Wrestling is filled with fake beefs, but about a decade ago John Cena and Dwayne Johnson got into a real beef. Spoiler: It all worked out in the end and the two patched things up. They even acted in movies together (though their stints in Fast X were, alas, separate). But at one point things got pretty ugly between them, which Cena has since blamed entirely on himself. Over the weekend he again apologized for ripping it up with The Rock.
A recap: Back in 2012 and 2013, when Johnson briefly returned to the WWE, Cena called him out on choosing a movie career over wrestling. The two got real angry with each other, and not in that fun, melodramatic professional wrestling way. Earlier this year Cena reflected on the bad patch, calling his actions “hypocritical” and “selfish.” His apology tour is not over.
“If you’ve been following what I’ve tried to do, especially as of late, publicly and personally to Dwayne Johnson, I’ve stated that although I thought I was trying to do what’s best for business,” Cena said on Saturday at the WWE Fastlane press conference, per Decider. “I went about it the wrong way. I violated his trust and I made allegations about his perspective that I knew nothing about.”
Cena also confessed that “deep down” he was really just a “fan” of Johnson. “I wanted The Rock back [in WWE],” he said. “I wanted to do anything to get The Rock back, but I did it the wrong way.”
Although Cena had done movies before his early teens Rock fight, since then his acting career has really taken off. So now he knows some of the reasons why Johnson, who retired from wrestling in 2004, wasn’t really able to juggle both professions.
“And I made it perfectly clear you can’t do both because of the liability insurance,” Cena explained. “If I were to try to juggle both, that’s very selfish because that would put a whole lot of people in the movie business out of work if something happened to me.”
As for Cena, he’s back on the wrestling scene because of the still ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike, although he plans to go back to acting soon as it ends. Johnson has also come back to wrestling, having last month done WWE Smackdown, where he and Cena hugged it out.
So enjoy Cena shirtlessly kicking butt in huge arenas for now, because during the presser he also confessed that his last wrestling bout is “on the horizon.”
(Via Decider)