Armed & dangerous: WWE wrestling sensation John Cena's blazin' gun workout is off the chain

Muscle & Fitness, Nov, 2004 by Jeff O'Connell

THIS IS HOW JOHN CENA ROLLS: IN A TRICKED-OUT '86 MONTE CARLO, BOUNCING WILDLY AT THE MOMENT IN RESPONSE TO ONE OF THOSE CRAZY HYDRAULIC SYSTEMS, WHICH ARE AS COMMON IN RAP VIDEOS AS BOOTY, BLING AND CRISTAL.

The man with his finger on the switch has selected the Monte Carlo this morning, but like a businessman choosing his necktie for the day, he could have taken either a '62 or '63 Impala convertible, a '64 Impala SS or a '71 Chevy Blazer, low-riders all.

To paraphrase an old joke, Cena rolls like that because he can, now that he rates as a star attraction for World Wrestling Entertainment, the wildly successful sports entertainment circus ring-led by Vince McMahon. Making the grade requires a gimmick, usually one that involves taking some exaggerated physical or cultural attribute and exaggerating it further. Cena's pimped-out rides form part of the unlikeliest shtick under the WWE big top: a rapping wrestler of Italian descent who earned his cred growing up on the "mean streets" of West Newbury, Massachusetts, a hamlet with manicured lawns and houses that look as if they were built from gingerbread, not bricks and mortar. The hip-hop nation hasn't a more remote outpost, but back in the day, that's exactly where Cena decided to stake his claim to fame in the rhyming game.

"One of the reasons I got into weights was that every day I was threatened with getting my ass kicked because I listened to rap music," says the SmackDown! star. "It's a small, predominantly white town, and that was my style, and it wasn't anyone else's style, so I got sand kicked in my face, so to speak."

Cena's other passion was football, a sport he played throughout high school and college and well enough to earn All-American honors during his senior year at Springfield College. He realized early on that adding some body armor would make him a harder hitter on the gridiron. When Cena was 13, his dad presented him with a home workout setup, but in a year he had outgrown it, prompting him to set foot inside Hard Nock's Gym in nearby Amesbury, Massachusetts.

SCHOOL OF HARD NOCK'S

It's there that Cena has insisted on returning for today's photo shoot. Appropriate choice: For decades, the gym's proprietor, former bodybuilder David Nock, has papered many of the walls with yellowing articles from past issues of MUSCLE & FITNESS and FLEX magazines. The oldest running gym in New England, Nock's rocks around the clock; in fact, this photo shoot marks its first closure, even for few hours, since the United States went to war ... in Vietnam. It's the kind of place that an impressionable young man with big dreams can enter and, through the alchemy of iron, sweat and hormones, transform himself into a major badass by the time senior year rolls around.

Take Cena--Nock knew the instant they met that his genetics and discipline, once mixed with Hard Nock's "controlled insanity" approach to bodybuilding, would explode with the inevitability of a lit fuse. Sure enough, Cena devoured the master's offerings with the insatiable appetite of a pit bull unleashed inside a Steak n Shake.

One particular incident is branded in Nock's memory. "I'm sittin' at home one Saturday night, and the phone rings at 10 o'clock," Nock recalls. "He goes, 'Dave, this is John. I just put a hole in the wall down here.' I said, 'Well, how's that, John?' He said, 'You know that squat workout you gave me? Well, I didn't quite get it done. I got upset, and I drove my fist through the wall and knocked all the plaster out.' I said, 'Fine, John. Just come down tomorrow and get it fixed.' He was just a wicked intense kid. We had some real battles down here."

Jonesing for sunshine and ready for full immersion in the bodybuilding lifestyle, Cena moved out to Southern California virtually upon being handed his college diploma. From 2000 to early 2002, he worked behind the counter at Gold's Gym in Venice, California, every bodybuilder's intersection between stardom and oblivion. There, scenes he had observed freeze-framed at Hard Nock's came alive before him every day. He also started studying at a Southern California wrestling school. Ironically, he would succeed where many of the bodybuilders he had idolized and then seen firsthand at Gold's had failed miserably.

EMINEM OR VANILLA ICE?

At wrestling school, his rhyming skills didn't distinguish Cena. After all, young Caucasian males have appropriated black culture for commercial gain since Elvis Presley strolled into Sun Studios back in 1954. The results have ranged from inspired (Eminem) to dumb (Kid Rock) to laughable (Vanilla Ice), and where Cena falls on that continuum soon will be apparent. Two years in the making, his first CD, tentatively titled Underground, is finished and due out at summer's end as a joint Columbia/WWE release.

Yet while his skill on the mic didn't propel Cena into the WWE, it would put him over the top. WWE talent endures a lot of downtime between matches, and one day, an executive overheard Cena freestyling backstage between shows. The rest, as they say, is history. "It's good, because it's allowing me to be me," Cena says of being recast from his former persona, The Proto Type. "Before [the WWE was] marketing me as this clean-cut kid from small-town America, and I am the kid from small-town America, but I'm the kid who would go to the mall in a tricked-out Nova."