The D'Amore Drop: You can say John Cena's heel run was a failure, but you're wrong

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5 hours ago

The D'Amore Drop is a weekly guest column on Uncrowned written by Scott D'Amore, the Canadian professional wrestling promoter, executive producer, trainer and former wrestler best known for his long-standing role with TNA/IMPACT Wrestling, where he served as head of creative. D'Amore is the current owner of leading Canadian promotion Maple Leaf Pro Wrestling.
Fans love surprises, and Saturday's surprise — Seth Rollins' Money in the Bank cash-in at WWE SummerSlam — was one of the biggest storyline twists of the year.
So the fans were super excited and cheered — even though the Seth Rollins character had lied and cheated his way to a title win in a terribly cowardly way, and at the expense of one of the most popular heroes in the sport, CM Punk.
Fans cheer moments as much as they do their favorite wrestlers these days. For better or worse, there's no going back to the days when the fans would have booed Rollins for doing something so dirty.
Not only was the execution of the 'injury' itself second to none, but Seth's commitment to selling the injury for the past month further underlines that Colby Lopez is one of the very best to ever do this.
Wrestling really can be the best community. A week ago, my friend of 30 years, Jeff Kavanaugh — known to wrestling insiders as 'Drumboy' — got the gut-wrenching news he has stage-four liver and bowel cancer.
The realities of modern life being what they are, we set a GoFundMe up, and it has already raised $27,000.
It's a tough assignment, but 'Drummy' is focused on getting healthy. We love you, Drumbie.
There's a saying in wrestling: The fastest way to get a secret out isn't by telephone — it's by tell-a-wrestler.
We're two and a half decades into an era where, if a surprise has any chance of not getting spoiled for the fans, you have to keep the number of people who know about it to an absolute minimum.
That includes people who work at the company. I've done it myself — during my second run with TNA, only four people aside from myself knew that Christian Cage was joining TNA for a few months while he was under contract with AEW.
It always feels a little bit … well, not right … to keep your colleagues in the dark, but that's what the job is sometimes. And even with that degree of sneakiness in place, there was still a report by John Pollock ahead of SummerSlam that Rollins' injury was a pre-planned work.
There are people outside — and inside — WWE who are understandably upset they were misled, if not lied to. However, you have to admit it worked beautifully.
The moment where Seth Rollins stopped limping, stood tall, and cast his crutches aside was pure excitement.
I continue to be over the moon for Trinity — aka WWE Women's World Champion Naomi — and her incredible run with WWE. Watching her not only have that great match with Rhea Ripley and Iyo Sky in front of 60,000 people on Sunday, but also getting what I am sure will be a lifelong treasured moment with her dad during her SummerSlam walkout, was special.
It also made me think of Mercedes Moné's recent AEW All In moment — wrestling in front of nearly 30,000 at AEW's biggest event of the year.
Most fans will know Trinity and Mercedes walked out on WWE — as tag-team champs, no less — back in May 2022. They were not happy, to say the least, with their creative direction and how they were being spoken to.
Now look at the pair of them.
There are a million lessons here. Not only for talent — to listen to their guts and believe in themselves — but also for office, who should never lose sight of the fact that talent are people too, and have to be treated with that respect.
The next Maple Leaf Pro Wrestling show will be Sacred Grown on Sept. 5 on the Six Nations territory in Ontario, near Hamilton. The Six Nations is the biggest native territory in Canada and we'll be bringing in a huge show next month.
I can announce Maple Leaf's Champion's Grail will be on the line when Rohan Raja takes on Bishop Dyer as part of what's going to be a loaded event.
In the meantime, check out Raja taking on Hammerstone earlier this summer.
Now that I've seen a couple episodes of "WWE: Unreal" … I don't know that my thoughts have changed. I know Bully Ray and Josh Barnett don't like it — and my feelings kind of align with theirs … while at the same time, I understand that it's a promotion's job to give fans what they want.
Like we talked about last week, the goal for WWE and Netflix here is to do for wrestling what "Drive to Survive" did for Formula One. But instead of viewers going, 'Oh, I didn't know it was this exciting, I thought they just raced round and round in circles,' they go, 'I thought it was just fake fighting — I had no idea it took this much creativity.'
Anecdotally, I have a friend whose wife binge-watched the season … she loved Chelsea Green's real-life persona and really gravitated to CM Punk tearing up moments before headlining WrestleMania 41.
And, for the first time ever, she wanted to watch a WWE PLE last weekend with my friend and their son. Bringing in new fans like this is exactly what "WWE: Unreal" is supposed to be doing.
If that really was John Cena's final WWE Championship match, what a match it was. You could lip-read him telling Cody Rhodes afterward, 'That's all I had.'
And it was more than enough, John.
Again, what a match.
Now that it's over, the John Cena heel run certainly won't go down in history like Paul Orndorff turning on Hulk Hogan — much less Hulk Hogan's own heel turn in 1996.
What I think we'll remember is that it was a shocking moment, it got off to a very strong start, but for reasons we may never know the full details of, it fizzled out quickly to the point where WWE simply dropped it.
For all we know, WWE always planned for Cena to turn around at SummerSlam and drop the belt to Cody. That's certainly what I predicted in this column in late spring.
If you hated the heel run, that's perfectly up to you. But I'll use the logic I use when I hear people try to say Jon Moxley's AEW title reign was a failure: Look at the gates, look at the numbers.
While it wasn't nearly as good as we all hoped, Cena's heel turn wasn't a 'failure.'
You'll have your own thoughts on Brock Lesnar's return to WWE, ranging from 'about time' to 'I hate they brought him back.'
Measure that against the fact that Lesnar's appearance got the biggest pop of the weekend — by far — and Lesnar shirts are now the best, second-best and third-best selling t-shirts for WWE … there's your answer to why he's back.
CM Punk winning a WWE World Championship in 2025 is a hell of a story. Again, there are real-world lessons here about it never being too late, and about letting go of feuds.
I already said in this column how gracious Punk was when we spoke to him about joining TNA in late 2023.
What I'll add here is that mere moments before he walked out to that insane reaction at WWE Survivor Series 2023, Punk texted me that he'd signed with WWE. It was important to Phil that I hear it from him before I read it on Twitter or was texted by someone else.
The match he had with Gunther this past Saturday at SummerSlam was incredible. You can argue — and feel on solid ground doing it — that the best matches at both WrestleMania and SummerSlam this year were CM Punk matches. He turns 47 in two months.
Like I say, it's a hell of a story.
WWE's first-ever two-day SummerSlam delivered where it matters most — at the box office and in the ring. An announced attendance of 113,722 over two nights shattered the SummerSlam all-time turnstile record set by SummerSlam '92 at the original Wembley Stadium in England.
And the matches were outstanding — it was the WWE's card of the year so far.
It's an absolute given that the two-day SummerSlams are here to stay, and you have to guess that the Royal Rumble, surely, will be a two-day event very soon.
WWE easily has the depth of roster to do a two-day Royal Rumble. They could do the women's Rumble and men's world championship on one night, and women's championship and men's Rumble on the other.
I popped big for George Iceman, aka 'The Personal Concierge' from TNA, making his WWE/NXT debut. Iceman has hustled for 25 years in wrestling and it's great to see him get his moment.
I tip my hat to the man who signed him to his first ever TNA deal.