John Cena Says Wrestling Schools Felt Like ‘A Mythical Thing’ To Him When He Started Training

John Cena looks back on the process behind becoming a pro wrestler.

For many wrestlers today, learning to become one has been as simple as finding a school as local as possible. However, twenty years ago, this was not as a easy as it is today, as John Cena found out upon while trying to pursue a career in pro wrestling.

While speaking to People in a new interview, Cena was shown a picture of him holding a homemade title belt, with Cena noting that it was a great business card to show that he always wanted to be a pro wrestler.

“I really think this is a great business card of like, I’ve wanted to do this all my life. I’m John Cena. This is my life in pictures. I meet a lot of folks who say like, man, I’ve been wanting to do this my whole life and there isn’t a better business card than this. Like I’ve been wanting to do this my whole life. So if you were to tell this person at this age, like, this is what you’re going to do, I think this person would have believed it, but this person is also, probably nine years old here. I think I hit a maturity level at around 11, 12, you get into junior high. It’s like, you want to be a ball player, you go play ball. You want to be a doctor, you go to med school. Hell, you want to be in a band, you join a band. How do you do this, and only just recently has WWE like open-armed about like NXT, go to the Performance Center. If you ever thought about doing this, you can. This used to be so secret. The school that the now head of creative Triple H trained at was like 35 minutes from my house. I never knew it. I trained out in California because that’s the first time I ever heard about a school, and I was 22 years old. It was like this mystical thing that like, how do you ever even do that? So this kid wanted to do it.”

Cena continued, explaining how he draw the title belt himself, explaining how he put it together.

“That is a… I drew that myself.  This is on the old printer paper that was stuck together. This is why the seams are taped, so the belt wouldn’t rip, and me and the brothers would just go down and kick the crap out of each other. We had entrances and music and characters. It wasn’t like freestyle wrestling, like the Olympic style. It was like full-blown sports entertainment.”

Elsewhere in another interview following this past weekend’s WWE SummerSlam event, Cena spoke about Brock Lesnar’s return. You can read more about that here.

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