John Cena admits he chopped the Red Sox out of the playoffs to Boston fan Seth Meyers
John Cena might be the wrestler-turned-actor ever destined to not quite be The Rock, but he’s certainly giving both careers his all. Appearing on Late Night on Thursday to promote [checking list] the new Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader (he’s hosting), WWE wrestling (still wrestling, although movie producers aren’t relly cool with giving him weekends off “to get my face bashed in”), and Playing With Fire (jumping from planes, fighting fires, and ’rassling adorable kids), Cena—stuffed impressively into a natty plaid suit—told Meyers that, while he’s “never going to leave the WWE,” he’s ready to transition from choreographed violence to even more choreographed movie violence at age 42.
But the grey area between in-ring wrestling and out-of-ring ’rassling, according to Cena, used to be a lot more, fluid, let’s call it. Prompted by noted Red Sox fan Meyers, who’d interviewed one-year Boston part-timer Sean Casey about an alleged incident between the two in a Tampa Bay hotel bar. Cena, more than happy to give his side of the story, explained how he’d been called over by both Casey and venerable Red Sox knuckleballer Tim Wakefield to “say hello” at the Sox team hotel during the 2008 playoffs against the Rays, which, for Cena and the players at the time, meant getting hammered and daring each other to some mock-violence.
Casey—notable both as one of the nicest guys in the league and as a member of the Irish American Baseball Hall Of Fame—was, according to Cena, the tipsy ringleader in daring mammoth Massachusetts native Cena to give him a patented Ric Flair “chop” at some point in the evening. With Cena holding up his giant meathook and explaining to Meyers that a “chop” is more like a cast-iron skillet to the chest—and that he let both Casey and Wakefield chop him first—the big guy admitted that he not only clobbered the unwise Casey on the front, but also got him flat on the back when Casey, understandably, doubled over in agony. Well, that led to what Cena called a “Royal Rumble” in the team’s hotel lobby in the undisclosed hours of the morning. And that being a morning before the Sox were to play the Rays in the American League Championship Series—which Boston went on to lose, four games to three.
And, look, we don’t know before what game this allegedly occurred, how late (or how drunk) everything got, why born-and-bred Masshole Cena was rooting for Tampa Bay at the time(?), or whether two semi-valuable members of the 2008 Red Sox went to the ballpark the next day with enormous, debilitating, hangovers and manhole-cover-sized slap-marks on their chests. We can, however, check out the ALCS stats for Casey (0-2, two strikeouts in the series), and Wake (0-1, 16.88 ERA) and make a case that John Cena is 100 percent to blame.