John Cena has spent plenty of time celebrating how his retirement tour turned out, but he’s not pretending everything went according to plan. In fact, Cena thinks one of the biggest matches of the entire run flat-out failed.
Speaking with Uncrowned, Cena reflected on his WrestleMania 41 match against Cody Rhodes, where he captured his record-setting 17th world championship in April 2025. Cena didn’t sugarcoat his assessment, admitting that he and Rhodes “stunk up the joint.”
“I think it’s a great template for when I talk to young talent — and I try to do this all the time, I remind them to swing big and don’t be afraid to fail. A lot of them think I’m talking from a glass house of like, ‘Yeah, sure, it must be easy for you, because you, you never fail.’”
Cena pointed directly to WrestleMania as proof that even someone at his level can take a big creative swing and completely miss. Instead of pretending otherwise, he uses that failure when talking to younger wrestlers about taking risks.
“And then I’ll look back, especially on that last year because the retirement tour did have a lot of eyes, and I’ll say I took a big swing at WrestleMania and we stunk up the joint. We failed.”
Cena’s point wasn’t that the WrestleMania failure ruined the story. He believes what happened afterwards mattered more, as WWE adjusted course and eventually brought Cena and Rhodes back together at SummerSlam.
“But what did I do? I got back up, we dusted ourselves off, course-corrected the ship, and we culminated with a fantastic finishing of the story, as Cody would put it, at SummerSlam.”
Rhodes ultimately regained the championship from Cena in a Street Fight at SummerSlam, bringing their rivalry full circle several months after Cena’s WrestleMania win. For Cena, WrestleMania 41 is now an example he can actually use when younger wrestlers are afraid of screwing something up. His message is pretty simple — sometimes you take a big swing and stink up the joint, but that doesn’t mean you can’t fix things the next time around.
Do you agree with John Cena’s assessment that his WrestleMania 41 match with Cody Rhodes “stunk up the joint”? Let us know what you think in the comments.
