John Cena Started Pro Wrestling Career As A Hobby

John Cena is a 16-time World Champion and carried the company on his back throughout the PG era. From 2017 John Cena became a part-timer in WWE and has appeared sporadically due to his busy schedule in Hollywood.

However, John Cena was not always interested in becoming a professional wrestler and certainly had a long journey ahead of him before he could realize his potential as a professional wrestler.

While speaking to PEOPLE, John Cena said that he wanted to pursue a career as a bodybuilder when Cena started training in pro wrestling. For him, professional wrestling was a hobby at first and nothing more.

‘[After college] I headed out to Los Angeles not because of the entertainment allure, but because that’s where the hub of fitness equipment, fitness manufacturing, fitness distribution, everything that applied to my degree was there. I got in working at Gold’s Gym and that was the best I could do. I worked in the protein shop. I worked on the floor.”

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“I knew every member and a bunch of the members would talk about wrestling and WWE specifically. This is right when two companies were jockeying for supremacy, the company owned by Turner and the company owned by Vince McMahon. One of my friends in a casual conversation was like, ‘Hey, we’re training down in Orange County to be wrestlers. Do you want to join?’ It wasn’t like, ‘Yeah, this is my chance to make it big in the WWE,’ it was like, ‘Yo, this would be a sick ass hobby, so when I worked my ass off during the week, I can go be a personality on the weekends, I’ll try it.’ I paid the promoter a bunch of money to get in the ring and learn how to fall down and the rest is history. So if we had never had that conversation, I’d never found a ring, and I’d never been talking to you right now.”

John Cena began his WWE career back in 2002 and eventually went on to become one of the biggest names in the history of the business, transcending barriers.

For a hobby, things turned out pretty well for John Cena.

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