John Cena has revealed that the idea for the John Cena Classic came directly from his final match event, where he used the undercard to showcase main roster stars against NXT talent rather than filling the evening with career retrospectives.
Speaking to The Rich Eisen Show, Cena explained the origin of the concept and how it evolved.
“I can tell you I’m pumped and I can tell you this is an idea from me, and I can also tell you that this is going to get a lot of chatter too, because the audience is kind of every which way, but loose on this. I got the idea from that last event, that Saturday Night’s Main Event where Gunther and I were the close of the show. But the idea for the open of the show and the way I wanted to promote it was instead of doing a 90-minute tribute showing highlights and interviews of folks to essentially my career, there’s no pay it forward there. So I chose to use the rest of the evening as showcasing marquee superstars as a way to get crowds in the building and keep them excited. You hear the music of your favorite superstar, that’s great, and pair them up against the future of our business. Names like Sol Ruca, Je’Von Evans, certainly Oba Femi, they all kind of debuted on our grand stage that day.”
Cena said the response to that format convinced him to build on it.
“I thought the event went well. Not only was it well received by the audience, the talent felt like they were part of something new, and that was really important. So I got the idea from there, and then I kind of wanted to extend it a little bit more. I’m like, ‘how can we involve the fan base?’ So that’s where the fan vote came from, and then I tried to take it a little bit further in saying that, like, man — if you’re a talent and you go out and you actually tear the house down, but you’re this close to winning and maybe you came up short, you still have the opportunity to be in the running to see if you won the fan vote enough to be crowned champion.”
The John Cena Classic will feature main roster talent against NXT competitors, with a fan vote determining a winner across all bouts regardless of match outcome. Dave Meltzer previously reported that WWE had not finalized the format before Cena announced it at Backlash, with an early December timeframe being discussed internally.