WrestleMania 28: How John Cena Is Beating Dwayne Johnson at His Own Game

On the February 20th edition of Monday Night Raw, John Cena unleashed a scathing promo accusing The Rock of being a prima donna, using the WWE just to further his acting career.

Cena, in a shot sort of reminiscent of his Doctor of Thuganomics gimmick from the early 2000s, claimed that The Rock only came back to WWE "to promote Fast Five and launch his Twitter account."

So when The Rock was given what ended up being close to half an hour of free reign last night on RAW, he made sure to defend himself...by calling John Cena a slew of ridiculous names and asking the audience to make them trend on Twitter.

And of course they did.

Why wouldn't something as asinine as #KungPaoB***h be a trending topic? With over two million followers, The Rock can basically get anything he wants to trend as soon as it comes out of his mouth, regardless of how little sense it makes.

At this point, The Rock is so over with the crowd, that it's become acceptable for him to just mail it in when he shows up live.

He can do the same shtick, "Finally, The Rock has come back..." "The Rock says this," "The Rock says that," "Size 15 boots up your candy a**." "If you smellll!" and people will love it for the same reason they love watching old episodes of Friends, or the same reason they secretly sing along when a Backstreet Boys song comes on the radio.

Because as dated and lame as it might be now, it still reminds them of the good old days.

It's The Rock's five moves of doom, promo style. The crowd knows what's coming, but they still love chanting it alongside The Great One.

But what did The Rock accomplish? Did he tear Cena down with an equally damaging rant? Did he bring it?

Sadly, I'm inclined to say the answer is no.

Every time it looked like he was hitting his stride, he'd stop to get some ridiculous insult to trend and I'd be too irritated to care. Then Cena came out, hit The Rock with a line about promo notes on his wrist that hammered the People's Champ as much as any Attitude Adjustment ever could.

I guess if The Rock's job is to show up, put Cena over and leave, then he's a far better actor than I've ever given him credit for. Cena is winning the war of words in basically every way as we get closer to WrestleMania.

But no matter what, the crowd will be overwhelmingly in The Rock's favor, because he reminds them of the good old days.

Cena will hopefully continue to deliver great promos while The Rock heads back to Hollywood for the time being, but it's all for nothing if he doesn't put on a great match. The crowd knows Cena can entertain on the mic. We need to see him dazzle in the ring.

Cena has shown in the past that despite his limitations, he can pull out a show-stopping performance now and then. At WrestleMania, against the most electrifying man in all of entertainment, Cena needs to reach all the way to the bottom of his bag of tricks.

The same old routine won't work. If he mails it in at WrestleMania like The Rock mailed it in tonight, despite all of his great promo work, it doesn't matter if we can see him or not.

If The Champ doesn't bring it, we won't want to.