Is Cena a bigger Star than Hulk Hogan?

No. Hogan will eclipse Cena forever. (I'm going to make a ton of assumptions in this post, but I think you'll get the general idea.) As time moves forward, the past gets compressed. We know hundreds of wrestlers from 2000-2015, but only the most knowledgeable of us can name more than 2 wrestlers from before 1940: Gotch and Hackenschmidt. And we can only name them because one of their matches is legendary. They were both retired long before 1940, but thanks to the compression of time, they're still the quintessential "pre-1940" wrestlers. Then, being more recent, many of us can name 5 or 6 wrestlers from the dawn of television: Buddy Rogers (who is mostly known for being the original Nature Boy), Gorgeous George, Lou Thesz (known for being the innovater of the Thesz Press), Verne Gagne, and maybe one or two others. These are the quintessential wrestlers of the era between 1940 and 1960. This pattern continues through to the present day. As time marches on, eventually Bruno Sammartino will be lumped in with this generation of wrestlers, and become the figurehead of the wider "Dawn of TV until Hulkamania" era. People will see him as of the same timeframe as Gorgeous George thanks to the compression of time. To keep this from being too lengthy, I'll just state that Hulk Hogan will be seen as "the wrestler" of the 1900s forever. We're 15 years into the 2000s. Barring some catastrophe, there will be much bigger stars than John Cena this century. If, for whatever reason, someone does a deep dive into the history books, they'll note that John Cena was "the wrestler" of the 2000-2020 era and that's about it. He'll just be a distant statistic like Jim Londos is to us.

/r/SquaredCircle Thread