Here’s the thing about the main event of WrestleMania 22: It’s mostly boring. It’s Triple H and John Cena in 2006, and it plays out about the way you’d expect a Triple H vs. John Cena match to play out in 2006. The only interesting thing from the match itself is the reaction of the crowd, and to talk about that, it’s much more informative to focus not on the match, but on the entrances.
Triple H comes out first to what I believe is the debut of the “King of Kings” entrance song, as well as his first WrestleMania appearance wearing a crown and sitting on a throne. At this point, it’s explicitly Conan the Barbarian cosplay; later it will become a whole other different thing that’s very clearly about his own self-aggrandizement, but here he really is just letting his inner fanboy loose, and the Chicago crowd is pretty into it. Ironically, it probably helps that he’s a well-established heel; at the time Chicago was known for being a smark town that had a tendency toward contrarianism — they had already cheered the heel Mickie James and booed the babyface Trish Stratus earlier in the evening, for example. But honestly, you could have replaced Triple H with pretty much any wrestler in the company and gotten the same result, because Chicago wasn’t excited to cheer Triple H so much as they were deliriously excited to boo John Cena.
Cena’s Chicago mobster entrance is peak wrestling cringe — less because of the actual content of the entrance (though to be clear, also because of that) and more because of what it said about Cena’s relationship with the fans. When 2025 Heel Cena goes off on the WWE audience for treating him badly, this is the kind of thing he means; a lot of wrestling fans at the time hated Cena, especially because he’d been champion for all but 21 days of the previous calendar year. The smark Chicago fanbase, in particular, hated seeing Cena get artificially pushed ahead of wrestlers who they felt had done more to organically earn the top spot. WWE was obviously aware of this and was desperate to mitigate the negativity, because if they weren’t, they would never have sent Cena out there with a trenchcoat and a tommy gun, heralded by a cartoonish crowd of gangsters pouring out of an old car — one of whom was famously CM Punk in his unofficial WrestleMania debut.
The entire thing smacks of desperation, and that’s if you’re just watching the clip on YouTube. If you go to Peacock, you’ll see Cena’s entrance immediately preceded by a grainy black-and-white video that explicitly attempts to link Cena to Depression-era Chicago mobsters, portrayed as anti-authority freedom fighters who didn’t care “if you loved them or you hated them.” Vince’s plea for the crowd to not boo Cena couldn’t have been more ham-fisted and transparent if he’d sent Cena out in an actual Chicago Bears uniform, and it also (hilariously) falls on deaf ears, as Chicago mercilessly boos Cena and his tommy gun out of the building anyway and proceeds to invent the “yay”https://www.wrestlinginc.com/”boo” chant (“yay” for Triple H, “boo” for Cena) that alternates back and forth during punch exchanges to this day.
There’s some not inconsiderable irony here in the presence of Cena and Punk, both (sort of) main-eventing WrestleMania for the first time almost 20 years before they’ll main event their respective nights this weekend. But there’s even more irony in the fact that, while the “CM” part of Punk’s name has often been referenced as meaning “Chicago Made,” it was actually John Cena who Chicago made at WrestleMania 22. This was the night Cena came fully into form — the superhero babyface WWE Champion being booed relentlessly while the company spins the crowd reaction harder and faster than the logo on his custom title belt and who, of course, always wins. All Punk can do is exist in Cena’s shadow, survive, and try to stand out as part of his story. And it’s telling that even today, as he prepares to retire, Cena is still above Punk on the WrestleMania card.
Written by Miles Schneiderman
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