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| He's hurt (or is he?), but that shouldn't be the end of the world Photo Credit: WWE.com |
However, WWE in the last few years has been using its own website as a primary source of legitimate news over the last few years. Maybe his appearance on RAW tomorrow is surrendering the title to Ryback straight up, or to the most controversial titleholder in wrestling history, Vacant, and then confirming himself that he's out for an extended period of time. The last WWE superstar to suffer this type of injury was Edge, who was on the shelf for seven months. Cena is a physical freak and has been known to come back from bad injuries in record time. Still, that puts his ETA around SummerSlam, right?
This puts WWE behind the 8-ball in terms of star power. CM Punk is already on the shelf rehabbing his injuries that have existed since he was still WWE Champion. The Rock has wrestled his last match, and fuck if he'd wrestle during the post-Mania lull period anyway. Brock Lesnar hates the road. Undertaker is sprier than normal, but I doubt he wants to do more than a few appearances here and there. Triple H... well, let's not invoke his name. He might come back fulltime, and God help us all if he does.
But yeah, if Cena is missing time, it exposes how poorly a job WWE has done building up for this rainy a day to come along. That being said, it only might feel like a doomsday scenario to those who underestimate the WWE's average audience. There are opportunities for WWE to build on the fly here. They have the wrestlers, the personnel. They just need the direction.
Obviously, that's not going to come overnight. You put any team's best players out with injury, and yeah, that team's going to flounder. In terms of WWE's other side, there's a reason why Saturday Night Live suffers from a lull every time they have a cast turnover. But that cast will find its footing eventually. I mean, why else has the show been on the air for almost 40 years? WWE is similar. They've been in business for 50+ years, and yet each time they've had a cataclysmic event in terms of turnover, they've been fine in the long run.
Now, unlike Hulk Hogan and his cast leaving for WCW or the extinction level event that ended the Attitude Era, this is a short-term crisis. The key for WWE is to lay a strong foundation for the next couple of months, and then when Cena and Punk come back, they integrate in the new matrix rather than crush it. It doesn't matter what the contingency for these next couple of months is, but it has to be more than a stopgap. It has to matter.
For the longest time in WWE, there has been a very elite group of people for whom the show revolved around. Everyone else didn't matter. The last time where that wasn't the case was said Attitude Era. For as much as I slag on nostalgia canonization of that era, and how bad Vince Russo's scatterbrained booking style was, he did get one thing right in theory. He tried to make everyone matter. His execution on that was too egalitarian, and it made only those who had the talent to shine through matter, but hey, he gave a shit.
Someone in WWE now has to give a shit. Someone in that front office needs to stand up for guys like Sheamus, Mark Henry, Ryback, Dolph Ziggler, Alberto del Rio, Daniel Bryan, Antonio Cesaro, Wade Barrett, and The Shield, whether it be all of them or just a few of them for now. Someone needs to look at them and see a future for the company, short or longterm, so that the next time ALL THE MAIN EVENTERS get hurt in one fell swoop, the situation maybe isn't as dire. Or, more accurately, it'll be a lot harder for every main eventer gets hurt all at once because there are more than just two full-time ones working.