AEW superstar and current ROH world champion Claudio Castagnoli recently appeared on the Kurt Angle Show to discuss a wide range of topics, including his thoughts on the great John Cena and what advice the Cenation leader gave to the Swiss-Superman during his run in WWE that has stuck with him to this day. Highlights from the interview are below.
How he has nothing but respect for Cena and his work ethic:
“I have nothing but good things to say about John. I mean, John Cena is an awesome person and he has a very high standard for himself. He’s one of those people that doesn’t just say how you should do it or say how it should be done. He shows you. He does it every day. He lives it, you know what I mean? If he tells you to watch all the matches, he’s sitting there at the monitor watching all the matches. If he tells you, you should work out, he is there working out early in the morning. So he’s like one of those people who is somebody I deeply respect and that’s kind of how I tried to do my career. Whatever I would say, I just do it, and if people want to take notice that’s, good. If not, I don’t need to,” he continued. “So John has always been super honest with critiques and everything, just super motivating with the way he works out and his work ethic and everything.”
Says Cena told him “you’re only as good as your last match”:
“Then, being in the ring with him for an open challenge was awesome because I mean, he was a legend at that point, and he still every match he wants to go out there and prove it and we talked about that before, like every match — he is the one who said it, I probably had it always kind of in my brain, but he’s the one that said that, ‘You’re only as good as your last match.’ So that’s kind of stuck with me because every time you go through that curtain, you want to prove yourself to everybody, ” he said. “So with him to have that open challenge and him working so hard, and having such a fun match for me was absolutely amazing. Then to run it back a couple of weeks later again, in Chicago, it was even better because, to me, here’s John Cena and you get to share the ring with him and he has so much knowledge and yeah, it was amazing.”
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)