The accomplishment of winning sixteen major world championships is considered the record for professional wrestling (though purists and historians will tell you that Ric Flair has 21 world title reigns, several of which are not recognised by the NWA or WWE) and before Sunday the only man to reach that number was the inimitable “Nature Boy” Ric Flair.
But now that the Leader of the Cenation has joined Flair in the rarified air atop the mountain of wrestling’s all-time greats the debate begs to be made, which man’s reigns meant more? Whose was most impressive? Why?
Numbers
There are several ways to determine this. First and foremost, the numbers. Though the two men have 16 World Championships if you were to look at the total number of days as Champion for each competitor, you would see that it’s no contest in that regard.
With a staggering 3,739 days as Champion, Naitch has nearly triple the days as Cena who clocks in with 1,397 and counting. Cena would need to be Champion for the next 2,342 days, or 6 years, 4 months and change to catch up. It’s safe to assume Cena won’t be catching up.
It may even be safe to say that Flair’s number will never be touched (note: Lou Thesz is the longest reigning world champion of all-time beating Flair by 10 days). Both men have had similar schedules as well, in terms of defending the title nightly and across the world. Flair did it for much longer. Chalk one up for the Nature Boy.
Quality of opponents
Another facet to look at is the quality of opponent each man faced during their runs. This may not be as cut and dried as your father and grandfather may want to believe. Ric Flair squared off against a gauntlet of hall-of-famers in his heyday.
While longtime rivals Harley Race, Ricky Steamboat and “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes spring immediately to mind, Flair was a global figure and a “true” World Champion, defending the championship around the world against Carlos Colon, Tatsumi Fujinami and Jack Veneno.
In the meantime, Cena has Hall of Fame notches in his belt as well in the likes of Edge and Shawn Michaels. Legendary figures such as Triple H, JBL and The Rock have all fallen by the wayside to Cena at some point in their careers. In an odd twist, outside of Royal Rumble matches, the only time the men shared the ring on television was as tag team partners.
Both men can say they beat the best of their respective generations and there really is no definitive way of saying which generation had the better competitors. No choice but to call this category a draw.
Quality of work
From the outset, most fans would think that Flair has quality of work in the bag. Nature Boy is one of the best in-ring technicians in the history of professional wrestling having been trained by Verne Gagne.
His matches with Ricky Steamboat and Terry Funk in 1989 are each considered, without hyperbole, to be the amongst, if not the, greatest matches of all-time. His feud with Dusty Rhodes is considered the industry’s most vicious.
In his heyday, Ric Flair was everything he said he was. Cena, on the other hand, has largely been panned as less than proficient in the ring. But this is a misnomer he has cast aside in the last five years as he has had several matches in that time that have been the best to be seen in WWE in quite some time.
His legendary encounter with AJ Styles at the Royal Rumble is undoubtedly the best match of his career. Where Ric Flair’s powers waned slowly and painfully over the latter two decades of his career, Cena seems to be getting better and better with each passing day, as if he were a wine and not a human being.
Unfortunately, many of those matches have come at a time when Cena wasn’t holding the WWE Championship. Fortunately for Flair, the latter years of his career bore no World Championships.
Looking solely at matches from their time as World Champion, Nature Boy struts away with this category easily as Flair’s best work is also considered some of the best ever.
Impact
Let’s be blunt here. Wrestling fans know who Ric Flair is, but with movie roles, Make-A-Wish outreach, television guest spots, everybody knows who John Cena is. Much in the same way Hulk Hogan was known to even non-fans.
John Cena has been the face of the industry from the moment he first pinned JBL’s shoulders to the mat at WrestleMania 21 and since then he has made sure that face is seen. John Cena’s face is seen in every big box store in the world and people of all ages around the world wear his T-shirts every day.
John Cena is the face of professional wrestling. Even at his apex Flair only had a fraction of the reach and impact Cena has enjoyed. While it can be argued that this is due to wrestling being treated differently in mainstream media in the two eras, it can’t be argued that your average person is more likely to know who John Cena is, as opposed to Flair.
Ask your girlfriend.
The actual reigns
This is perhaps the most subjective criteria base. Both men are lauded as fighting Champions, defending the Championship night in and night out across the globe, in Flair’s case for years at a time. But Flair didn’t do so consistently throughout all 16 reigns.
His later title runs in WCW saw him defend the Championship far less regularly than he had previously and some of those reigns ended without title defences or very few. Flair’s 15th and 16th reigns with the title saw no successful defences, holding the belt for less than three hours his final time losing the title to Jeff Jarrett after the Championship was given to Flair by Kevin Nash.
While Cena has had several short reigns as well, he was never given a Championship. Thus far, each of Cena’s title wins, even his Elimination Chamber victory in 2010, have had significance or direction and were going somewhere.
Ric Flair’s final two reigns are complete afterthoughts and many people forget he even held the Championship after losing it to The Giant in 1996. While the championship may be a prop, the prop was always used properly with Cena. That can’t be said for Flair.
Final Count: Flair – 2, Cena – 1, (1 Draw)
Using this highly informal grading scale and eyeball test, Ric Flair is still the greatest Champion of all time, though the conversation will probably become moot in the very near future. Because if anybody thinks that John Cena is done winning world championships at this point, they’re going to be disappointed here.
Championship number 17 for John Cena is just a matter of time.
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