that we did get over the course of that year? Poetry.
Rating: **** & 1/2