In the world of professional wrestling, one of the most meaningful ways to push a rising star is for him or her to defeat an established star. That’s especially true when the established star is a former world champion, or better yet a main event fixture.
On paper, beating John Cena should be huge for someone’s career. After all, Cena is a sixteen-time world champion, was the face of WWE for a decade-plus, and is one of those rare wrestlers to successfully crossover to Hollywood and arguably be even a bigger mainstream celebrity now than when he worked full time for WWE.
However, counterintuitively, beating Cena has actually not meant career progress for most of the men who’ve pinned him on TV within the past five years.
Solo Sikoa Has Taken A Backseat Since Decimating John Cena
In the build to Crown Jewel 2023, one point of drama was John Cena emphasizing he hadn’t won a singles match in years. Many fans took this storytelling as a sign Cena was going to get a big win again, but that wasn’t in the cards.
Solo Sikoa didn’t only defeat Cena. In repeatedly bludgeoning Cena with the Samoan Spike, Sikoa positively decimated the former champ, leaving him unable to defend himself in the ring. The youngest member of The Bloodline had already existed in the main event orbit. Many fans read this particular victory as a sign he was in line for a major push, perhaps replacing Roman Reigns as a top heel or turning face to challenge his cousin.
Instead, Sikoa has stalled out. Rather than the Cena match being a launching pad, there’s a subtle truth that that was actually Sikoa’s first ever WWE PLE singles match and his last to date. While he has remained featured as a top sidekick to The Tribal Chief and a proxy for him on house shows, Sikoa hasn’t seen his own career advance nearly a full half-year off the biggest win of his career.
Austin Theory Is In A Weaker Position Than He Was A Year Ago
It’s one thing to beat John Cena one-on-one in a televised match. It’s another to do it at WrestleMania.
Austin Theory accomplished that unlikely feat at WrestleMania 39, pinning Cena in a win that wasn’t entirely clean, but also wasn’t that dirty. This wasn’t a victory that pushed Theory to the main event. Though he’s flirted with that picture here and there, most of that was before the Cena match. Theory wasn’t getting established as a dominant secondary champ the way Gunther has been either. Theory dropped the United States Championship four months later after a largely uneventful remainder of his reign.
One year later, Theory barely earned his way into a twelve-man ladder match with his better-featured tag team partner Grayson Waller. Theory is still only in his mid-20s, so there’s plenty of time for him rise up. Nonetheless, Theory remains at this point the only man to have defeated Cena at WrestleMania who was not a world champion before, after, or at that time.
Bray Wyatt’s Career Trajectory Can’t Be Fairly Assessed Due To Tragedy
Bray Wyatt holds perhaps the most unusual victory over John Cena in having defeated him in a Firefly Fun House Match at WrestleMania 36 (after enjoying some success against Cena in their earlier feud as well).
To be fair, Wyatt did enjoy some successes after his last victory over Cena, including winning a world title. However, it’s worth acknowledging that that third world title reign was the shortest of Wyatt’s career, only lasting one week.
The following WrestleMania would be the last one at which Wyatt worked a match—losing a confusing, disappointing bout to Randy Orton. Wyatt would be on and off television for the year to follow between health and creative issues, including winding up released from the company for a period of months. Finally, after missing significant TV time, the wrestling world was shocked to learn of Wyatt’s passing.
It would be silly to associate winning a match over Cena with the real-life tragedy of losing a human being—let alone such a creative artist and a father. Nonetheless, it stands that Wyatt was on the list of men who didn’t enjoy appreciable career growth from beating the sixteen-time world champion.
Roman Reigns Is The Exception That Proves The Rule
The only man to defeat John Cena in a one-on-one televised match in the last five years and prosper was Roman Reigns. Indeed, Reigns beating Cena at SummerSlam 2021 made a statement as it cemented that WWE meant to go the distance with his title reign, and that Reigns had firmly supplanted Cena as “the guy” in WWE.
Every rule has its exception, but all the more so, one might argue that beating Cena wasn’t all that monumental to The Tribal Chief’s success. Beating Cena was undoubtedly the biggest win of Austin Theory’s career and the same is true for Solo Sikoa. The Firefly Fun House match, so uniquely tailored to Bray Wyatt’s character, could be perceived as the biggest win of his run.
For Reigns, there’s a very reasonable case that the visual of him pinning Edge and Daniel Bryan at the same time at WrestleMania 37, pinning Drew McIntyre in front of a UK stadium crowd, successfully defending against Cody Rhodes at WrestleMania 39, or any of the times he survived Brock Lesnar were the highlights of this title reign, let alone of his career. As such, The Head of the Table may have withstood the curse of beating John Cena if only because the win wasn’t such a big deal for him in the first place.
Like most patterns in wrestling, the curse of beating John Cena probably doesn’t mean much. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting anomaly to track, and fans will have to wait and see if it continues or something shifts the next time Cena’s back in the WWE mix.
