WWE: The Rock Needed to Stick Around Just a Little Bit After Survivor Series

Survivor Series has officially come and gone. 

And so has The Rock. 

The Rock teamed up with John Cena to defeat The Miz and R-Truth at the pay-per-view, and he was the life of the party at Madison Square Garden. The fans cheered him endlessly, they booed his tag-team partner and they popped huge for just about everything he did. 

“The People’s Champ” loved it. He ate it all up. He looked like he never wanted to leave the WWE ever again. 

But, after ending the PPV by planting Cena with a Rock Bottom, The Rock walked out of the arena and out of the WWE until only God knows when.  Just like that, The Rock left the WWE, and it was almost as if he was never there. 

Sure, The Rock has been mentioned by Cena in promos since then, and the WWE did an entire “Piper’s Pit” segment that centered on The Rock, his popularity as compared to Cena’s and the upcoming match between the two at WrestleMania 28. 

But The Rock in words is not the same as The Rock in person. Not even close. 

“The Most Electrifying Man in Sports Entertainment” is certainly electrifying—there’s no doubt about that—but it’s kind of hard to consistently be electrifying when you perform a magical disappearing act as soon as Survivor Series is over. 

Now, I have no hatred for The Rock “bringing it via satellite” as Cena might say or for not bringing it whatsoever. He’s a busy man, an actor first and foremost, and for all we know, the WWE may have signed him to a contract that only requires him to be present in the WWE before Survivor Series and before WrestleMania. 

But The Rock should have stayed around following Survivor Series. At least for a little bit. 

I understand that the reason why the WWE had The Rock hit Cena with The Rock Bottom at the conclusion of the show was to make fans wonder, “Oh, crap. What’s going to happen the next time The Rock is around?” 

The unfortunate truth, however, is that the gap between The Rock hitting Cena with his patented finisher and The Rock appearing on WWE TV is going to be so big that I’m not even sure that what happened at the conclusion of Survivor Series is going to matter all that much a few months from now. 

During The Rock’s absence, we all know that it’s highly likely that Cena will go back to being “Super Cena” and that Cena will once again be booked like the WWE’s most unstoppable superhero.

Unless we’re getting segments like we got with Roddy Piper every week, then the focus won’t be on Cena’s relationship with the fans—it’ll be on Cena trying to prove that he’s the best in the business.

And, in order to do that, he’s not going to look weak like he did with The Rock. He’s going to look as strong as ever. 

In the meantime, The Rock will be off filming some movies and making some money, while the build toward his WrestleMania feud with Cena suffers greatly as a result. If you’re going to have a feud between two legends like The Rock and Cena, it’s imperative that you have them around each other more often than once every three or four months. 

In professional wrestling, guys who hate each other don’t see each other five times a year when they’re supposed to be involved in a year-long rivalry that goes down as one of the greatest in history.

No, they’re supposed to be around each other—costing each other matches, cutting promos, etc.—throughout their feud, so that when they finally meet one-on-one in the ring, everyone can’t wait to see what happens. 

That’s just not what’s happening with The Rock and Cena, though. 

The two of them were involved in a memorable moment at Survivor Series when they teamed together to get a win, only to see Cena get blasted with a Rock Bottom. But that memorable moment has left Cena in No Man’s Land. 

He doesn’t have The Rock there to continue that feud, he doesn’t have anyone else to feud with and he just looks like a lost soul at the moment. 

If The Rock’s absence—and Cena’s involvement with guys like Piper—is leading to a Cena heel turn, then that’s fine. But I think we all know that the chances of that happening are slim to none. 

The Rock is gone because The Rock has other things to do, Cena is lost without him and now The Rock’s appearance at Survivor Series is largely irrelevant in terms of today’s storylines. 

Perhaps had he stuck around for a while after the PPV, it woudn’t be.