John Cena talks Randy Orton.
Cena and Orton go way back as rivals in WWE. During the late 2000s and early 2010s, the pair would face off in a large amount of matches with the WWE Championship on the line.
While not every fan enjoyed this rivalry, it will go down in wrestling history as one of the the most iconic rivalries in WWE since the year 2000.
Reflecting on his top matches over the years in a WWE exclusive, Cena looked back on his rivalry with The Viper, comparing Randy to Shawn Michaels.
“I think the great thing about an Iron Man match is you have the luxury of a three count. The three count fan elicit excitement. So if people aren’t interested, you can give them a pinfall. The match had a digger dynamic to it. Any time I can get in there with Randy’s great. He and I fit together well. We work together well, and I love working with him. This is the fourth premium live event, as we now call them, and we’d done a lot of stipulations before, and we’d added tons of stipulations to this match, with anything goes and if I lose, I leave Raw. One could speculate that possible audience fatigue, of watching performers together for half a year, that’s a lot of interaction. That’s a lot,”
“So I do remember the concept of, maybe he should hit the pyro and try to explode me, and him being okay with it. Not only being okay with it, he made that work. I think that just goes to show, if we were coming up with concepts like that, we had certainly exhausted every traditional method of competition. But the fact that both of us could be like, ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea, and let’s wholeheartedly try it.’ It’s a cool concept, a cool idea, and we were brave enough to try. I think when you’ve had such a history with someone and been in the ring with them so many times, we both kind of knew, ‘We’re gonna have to do some different stuff here,”
“Randy is my generation’s Shawn Michaels. He has an understanding of nuance, and how important it is. He has the best timing of anybody. He’s always there, he’s never late. He shows emotion as a performer. He’s incredible. He makes difficult look simple, always.”
John Cena
Orton has been injured for over a year now, after undergoing back surgery.
We exclusively reported last month that Orton had been training for his return at the WWE Performance Centre for 3 weeks before he was spotted there by fans.
Most recently, it was reported that Orton and WWE have been targeting Survivor Series for his WWE return.
H/T to Fightful for transcription
Follow Corey at @CoreyBrennanBS on Twitter
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