For years The Undertaker was one of the top stars in WWE and many people at him as a locker room leader. However, as The Deadman aged his appearances on WWE programming became less and less frequent which meant that WWE had to start pushing new stars.
WWE spent a lot of time building up John Cena and it seems that Cena didn’t just become the face of the company, but also a locker room leader as well. Matt Hardy discussed John Cena’s evolution on The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy podcast, and he said that he thinks John Cena emulated The Undertaker when it came to encouraging morale.
“In the beginning he wasn’t, he wasn’t like a big party [guy]. I mean later on like once he started being looked upon as like a, becoming John Cena, as a top guy and like once Undertaker wasn’t doing all the shows and international trips, John would make sure to like you I pull up a chair and he’d hold court and I’d love to be there. And we’d sit back and we would drink and tell wrestling stories and talk about the business and life and just have a good time, like a lot of brotherhood, which is a very, very important thing in pro-wrestling, and was especially at that point.
So once that happened, you know, John was definitely in there. And he’s like, alright, well, let’s, you know, let’s have a couple of drinks, guys. Let’s start some wrestling. Do whatever. So he was, he was good once he got to that thing. And I think that was just him emulating Undertaker, you know, just watching what a top guy who’d done, who was like the leader of a locker room who was there to kind of like help try and encourage morale.”
John Cena recently returned to WWE last week when he teamed with Kevin Owens to defeat Roman Reigns & Sami Zayn during the last SmackDown of 2022. It’s rumored that WWE is hoping to book John Cena for WrestleMania, but so far nothing has been confirmed. Stay tuned for more updates as they become available.
