AEW's Samoa Joe Reveals The One Thing Fans Don't Know About John Cena's WWE Character

AEW World Champion Samoa Joe and WWE legend John Cena have a strong bond thanks to their time breaking into the business together. Joe and Cena trained together in the late '90s and their work together in Ultimate Pro Wrestling led to WWE signing Cena to a developmental contract. WWE passed up on signing Joe, who continued to build a reputation in companies like Ring of Honor in the US, and Zero-ONE in Japan.

During a recent interview with "ESPN," the AEW World Champion looked back on his time traveling up and down California with Cena and revealed something about Cena's Doctor of Thuganomics character that fans might not have known. "People think that the freestyling started in WWE, but all that started back in the day," Joe said. "On road trips up to Northern California and John going on freestyle raps for hours at a time. I mean, just going off. We'd have whatever evening mix, the drive time mix that would be on, and we'd be driving up to San Francisco, and John would just be killing it. The brother can rap."

When Joe eventually signed with WWE in 2015, he did get a chance to cross paths with Cena. The two men had a pair of one-on-one matches in 2017 at WWE live events, but they never got the chance to wrestle in a televised singles match. 

They did however manage to lock up on pay-per-view at the 2017 Survivor Series event when Joe and Cena were on opposite teams in the annual fight for brand supremacy. There were rumors of a match between the two at WrestleMania 35 in 2019 when Joe was the WWE United States Champion, but that bout never came to be.