Though he took an incredible amount of punishment, John Cena, much to the shock of many pro wrestling insiders, won his main-event match with Brock Lesnar at WWE’s Extreme Rules.
Essentially a beatdown to get Lesnar over as a monster, the match featured several ref bumps and a ton of blood en route to a come-from-behind victory for Cena. Cena caught a charging Lesnar with a surprise chain to the face and then performed the Attitude Adjustment onto steel steps to get the pin.
A key plot point of the match was Brock Lesnar’s continued reliance on the kimura submission; late in the match, Cena sold that his left arm had been destroyed and rendered useless.
That, then, played into a cryptic post-match angle in which John Cena teased that he would be taking time away from the ring. Though he said nothing specific, he hinted that he would be forced to embark on a hiatus and if this was the beginning of an absence, he was glad to have such a brutal match in front of a “wrestling town” like Chicago.
He also threw in some cryptic, “worked shoot” lines about his “boss” perhaps being unhappy with his decision to speak out of turn at the end of the show.