John Cena Reveals Locker Room Speech He Gave After WWE Retirement, Epiphany He Had 24 Hours Beforehand
As noted, John Cena sat down With Cody Rhodes on his What Do You Wanna Talk About? podcast for a full-length interview for the first time since his memorable WWE retirement at Saturday Night’s Main Event.
In addition to the highlights from the candid conversation that we shared here previously, “The Greatest of All-Time” also spoke to “The American Nightmare” about an epiphany he had 24 hours before his WWE retirement match, as well as the toast he gave to the locker room following his WWE swan song.
Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview where he touches on these topics with his thoughts.
On an epiphany he had one day before his WWE retirement: “The epiphany was crazy, right? And it’s just an example of like, let’s never stop learning. This is Friday, I get this, like, ‘Holy sh*t, I found a way to say what I’m actually feeling.’ I was just reading through a book and it was about the ability to have fierce conversations. And you want to, you want to let everybody contribute. You want to have a conversation. And they were talking about the power of the pause and the silence, essentially slowing down. It’s those moments where you do action — it’s your piece of the conversation. And then you slow down to allow the arena to have their piece of the conversation. I’m like, ‘Holy sh*t. I think I can finally articulate what’s up here to a Je’Von Evans at 21 years old.’ Be like, ‘Je’Von, if I talk to you for 45 minutes, you’re not going to care. But if we can talk, if you can tell me what’s on your mind and I can talk to you, and then maybe we both walk away having grown a little bit. Just make sure you do that in your matches.’ You know what I’m saying? Where I don’t have to say, ‘Slow down, kid. You’re going too fast.’ That immediately puts you on the defensive. ‘Slow down? You can’t keep up, old man.’ It’s not about that. You’re going to feel it when you feel it. But now you got a chip on your shoulder to prove me wrong and prove working fast is going to work. I’m not saying it doesn’t. I’m just saying — just make sure you always have a conversation with them out there. And that happened the day before I retired. So what I love about it is, you’re learning all the time.”
On the toast he gave to the locker room after his WWE retirement match: “I got to have one last beer in the locker room in my gear, in my socks, my kneepads, the jorts. And I made a toast. And the toast was to the metrics of the evening: largest arena [gate] in WWE history, largest for the building itself. Very rarely do we hit those milestones. And the only reason I wanted to showcase those metrics was because I said — you know, Haku was in the room and Je’Von Evans was in the room. And everyone in between. We have legends, we have future stars, we have talent that are front and center on our programming. The locker room was full. I can’t believe that many stayed. So I have 12 ounces of conversation left in me, and I choose to use a moment to say, ‘This is what we did tonight. The reason we did that is because of the effort of people like Haku. Also, the goal is for you younger guys to shove that sh*t straight up my ass. You now have the metric.’”
