It almost seems like WWE jumped the gun and came up with something more interesting for John Cena to announce at WWE Backlash, other than just more Club WWE stuff, as was originally reported, and thus, we got the John Cena Classic. While interesting, this initially felt extremely rushed when Cena was trying to describe it, and now that I’ve thought about it more, that really appears to be the case. We have no information about just when this will take place, where it will happen, or if the “classic” means a tournament or just a showcase of matches, and there are many other aspects of this that puts the John Cena Classic overall in the “L” category.
The tournament feels like it could be set up to put a belt, albeit meaningless, on Oba Femi before he hopefully wins the World Heavyweight Championship from Roman Reigns. With Cena’s involved, we could see Mason Rook vs. Femi, despite “The Ruler” not being all that far removed from “WWE NXT” himself. But, as I thought about that part of things more, WWE could easily keep Femi out of the tournament, fully knowing that he’d be the star fans would vote to win it all. Even with a “fan vote,” it’s hard to trust WWE to not game the system in the favor of the star they want to build. With as big of a company guy Cena is, it doesn’t seem like he’d have much to say against that.
While mostly everything about the John Cena Classic makes sense in theory, as the matches at Saturday Night’s Main Event in December were excellent, the aspect of fans being able to vote for their favorite, even if that star loses their match, leaves a lot to be desired. Sure, it’s the “hustle” aspect of “Hustle, Loyalty, Respect,” but I don’t know if I ever thought WWE would be so blatant in the “winners don’t matter!” category of sports entertainment.
Cena really didn’t provide a lot of information about anything, really, but it feels like an easy assumption that only Club WWE fans will be able to vote for their favorites. At best, members could get more votes for being a part of the club, while those who don’t want to pay the extra money to get involved only get one vote per X account, or something like that.
Fans were left with more questions than answers at Backlash regarding the John Cena Classic. We got the basics, but while we don’t need to know who will be competing from “NXT” and the main roster just yet, it would have been nice to at least know just when to expect this event.
Written by Daisy Ruth
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