Tonight John Cena will have his first singles match on RAW in more than a year. Maybe WWE will ease him back into solo competition and throw him, someone like Curtis Hawkins.
Nope.
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According to PWInsider, John Cena will face off against Samoa Joe tonight on RAW. This pay-per-view caliber match will be the first time these men have met since their amateur says in UPW nearly 20 years ago.
There have been some rumors coming about that these two were already booked for a No Mercy match, but we can only speculate from here. One thing is certain, we’ll know much more about No Mercy after tonight.
As Mentioned, Cena and Joe have a bit of history. In fact, Joe was launching pad for Cena and his WWE career. According to a recent interview with 102.5 The Bone’s Drew Garabo Live out of Tampa Bay, Florida, Samoa Joe served as the final stepping stone that got Cena into WWE’s famed doors:
“Actually, John Cena’s match with me, the one that kind of got him hired with WWE, I remember they were there to look at John, obviously. He looked great, he was like the blue-chipper, and John was a good friend of mine, so I had no problem whatsoever helping him kind of highlight and do his thing. Hey man, he was a hard worker, man. He got it done, so after the match, I remember Jim Ross, head of Talent Relations at the time, I went up to him and I was like, ‘is there any interest over here?’ ‘Ah, no, son. I don’t think you’re quite going to work out here.’ Two years in, but it was cool because I was like, ‘well, if I can’t go there, I’m going to focus on all this other stuff. Where else can you make money? Oh, Japan!’ So I focused on Japan, I got a contract over there, and the rest is history.”
While Cena arriving in WWE was likely inevitable, this is still a cool anecdote from The Destroyer. Think about it, if Joe wasn’t feeling it on that fateful night, Cena’s arrival could have been delayed by the sub-par performance. It wasn’t, and the rest is quite literally history.
Tonight they’ll reignite some old chemistry. Maybe it leads to a bigger match at No Mercy, we can’t tell just yet. On that we do know is that we’re curious, and that’s always a good thing for WWE.
