The Rock vs. John Cena: A Look Inside WWE's Most Personal Feud

When The Rock returned to a WWE ring just over a year ago, it was to announce that he would be the guest host for WrestleMania XXVII. Little did wrestling fans know that he would also ignite one of the more personal feuds in recent memory.

In The Rock's fantastic return promo, he called out John Cena for talking about him behind his back and accusing him of leaving the company high and dry. While he admittedly left the company in 2004 to pursue an acting career, it isn't as if The Rock took off. His contract was up and he decided against signing another one.

After seven years, however, The Rock returned to the WWE in 2011 and announced that he was never going away. This was taken literally by some fans and apparently by Cena, as it has been his only ammo in his crusade to tear down The Rock.

The fact of the matter is that The Rock has a very lucrative acting career, and he isn't going to turn his back on it to appear on WWE programming week in and week out for an entire year. If fans or Cena expected that, then they were kidding themselves.

What The Rock obviously meant was that he would always be there for Vince McMahon and the company if he were needed. Such has been the case over the past year, as he hosted last year's WrestleMania, which ended up being one of the most lucrative ones in history.

Also, he tagged with Cena at Survivor Series, and now he'll be facing Cena at WrestleMania XXVIII in perhaps the most anticipated match of all time.

Certainly The Rock hasn't appeared on WWE television as often as most wrestling fans would have liked over the past year, but the mere fact that he's going to be wrestling Cena on April 1 ensures that WrestleMania will be successful. The Rock has also been a great ambassador for the company in the media.

The majority of the Cena/Rock feud has taken place on Twitter, where they have exchanged 140-or-less-character jabs for the past several months. For whatever reason, the majority of fans seem to believe that Cena is winning the war of words, but he continually pounds one issue.

In a lot of ways he reminds me of a politician with no real platform. Rather than taking on all the issues head-on, he mentions one thing to death. For Cena, that one thing is that he is on the road, performing every night, while The Rock is on set as an actor.

Cena obviously isn't wrong when he says that, but it isn't really an indictment of The Rock. He put in his time from 1996 until 2004, and he used to perform on a nightly basis, just like Cena does now. The Rock isn't bashing Cena for not performing from 1996 until 2004 because he knows how ridiculous it would be to do so.

Both Cena and The Rock have been workhorses over the course of their respective careers, so for Cena to degrade The Rock because he isn't a full-time professional wrestler is nothing more than him grasping at straws.

Of course, Cena isn't totally to blame because it's obvious that the WWE wants that to be Cena's main talking point. Make no mistake that both Cena and The Rock have creative license on Twitter and during promos, but the nuts and bolts of their put downs are what the company wants them to say.

Up until now, The Rock has gotten the better of Cena every time they have been in the same ring together. Not only have The Rock's promos been leaps and bounds better in my mind, but from a storyline perspective The Rock has made Cena look like a joke.

It all started at WrestleMania XXVII, when The Rock restarted Cena's WWE Championship match against The Miz, only to Rock Bottom Cena and allow Miz to pick up the victory. Even worse, perhaps, Cena was getting beat down by The Miz and R-Truth at Survivor Series.

All it took was a hot tag of The Rock, though, and the match was basically over. The Rock looked fantastic, while Cena looked weak, and that was only exacerbated when The Rock delivered a thunderous Rock Bottom to Cena following the match.

That explains Cena's defiance and sudden tough-guy image as of late. Although it won't ultimately work since WrestleMania is being held in The Rock's hometown of Miami, the goal is to get the fans on Cena's side.

I will say that as far as the IWC goes, the tactic seems to be working. Fans who had illusions of The Rock appearing on a weekly basis seem to find themselves supporting Cena in the feud and agreeing with his pretentious and repetitive claims.

In an effort to make The Rock look bad on Monday's edition of RAW, The Rock was clearly told to write notes on his wrist. The Rock has delivered thunderous promos and remembered his lines on set for 16 years, yet we're led to believe that he needs to write his lines on his wrist.

The Rock is an actor and is fully aware of how high-definition cameras work, so if he didn't want people to know that he had written notes on his wrist, then he certainly wouldn't have written something akin to the Declaration of Independence in bold on his wrist.

The simple fact that Cena came out and addressed it made it quite obvious that it was a work. Even so, the WWE did a fine job of blurring the lines between what was fake and what was real, and the company has plenty of people believing that Cena struck a major blow.

When it comes down to it, there seems to be some legitimate heat between Cena and The Rock. The Rock has continually said that he thinks Cena is a phony, and there's probably some truth to that. At the same, time there's probably some truth to Cena saying that he doesn't like Dwayne Johnson as a person.

Ultimately, though, everything is being played up by the creative team in order to make the rivalry look bigger than it is. With only a month until WrestleMania, there already seems to be a lot of heat, so the WWE has done a fine job.

It will be interesting to see if Cena continues to be given the upper hand heading toward April 1.