John Cena talks retirement, being told he can’t wrestle while filming and more!

It’s no secret that the man who has been the face of the WWE for over a decade, John Cena, is winding down his in-ring career as the past couple of years have seen the 16-time champion spend less time with the company and more on outside projects.

‘The Leader of the Cenation’ will be making his WWE return this month on December 26th (see his upcoming WWE schedule here) after last competing at Super Show-Down in October, while at the same time his newest film ‘Bumblebee’ will be hitting theaters this Christmas. He has already confirmed that he will be at WrestleMania 35, so it’s expected he will be sticking around from his return until at least then.

Cena sat down with ESPN’s Cari Champion recently to promote the release of ‘Bumblebee’ and spoke on a number of topics including retirement from the ring and why he can’t compete inside the squared circle while he’s shooting a movie. When asked if he ever thinks to himself, “This is it for wrestling”, Cena responded:

“Well, that’s like asking an athlete like, ‘Hey, do you ever contemplate retirement?’, and you can ask a professional rookie that. You have to because anything that you rely on your body for an end result, time is gonna catch up with you. So there is gonna come a point where I can no longer keep up with the pace. I made a promise to myself years ago, years before I ever found my passion for being on-screen, when I can’t keep up with the pace I gotta walk away. I don’t wanna take a buyer’s money and have sit down and be like, ‘Ah, he’s just hanging on’. I don’t ever want that feeling.”

Cena would continue and speak about why he wants to wrestle while shooting movie and can’t, as well as how he previously misjudged The Rock by not understanding what comes with shooting a movie:

“So I don’t think that correlates with what I’m doing now. The biggest difficulty is trying to juggle stuff because I have learned and I’m trying to fight the system, but I’m losing, when you’re in production for a movie they don’t allow you to wrestle because I can’t go to a WWE taping, have my nose put over here [in reference to his broken nose in a match against Seth Rollins]. Not only does it not look good, ‘Man, you don’t look right’. So then they shut the movie down and there’s 150 people that are expecting a paycheck for that movie and I just screwed them out of their wage and it ups the budget of the movie, so I just put the movie behind the eight ball of possibly being a financial success.

So as much as I want to do everything, you can’t and this is a GIANT misunderstanding I had with what Dwayne was doing, what The Rock was doing ’cause he does movie after movie after movie after movie and I know the feeling of wanting to go back and I’m going back as soon as I can, but I can’t go back until I’m done with this. So I totally get it and I kinda called him out for it and that was me being an ass and I was totally wrong and ignorant and young and stupid and I’ve told him, ‘I’m sorry’, but it’s something I think that our fans don’t understand. If LeBron James was to take a break from basketball because he had the opportunity to film something, basketball fans would be like, ‘What are you doing? Go back to basketball’. So I understand the resentment, but it’s a tough balancing act and I’m bold enough to try.”

If you use any of the above highlights, please credit The Chairshot for transcription.

Do you think John Cena can follow in The Rock’s footsteps? Let us know on social media @theCHAIRSHOTcom and always remember to use the hashtag #UseYourHead!

Brody King is this week’s guest on X-Pac 12360!

After being joined by former WWE Superstar Darren Young last week (find that here), this week’s episode of X-Pac 12360 features Sean Waltman welcoming Brody King to the show, as well as discussing the recent passings of The Dynamite Kid and Larry ‘The Axe’ Hennig.

The following press release for the latest edition of X-Pac 12360 was sent along to The Chairshot today:

SEAN ‘X-PAC’ WALTMAN REMEMBERS TOM “DYNAMITE KID” BILLINGTON AND LARRY “THE AXE” HENNIG. HE ALSO WELCOMES BRODY KING AS GUEST.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PRESS RELEASE- Los Angeles

X-PAC 12360

Get it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyVEaSaFezs

or download the podcast version on iTunes:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/x-pac-12360/id1150124693?mt=2 or download the podcast version for Android:  https://omny.fm/shows/x-pac-12360/remembering-the-axe-and-dynamite-kid-with-brody-ki

Sean ‘X-Pac’ Waltman Remembers Tom “DYNAMITE KID” Billington

One of the greatest of all time… He was a huge, huge influence on my career. As a smaller guy, that’s how you had to be during that time and when I was coming up. And everything you did had to make up for the lack of size, it had to be explosive. And there was nobody more explosive than the dynamite kid… My name was Lightning Kid, it was pretty much a copy off of Dynamite Kid …

Sean ‘X-Pac’ Waltman Remembers Larry “The Axe” Hennig

A lot of people know that I was really close with Curt {Hennig} and traveling down the road with Curt I got to hear stories, I never met anyone that loved their father and looked up to their father more than Curt Hennig did. …And Larry in turn I never met anyone that was more proud of his son than he was of Curt. Every father is devastated when they lose a child but it was just times a hundred, times a hundred for Larry.

I put a tweet out the other day saying one day I’ll the story about Arnold Skaaland, Larry Hennig, Curt and I going over to Tijuana for a few hours, and you know people’s heads started to turn ‘maybe they went to the donkey show’ but no all it was is I went down there and bought a bunch of pills. {laughs} And when we came back across Larry and Arnold both, when I was going through the line, they went in the line furthest from me. They got as far away from me as possible on the way back through. {laughs} … I am honored to have known Larry Hennig and I am sending some love to the Hennig family….

Sean ‘X-Pac’ Waltman Comments On Justin Credible

I had my own way of being down, my own version of hell, so my heart hurts for him and I love the guy. You guys know I really care a lot about him, we try not to give up on people cause when I was ready to fight, people were there for me, but he’s gotta do his part, you gotta do your part…. I just hate seeing this cause there is children involved, there’s this documentary being made. And a documentary is a documentary, it’s not scripted , you don’t get to write the finish of the documentary…You guys know I work with a rehab center and that guy was ready to go pick him up and he wouldn’t go, it’s so frustrating. But I kinda get it too…

Brody King Talks About He Wants To Still Work While Wrestling Full-Time

My work ethic is pretty good, I have a full-time job that I work Monday through Friday and I also train five days a week … I don’t think I can sacrifice the life that I have now to have like a starting rate at somewhere like WWE…that would be huge blow to me in my personal life. The stuff that I have coming up that I cannot confirm or deny, I am able to do my job part-time which is like the best part-time job in the world cause when you want work you can look for it and when you don’t, you don’t look for it. And I can do that and do my wrestling career full-time.

Brody King Talks About Wrestling Jungle Boy at PWG on 1/18/2019, In Jungle Boy’s PWG Debut

It’s almost like a full circle thing, almost a year from when I debuted you know another California kid is debuting, he has all the tools I feel you need to get over. He looks cool, does cool stuff, he’s got this mystique about him, he doesn’t say much but he doesn’t need to. His dad is Luke Perry so that’s kinda funny…

Get it all on this week’s brand new episode of Westwood One’s X-Pac 12360. Two words for you…DOWNLOAD IT!

What did you think of this week’s episode of X-Pac 12360? Let us know on social media @theCHAIRSHOTcom and always remember to use the hashtag #UseYourHead!