WWE Star of the Week: Mark Henry

After dominating the Smackdown brand throughout most of 2011, Mark Henry has spent the first few months of 2012 falling down the card. 

He lost his World Heavyweight Championship last December, and since moving on from the title scene, he’s almost right back where he was a year ago as just another mid-carder, in a WWE that’s full of them. 

But on this week’s episode of Monday Night Raw, he was given another chance to show that he belongs in the main-event scene when he faced John Cena in singles action at the top of the second hour. 

We knew that Henry wasn’t going to beat Cena (at least not clean) and that this was merely a showcase to help Cena build up some momentum as he nears his WrestleMania 28 match with The Rock. But Henry delivered one of his best performances in recent memory here. 

The World Strongest Man’s world title run consisted almost entirely of bad matches with The Big Show, but his bout with Cena on Monday’s Raw was arguably his best since he faced Randy Orton at Hell in a Cell last October, or maybe his steel cage bout with Daniel Bryan on Smackdown. 

The crowd was really hot for Cena that night, and Henry did an excellent job making it at least seem like he might have had a chance to win the match. Obviously, a Cena/Henry match is never going to be expected to be a classic, but these two had some surprisingly great chemistry that resulted in a surprisingly great match. 

Henry was on his A-game that night, and though I’m sure he’s not thrilled about being relegated to the Long/Laurinaitis match at WrestleMania, his performance on Monday may have the creative team reconsidering his de-push. 

I’m not saying Henry vs. Cena was an instant classic, but Henry had a heck of a showing in the match on Monday and even looked impressive when he took that post-match Rock Bottom from The Rock. 

The WWE didn’t give us a whole lot of wrestling on Monday, and aside from Chris Jericho’s promo via Titantron, nothing else on the show really stood out all that much. 

But Mark Henry? Well, at least his match lasted more than a few minutes and he kept the crowd into it. 

And that’s why he is your WWE Star of the Week. 

Note: As part of the new WWE blog, I'll be asking all of the B/R wrestling readers for questions for a new mailbag that I will post on Fridays. It will be a slideshow featuring 10-20 questions and answers on a wide range of topics. You can submit questions either through Formspring or Twitter, and the best ones will be answered in the B/R mailbag.