Reel in Place

  The customary lacuna between John Cena PPV main events featured another Angle/Cena match at Survivor Series, this time with a crooked special referee. Cena won, after angle bumped the referee, Shawn Divari, causing a Smackdown referee to run into the ring and count the subsequent Cena pin. This displeased Ray GM Eric Bischoff, and determined to get the title off of Cena, announced an Elimination Chamber for New Year's Revolution. After a bevy of qualifying matches, the field became John Cena, Kurt Angle, Carlito, Chris Masters, Kane, and Shawn Michaels.  Cena and HBK start things off, and we get a heavy chorus of Cena Sucks chants, a first here for this project. Pretty standard stuff here. Chops punches, spots to get over the physicality of the chamber match; standard fare. Shawn does some overselling of kicks while draped over the corner. Goofy stuff and the sort of thing that his worst detractors are always keen to point out.  Carlito is in next, and the crowd is more...

This match is a continuation of the Unforgiven match between John Cena and Kurt Angle, but this is Taboo Tuesday and the fans get to vote on a third wrestler to make our main event a Triple Threat Match. In the weeks leading up to this show, Eric Bischoff set up an angle for Shawn Michaels to get involved with Cena and Angle, stacking the deck in HBK's favor, especially considering the other options for the poll were Kane and Big Show. It is also worth noting that this match follows a very good, and incredibly bloody cage match between Ric Flair and Triple H. Cena is still over like crazy at this point in 2005, but having to follow a bloodbath cage match isn't exactly an envious position.  Shawn Michaels, predictably, wins the poll and at one point in the show we are shown Angle approaching Michaels, proposing a deal of sorts; He and Shawn take out Cena and wrestle each other for the title. The posture before the bell seems to indicate that Angle and HBK have a deal, but as soo...

  Coming into this show, it has been four months since John Cena has main-evented a PPV. So, let's run down what has happened in the interim. Shortly after the JBL match, John Cena gets drafted to Raw, where he'll spend over a decade as the centerpiece of that show. And to celebrate that momentous occasion, Cena was given the poisoned chalice of Chris Jericho wanting to put him over, which really never works except if you're Chris Jericho. Already tasked with overcoming that, John Cena's gimmick also now has come to include the fact that he can't wrestle. Fans took this bit of storytelling to heart to such a degree that ten years after this, a lot of fans still believed it, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. At Vengence in June, Cena beats Jericho and Christian in a triple threat and at SummerSlam he beats Chris Jericho is a singles match. This leads us here to Unforgiven, and the continuation of the John Cena can't wrestle saga, this time up against...