Here’s the thing concerning the predominant event of WrestleMania 22: It’s mostly boring. It’s Triple H and John Cena in 2006, and it plays out concerning the way you’d expect a Triple H vs. John Cena match to play out in 2006. The one interesting thing from the match itself is the response of the gang, and to speak about that, it’s rather more informative to focus not on the match, but on the entrances.
Triple H comes out first to what I imagine is the debut of the “King of Kings” entrance song, in addition to his first WrestleMania appearance wearing a crown and sitting on a throne. At this point, it’s explicitly Conan the Barbarian cosplay; later it’ll grow to be an entire other different thing that is very clearly about his own self-aggrandizement, but here he really is just letting his inner fanboy loose, and the Chicago crowd is pretty into it. Paradoxically, it probably helps that he’s a well-established heel; on the time Chicago was known for being a smark town that had an inclination toward contrarianism — they’d already cheered the heel Mickie James and booed the babyface Trish Stratus earlier within the evening, for instance. But truthfully, you would have replaced Triple H with just about any wrestler in the corporate and gotten the identical result, because Chicago wasn’t excited to cheer Triple H a lot as they were deliriously excited to boo John Cena.
Cena’s Chicago mobster entrance is peak wrestling cringe — less due to actual content of the doorway (though to be clear, also due to that) and more due to what it said about Cena’s relationship with the fans. When 2025 Heel Cena goes off on the WWE audience for treating him badly, that is the form of thing he means; a whole lot of wrestling fans on the time hated Cena, especially because he’d been champion for all but 21 days of the previous calendar 12 months. The smark Chicago fanbase, specifically, hated seeing Cena get artificially pushed ahead of wrestlers who they felt had done more to organically earn the highest spot. WWE was obviously aware of this and was eager to mitigate the negativity, because in the event that they weren’t, they’d never have sent Cena on the market with a trenchcoat and a tommy gun, heralded by a cartoonish crowd of gangsters pouring out of an old automotive — one among whom was famously CM Punk in his unofficial WrestleMania debut.
The whole thing smacks of desperation, and that is for those who’re just watching the clip on YouTube. In the event you go to Peacock, you may see Cena’s entrance immediately preceded by a grainy black-and-white video that explicitly attempts to link Cena to Depression-era Chicago mobsters, portrayed as anti-authority freedom fighters who didn’t care “for those who loved them otherwise you hated them.” Vince’s plea for the gang to not boo Cena couldn’t have been more ham-fisted and transparent if he’d sent Cena out in an actual Chicago Bears uniform, and it also (hilariously) falls on deaf ears, as Chicago mercilessly boos Cena and his tommy gun out of the constructing anyway and proceeds to invent the “yay”https://www.wrestlinginc.com/”boo” chant (“yay” for Triple H, “boo” for Cena) that alternates forwards and backwards during punch exchanges to at the present time.
There’s some not inconsiderable irony here within the presence of Cena and Punk, each (type of) main-eventing WrestleMania for the primary time almost 20 years before they’ll predominant event their respective nights this weekend. But there’s much more irony within the proven fact that, while the “CM” a part of Punk’s name has often been referenced as meaning “Chicago Made,” it was actually John Cena who Chicago made at WrestleMania 22. This was the night Cena got here fully into form — the superhero babyface WWE Champion being booed relentlessly while the corporate spins the gang response harder and faster than the brand on his custom title belt and who, in fact, all the time wins. All Punk can do is exist in Cena’s shadow, survive, and take a look at to face out as a part of his story. And it’s telling that even today, as he prepares to retire, Cena continues to be above Punk on the WrestleMania card.
Written by Miles Schneiderman
