>>12701553This although I think his physicals were always good even if his facials were usually OTT- Yeah so were Hogan's but that was the 80s, Cena was doing it in a different era of weekly HD TV and closeups it looked hammy.
He could throw a good punch though, which is more than can be said for 99% of modern wrestlers.
Stick him in there with a genuine ring general, or in a gimmick brawl, and he could be pretty good, but the vast majority of his career divides into one of 3 eras:
>Early 2002-05 Cena, nothing special, nothing awful, serviceable and there>2005-14 Super Cena, unbearably formulaic matches with a limited repetitive repertoire, mashup of Hulk Hogan's worst and Bret Hart's 5 Moves worst, seen one seen them all>2015+ Smark Cena, absolutely stupid "see I can do MOVEZ" nonsense to pop the workrate dorks where he's busting out Yoshi Tonics and springboard stunners for zero reason, absolutely no psychology, no purpose to anything he's doing in the ring, normalised the flippy midget mentality that all that matters is moves.In terms of in ring ability to career success he's honestly one of the worst ratios ever. He could never carry a match against someone less than A grade it's why his HHH matches had lots of heat going in but the match itself was dull and plodding- HHH was pure B-player who also needed gimmicks & shortcuts or a top top partner (or both), Cena wasn't good enough to lead the match.
Bags of charisma though. But when he got to the 'fine speech' stage where he was allowed to no-sell promos and shoot into a guy's performance/character HHHH-burial style he was hard to sit through, equally so because all the promos against him became shitter "youre not a good wrestler" crap. Maybe he's not great in ring in a meta sense, but in kayfabe he's the champ who always wins clean, which by definition makes him good in kayfabe, work with it rather than doing smarkbait.
