Let me begin by sharing three things I was never into: traveling, concerts, and John Cena.

I hated traveling because I’m so bad at technology and science, hence there’s no way you can explain to me that turbulence won’t kill us. Later on in my story, you’ll see why I hate traveling, and guess what? You’ll hate traveling with me. I was never a concert guy or a go-to-events kind of guy. Funnily enough, I saw the Corrs when they went to Manila in 1998? I was also able to watch Lady Gaga live in Araneta Coliseum in 2008. Also, I went to the two WWE Manila house shows in the mid-2010s. Fine, maybe I’m not super not into concerts; I just don’t have a concert habit. As for Cena? I don’t hate him like a lot of people did during his salad years as the face of WWE. I just never took to Captain America-type babyfaces. Same reason I never liked Sting. I prefer the noble tough guys like Ron Garvin or the blood knights with a heart of gold like TNA Samoa Joe. Plus I grew up in the 90s, so I’m an Austin guy through and through. Yeah, you can throw in some of The Rock there as well.

But when Cena announced his retirement during Money in the Bank 2024, I made a decision that would tackle all three of those quirks of mine. I decided to buy a fucking WrestleMania ticket. Now, did I become a convert to John somewhere between being a kid and becoming an employed adult? Not really. But the death of Kobe Bryant moved me. It sort of fractured my belief that these athletes would live long enough that when they finally died, I wouldn’t be so bothered. I think Kobe dying just four years after his retirement made me realize that if I had the means, then I should try to see everything and anything that matters. And lemme tell you something, Mean Gene. John Cena fucking matters.

You can argue about his legacy and whatnot. All valid points, all valid preferences. I just wanted to watch him because I grew up kinda around him. Plus WWE in 2024 was still very good. It wasn’t perfect, but it was more than edible. It had some compelling stuff. So you know, had to do it and wanted to do it. Plus it is WrestleMania, the centerpiece event of WWE. My dream in life is to watch all the events from every promotion: WWE, AEW, CMLL, AAA, NJPW. Basically any promotion I can travel to, I’d do it and I’d watch it. Mania also made sense as my first international show because I had friends who were only into WWE, so they were game to accompany me. I didn’t want my first trip abroad for a live wrestling event to be a solo one.

The first step to any grand endeavor is taking the first step. I never bought any tickets of my own whenever I would visit the US. I always depended on the charity of my relatives, and since they were based in Los Angeles, that charitable spirit meant Clippers or Lakers games. So this was my first big boy pants thing. At the age of 36, mind you. I made a Viagogo account, and let me fucking tell you: never make ticket accounts for ticket services without first doing your research on them. I only did my due diligence after the fact, so I freaked out when I read about all the Viagogo horror stories of people not getting proper service and then only getting refunded. Fortunately, I did get my ticket, but it’s an electronic ticket, and I’m not used to that, so there’s still this anxiety of EMP worms wiping out my phone or hackers stealing my e-ticket from my Apple Wallet, etc., etc., etc. Ooga booga, I’m a caveman.

So anyway. I got my ticket just around WarGames 2024, when they did Team Rhea and Team Roman, respectively. As far as pricing goes, my ticket cost $1,300. That’s three months’ worth of salary for a middle-class Filipino citizen. That’s very taxing on the pocket. I’m not yet married, I got no kids, and my parents do not need my financial support. So this was probably the only time I could do this. And given how TKO started jacking up the prices shortly after Cena’s retirement, hindsight gave me two thumbs up.

After purchasing the ticket, the boring part of waiting came next. That meant living my life until April 2025 while monitoring the WWE storylines. Everything was in your usual fashion: Halloween, Christmas, then New Year’s Eve. Then came the Royal Rumble. I saw Jey Uso win, and it was the first seal of the apocalypse being broken open. I forget who won the Women’s Royal Rumble. I think it was Charlotte Flair. So come Elimination Chamber, I’m waiting for the other pair of challengers to emerge. And then it happens. Cena turns heel.

Again, I don’t follow Cena with great interest, but even I understood the magnitude of what went down. People were already calling this the biggest heel turn since Hulk Hogan at Bash at the Beach. Cena was the biggest babyface of the 21st century, a man who had never turned heel once his babyface persona was set, who preached the virtues of hustle, loyalty, and respect, and who had been loved, turned on, and eventually welcomed back with remorse. He came up in a loaded roster and carried WWE through a terrible PG era. He has wrestled long enough to see new competition rise around him. Yeah, that guy. John Cena.

The Plane Ride That Was Hell

Fast-forward to April: I’m in Los Angeles, staying at my uncle and aunt’s place, chilling and going crazy on Mexican food from Vallarta. The atmosphere in the States is filled with excitement for this Mania. It’s Cena’s last Mania ever and his first one as a heel. There’s plenty of historical weight in that. WrestleMania has enough pop culture equity that, in the past, WWE has been able to fill seats with much, much weaker cards. The card for this one is very loaded. It’s Triple H’s first Mania technically as his own man; I don’t think he has any inherited Vince plotlines left. The Cena-Cody feud is clouty enough to main-event itself. So now, while waiting for the week of the 19th, I’m watching H and his regime put the finishing touches on the build. Roman, Seth, and Punk are going to main-event the first night. No surprise there, as I doubt CM Punk would have allowed another year to go by without being booked as the centerpiece of the two-for-one bonanza. It’s also a decent enough premise to justify three of WWE’s main-eventers being put in a triple threat.

The non-main-event matches are the ones beset with troubles. Jey Uso has already started showing signs of worry as he enters his match with Gunther. Yes, it’s gonna get worse as the year progresses, so much so that by 2026, he’s back to being a Roman minion, but not before giving us a playlist of classic Jeyisms, such as putting on a dogshit match with CM Punk, where the latter was visibly mortified that part of his job as the main guy is now to babysit nepo-stars for one-off matches. There was also that time Jey cut himself while swinging a steel chair, which adds more support to the online theory that he’s wrestling drunk or high. Let’s also not forget his many, many iconic promos… YEET. Can you even remember one earnestly good main-event Jey promo that didn’t rely on a catchphrase? Needless to say, I was fortunate (or unfortunate) to witness his first and possibly last big-belt title match.

The women’s marquee matches offer a split picture. Bianca, Rhea, and Iyo fit nicely into their storyline, and the allure of their Mania match is that they are the most important stars in WWE’s women’s division right now. You can argue about popularity, mainstream status, or whether they can draw; all of that is fluff. These three are the hands H trusts to put on competent high-profile matches.

Charlotte and Tiffany Stratton’s match is the flip side. You have an aging, banged-up veteran with considerable star power in Charlotte Flair, paired with a very young, somewhat green star in Stratton, whom management is clearly very high on. The Rhea-Iyo-Bianca feud is cooking peacefully and steadily, probably owing to their chemistry from their NXT days. The Flair-Stratton feud turned into a mess after their promos went off-script. People debated for months afterward whether Flair was sabotaging Tiffy with those Kaiser jabs. By the tail end of 2025, rumors were already circulating that Tiffy and Kaiser had broken up. By the time I’m writing this feature, Kaiser is probably the most over person in AAA, coming off an all-time classic mask match with Chad Gable at Noche de los Grandes. Tiffy, meanwhile, is back to running around with a briefcase, rehashing her old 2024 arc.

Back then, though, I was still in Los Angeles, about to fly to Las Vegas. And shit, that flight was something out of a horror movie. First Mania needs some sort of wild initiation story, I guess.

Remember when I said that turbulence freaked me out and you probably wouldn’t wanna travel with me? Well this is the flight where I had to be restrained and sedated. So make whatever you want out of that. We were over the Nevada mountain range, the plane was bucking around in all that empty space, and each jolt seemed to tug the floor out from under me. It would dip and my stomach would float up and catch on itself, then my body would slam back into the seat and the belt would bite across my gut. My insides felt like the slime in a lava lamp but you know, more volatile. Then another dip came and then another, the whole plane shuddering and my body having no agency in all of that. I kept gripping the armrests like I could hold the aircraft in the sky by hanging on. I even did that thing where you try to press down on the airplane floor with both of your feet to sort of transfer all that tension to the plane? People can tell me planes are built for turbulence. I know that. The mind believes what it wants to believe. I had the Singapore Airlines turbulence story running through my head, and whatever the actual numbers were, my memory had boiled it down to a plane falling and falling; now I was over mountains, and I was feeling every bounce as the beginning of the same story. You can tell me that turbulence doesn’t harm airplanes but there’s always an exception or some stupid fact that says otherwise, and my mind likes to insist that I’m that poor sucker who falls in to that statistic. So anyway, I started sobbing, not a little wet-eyed movie cry, just ugly crying until I couldn’t breathe right, and I shit you not, the little girls nearby looked over wondering who was this big-ass Asian crying like it’s heartbreak season. My best buddy was too far out in front to help me or calm me down.

The flight stewardess was really desperate to just help me relax and not freak out the other passengers with my own freaking out. She gave me three doses of Dramamine to calm me down, and then I was tightly strapped into my seat while my seatmates were instructed to restrain me if necessary. That is how badly I was doing: a grown man crying and shaking in public while the strangers beside him waited to see if he’d get worse. The cabin still kept rattling and rattling, but the Dramamine kept me from feeling that drop in my stomach. Dramamine is very strong, I was told that the turbulence got worse but by then, they just felt like road humps to me.

Still, one of my seatmates, a U.S. Marine on leave reached over, held my hand gently, and prayed with me for the rest of the flight. I was holding his hand as well because I was so loopy that it just felt like the proper thing to do. Part of me still wished for the turbulence now, not because the whole ordeal suddenly awakened some repressed adrenaline junkie in me but because I was so embarrassed by what happened that I wished that the turbulence at least justified my episode. I mean people were freaking out, but still, they handled it better than me.

Anyway, we arrived at Las Vegas. The city was indifferent to all my drama in the air, in fact it was very much in Mania mode. Now that I’ve survived my brush with death, time to celebrate life.

To Be Continued in Part Two