John Cena Learned Some Of His Greatest Lessons From Eddie Guerrero

John Cena has opened up on the lessons he learned while working with Eddie Guerrero in WWE.

Early in his WWE career, John Cena was part of the SmackDown roster alongside the late, great Eddie Guerrero. During that time, the pair clashed multiple times in the ring, but behind the scenes, Guerrero became a mentor to Cena.

During an appearance at Fan Expo Denver, Cena spoke about the lessons he learned from Guerrero.

“Eddie was one of the people that mentored me and one of the last individuals who was an improviser. I take a lot of my skills from Eddie Guerrero because he was a genius. Not only was he brilliant in his execution, he knew when to do things, and what y’all don’t know is he was just making it up as he went along. So he was that astute to the audience.

“The most influential thing I learned from Eddie Guerrero and something I’ll never forget, WWE went through a boom in the Attitude Era, and then all those guys- we fired Stone Cold, The Rock left, The Undertaker got hurt. We changed the name, the XFL failed. There was a lot of upside down stuff. We started SmackDown and it had Kurt Angle as its anchor, but we brought Eddie Guerrero and a bunch of (others) like Edge and me and a bunch of other new guys and people trying to find their way.

“Eddie was our champion for a certain period of time, and he used to tell me that it is the night when the fewest people show up that you have to work 10 times as hard because the presence in that area isn’t as strong. When I get a crowd like this, working the room is easy. If it’s just you five in the front, I gotta give my whole self to you. Not that I don’t. But it’s on those nights where business is bad, do not ever, ever, ever phone it in.

“As a matter of fact, you work 100 times harder to get those people to go out and be like, ‘yo, dude, you missed that show’ and you want to go back the next time. He was a person that was able to weather the storm through some of those lesser-attended events and still put on these spectacular matches.”

Eddie Guerrero Taught John Cena To Listen To The Audience

Continuing, Cena revealed another of the biggest lessons he learned from Guerrero was how to react to the audience and hold their attention.

“He took being the champion very seriously, and that’s something that I’ll definitely not forget under his tutelage. He also taught me to listen to the audience. I’m one of the loudest talkers out there. If you’re sitting close enough in the WWE show, you get the match before the match, but that’s okay. Because the tool I learned from Eddie Guerrero was to listen to the audience because they’re the biggest piece of energy and they’re the biggest star we have.

“If you don’t do something when they want you to do something, lose their attention. They’ll be generous, they’ll give you once or twice, but you lose them that third time, they don’t care about your match, and Eddie was always so surgical about not only doing the right thing, but doing it at the perfect time. He taught me to improvise, he taught me to listen, and he taught me to work hard.”

Cena can put all those lessons to use at SummerSlam when he defends the Undisputed WWE Title against Cody Rhodes in a match that was officially made a Street Fight on SmackDown (read all about it in Niz’s review!)

Do you remember Cena’s run-ins with Eddie Guerrero back in 2003? Let us know below!

H/T to Fightful for the above transcription.