During an interview on the Attitude Era podcast, former WWE Superstar D’Lo Brown reflected on John Cena’s debut with the company in 2002 and how he was laughed out for his abilities by the then-WWE locker room:

“I’ll tell you this. Here, I’ll give you a little story. Here, so, in WWF we do dark matches, right? They’re matches that no one sees on TV. So, for about a year John Cena kept coming in as The Prototype. And the boys, all of us would go sit up in the stands because back then it wasn’t full arenas. So, we can go sit up in the arena and no one would see us and you could watch the matches. And we would laugh at John Cena going, ‘He’s so robotic. he’s so robotic.'”

“Then he came one day and he had a flow to him. And you’re like, ‘Wait a minute, that’s the same dude?’ Because his body moved differently, his matches worked differently, and you’re like, ‘Okay, there’s something to that son of a b*tch. There’s something there. Lo and behold, a year later, he becomes the biggest star in wrestling and moves on for ten years. He puts the company on his shoulders. But I remember for about nine-ten months, we would laugh at him going, ‘What is this guy doing? Why is he even doing this?’ He became John Cena.”