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CALDWELL'S MEDIA CLUB: Eddie Guerrero DVD review Day 17 - John Cena learns wrestling psychology Dec 9, 2008 - 2:59:34 PM
Back in the day, John Cena and Eddie Guerrero had a feud on the Smackdown brand when Eddie was doing the "lie, cheat, and steal" gimmick while Cena was doing his Thuganomics rapper gimmick.
As Cena said, he was able to get away with a lot of comments in his raps that he wouldn't be able to say on TV today. (Well, unless he suddenly moved to TNA and could get away with anything on Spike TV.)
This led to a blow-off match on the Sept. 11, 2003 Smackdown where Eddie and Cena had a parking lot brawl backstage. A bunch of cars - mini-vans, low-riders, compacts, and everything just short of gas-efficient hybrids - were in a circle with wrestlers watching the brawl.
It was straight out of a WWE video game and ended with Eddie nailing a frog splash on Cena, who was flat on his back on the hood of a car, after leaping off the hood of a mini-van.
"I had a good talk with John before we went out there, giving him the same advice I'd have given him if we were going to be doing a ladder match - we were going to feel pain," Eddie wrote in his autobiography. "We might even get hurt. There was no way around it."
The match had a lawn-mower, Chavo Guerrero's interference, JBL in the APA era, a shovel, movie special effects with broken glass, and all sorts of random "parking lot brawl" tricks and gimmicks to create movement within the confines of a circle.
The blow-off to Eddie and Cena's feud was found in a somewhat contrived brawl by today's standards, but Eddie looked at the match as one of the more creative things he had done.
"The Latino Street Fight was one of the most innovative matches of my career," Eddie wrote. "If it sounds dangerous, that's because it was! But it was also pretty creative."
The matches leading up to the blow-off essentially helped Cena understand in-ring psychology to help him learn and grow into the WWE wrestler we see today. Eddie, as we've seen throughout this DVD review series, was the perfect teacher for Cena.
"Being given a hard time at first is expected," Cena says on the DVD of working with Eddie and Chavo Guerrero. "It's almost like they want to test the waters and see if you're ready. He basically took me by the hand and gave me the basics on how to perform at a WWE level."
Working with Eddie was valuable experience for Cena. "By the time I was done wrestling Eddie, I certainly couldn't do all of his moves, but he gave me such a great foundation in wrestling psychology," Cena says. "That's what I took away most from wrestling Eddie."
Over the course of 25 days, I will be reviewing the "Viva La Raza" Eddie Guerrero DVD recently put out by WWE. I'll be looking at the significance of each of the 25 matches on the DVD as well as establishing the context of events that were occurring at the time of each match.
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