Congratulated by his opponent at WWE’s biggest event of the year, their meeting in the ring was swiftly interrupted by The Rock – and Travis Scott – as ‘The Final Boss’ demanded ‘The American Nightmare’s’ answer to his offer of owning his soul and becoming “his champion”.
Rhodes profanely declined the offer, instead telling The Rock to “go **** yourself”.
However, that was the trigger for a shocking turn of events, it was Cena who ended up aligning himself with The Rock, thus selling his soul by ruthlessly attacking Rhodes to rubber-stamp his new villainous persona.
The sight of Cena and The Rock together on the same side is something nobody could have predicted 14 years ago. Especially when taking into consideration the latter cost the former the WWE Championship in the main event of WrestleMania 27 against The Miz.
John Cena shocked the WWE universe at the Elimination Chamber Premium Live Event last month
WWE
This coupled with Cena’s new persona has been a lot for many in the WWE Universe to digest. But not for The Miz.
Standard Sport sat down with the WWE Superstar during WWE’s recent European tour on the road to WrestleMania and he believes he’s justified having previously warned people about this side of Cena.
“I love it, I never thought I’d see Cena doing this and it’s interesting to see him in this era,” he said.
“You know what’s fun? I have been warning everyone for a very long time and no one would listen to me and now I feel like ‘there you go!’ I was right once again.”
Whilst The Miz still harbours dreams of a singles match with The Rock, now a WWE veteran having been on the main roster full-time since 2006, he has no plans to hang up his boosts any time soon.
Discussing his current standing with the company, he said: “I feel more focused and energized than I ever have before and it’s maybe it’s because I’m getting older and you never know how many matches you have, whether you’re 25 or 35.
I feel more focused and energized than I ever have before
The Miz
“You don’t ever know but when you get older, you’re like ‘wow’. Say I have five more years, right? How many more times in London will I be able to perform? Sometimes you don’t have a match. Maybe it’s just TV, maybe it’s just a promo.
“You start looking at that and you going alright, if this is my last what would I want to do? What do I want to do in that 10 minutes if I have a match? I got to make it the best I possibly can because that’s just the mentality that I’ve always had.”
‘I was having so much fun with that’
More recently The Miz has struck up a budding on-screen partnership with rising star Carmelo Hayes on Smackdown, which is hot on the heels of a short-lived but nevertheless, entertaining program with Karrion Kross taking on the ‘Wyatt Sicks’.
It’s working with the younger talent in WWE that the 44-year-old is really enjoying: “Whenever you get to pull out something that’s different in WWE and you get to really be creative with it, and it’s a lot of acting.
“When people talk about WWE, they don’t ever talk about the acting aspect of it, right? And so that was a lot of that because the characters that we were going up against, you know, you have to be creative with.
“I was having so much fun with that and even people saying ‘oh you’re Kross’ lackey’, like in my mind I was the person being the puppet master, but you weren’t seeing that and we didn’t really get to finish that story.”
For the first time ever, WrestleMania 41 will air live on Netflix. Viewers in the UK can tune in on Saturday, April 19 and Sunday, April 20.
