John Cena continues to insist that he’ll be hanging up his wrestling boots by the age of 50.
The WWE Superstar was a recent guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to comment on his retirement plans, getting his start in WWE, and more.
You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On his retirement plans: “I’ll be 47 in April and the product is filled with superstars who are young, fast, and gifted. I’m just not as fast as I once was. I compare myself to like a fine vintage classic car. So if you want to take it out one day, you got to warm it up for about two and a half hours, then you can take it out and you can hit the last gear, but please don’t pin it to red line. I can go for about 30 minutes. Then after you drive for 30 minutes, you got to take it back in the shop and fix all the noises it was making. I’m leaking fluids from places I didn’t know I had places. So it’s pretty rough around the edges.”
On getting his start in WWE: “So I was living in a garage in Venice, California, and I had picked up… professional wrestling as a hobby. I did not know what I was going to do with my life. I tried to be a cop. I failed the CHP exam. I couldn’t apply my college degree. I was going to go down to be a Marine. And the weekend I was going to go down, a friend was like, hey, we’re training to be wrestlers in Orange County. I didn’t even know there was such a thing. So when I saw a ring, I was like, I will figure it out to do this as a hobby. Never anything more than that. I just wanted to live like Superman on the weekends and then I finally get my big contract with WWE. I got a call from Bruce Prichard, head of talent relations at the time. He said, ‘we want to sign you to $12,500 a year.’ And living in California, I quit my job right away, and I was balling like a newborn baby. I couldn’t have been happier. I view it as a chance to better myself, and I’m very grateful for that opportunity because it’s brought us here today.”
