John Cena Considered His June 13 SmackDown Promo A 'Pretty Good Failure'

On June 13, WWE took over the Rupp Arena in Lexington, Kentucky, with WWE Champion John Cena opening up an episode of Friday Night SmackDown. Cena cut a promo that was soon interrupted by the likes of LA Knight, Cody Rhodes and Randy Orton. However, Cena wasn’t too happy with how the promo turned out. 

Speaking in an interview on The Breakfast Club, Cena discussed what he considered to be a failure of a promo. 

“I had a pretty good failure two weeks ago, I think. I was out in front of a live audience, not Grand Rapids, where were we — Lexington, Kentucky. I’d opened the show. I had five minutes to speak before three other performers came out and that’s a real hard spot to be in because I can’t do any action yet, you kind of got to tell people what my purpose is and my character is not someone to rile up the audience, it’s somebody against the audience.

"I took the route of, okay, evil mastermind, I’d like to explain my plan and I did for five minutes. I planned this, all this shit, I knew this would happen so I made this move, I knew this would happen. I thought it was well constructed, I thought it was dropping easter eggs for fans. They fucking hated it. The great thing is, they loved when the next three guys came out, so the bit itself worked. But man, it was crickets. I know the noise. I really cannot wait for this to be over, I really thought this was going to work.’”

The following week, Cena had a far more well-received promo, imitating CM Punk’s “Pipebomb”.

H/T Fightful

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