For my second pro wrestling based post I have decided to give my opinion on what I would say has to be one of the absolute worst put together wrestling rivalries I have ever seen, John Cena and The Miz (or Mike Mizanin as he is sometimes referred).

The rivalry started just after The Miz broke up his tag team with fellow up-and-coming wrestler John Morrison. Morrison has been getting a good (though kind of rushed) push closer to main event status on WWE’s Smackdown brand, while it looked like The Miz was poised to do the same on the RAW brand, unfortunately it was not to be.

After his tag team split, The Miz would continuously call out one of RAW’s (and all of the WWE’s for that matter) highest profile wrestlers in the form of John Cena, who is one of pro-wrestling’s biggest pop-culture icons of recent memory. Week after week The Miz would “call out” John Cena (who was at the time simultaneously feuding with “the world’s largest athlete” The Big Show), and whenever John Cena wouldn’t come out to face The Miz (usually due to The Big Show), The Miz would claim a bogus forfeit victory over John Cena.

The Miz would also constantly ridicule Cena for being a commercial product who’s biggest accomplishment was selling t-shirts. He would rank on Cena’s outside of wrestling exploits such as his rap album (yes, it happened. Try to forget about it.) and the WWE produced, box office bombs in which Cena starred, The Marine and 12 Rounds (which could best be described as waisted money on WWE’s part).

Although somewhat ridiculous, The Miz made the storyline work and proved he had great mic skills (not as good as Edge or Chris Jericho of course but you have to start somewhere) and showed a lot of star potential. I thought for sure they were building him up towards main event status.

But as soon as Cena’s feud with The Big Show started to die down everything that was good about the Cena/Miz angle all went down the drain.

With Big Show behind him, John Cena started to give full attention to The Miz. The problem? Cena showed absolutely no signs that anything The Miz had said about him had even fazed him in the slightest. This made The Miz look like nothing but a joke and defeated pretty much anything they had been building up for the past couple of months. True, Cena is the good guy (or the face, to use a pro-wrestling term), but to make him brush off everything The Miz had said just gave Cena some unneeded extra pathos and took away any The Miz had received.

Of course, eventually a “real” match had to take place between the two, and if there was any hope of redeeming The Miz, he HAD to beat John Cena one way or another. And of course they did have a match, but rather then give The Miz the much needed victory and the push towards main event status that he (and the WWE) needs, they give him a humiliating and crushing defeat in a match that lasted roughly five minutes. The match even ended with The Miz tapping out to Cena thus making him look even more like a joke.

This rivalry looked like it was set to make The Miz shine, but instead it just turned out all the lights on him. The WWE has had a bad track record lately when it comes to giving their younger wrestlers their dues. The commentators will always claim them to be “the future of the WWE” and “possible future world champions.” Yet the WWE continues to not only not show us that potential, but make these guys out to be some kind of sideshows. The feud between John Cena and The Miz is the most blatant and shameful example of this I can recall in recent memory. I understand Cena is one of the WWE’s  biggest stars, but they may as well have thrown The Miz into a deep dark abyss, because they couldn’t bury The Miz any further than they already have.

This rivalry was anything but awesome….