AJ Styles has cemented himself as one of the best in-ring workers in all of WWE after his debut during the 2016 Royal Rumble. He has had great matches with several big names in the company, but perhaps his greatest feud was with John Cena.
AJ Styles’ feud with John Cena truly elevated him to the top of the company and raised his credibility. This is especially after Styles defeated John Cena at the 2016 WWE SummerSlam pay-per-view.
The Phenomenal One was a heel during his feud with Cena and he would often say ‘Beat Up John Cena’ along with Karl Anderson and Luke Gallows. This is because that is exactly what they did every week to Cena.
While speaking on TalkNShop, Karl Anderson and Luke Gallows talked about the promo where AJ Styles said ‘Beat Up John Cena.’ Anderson and Gallows revealed that Vince McMahon banned them, including AJ Styles, from saying that line again.
Unfortunately, when you walk the line the way we walk the line, we’ve had a lot of those matches where, I hope we entertained you, but on the inside we were thinking, ‘My God.’ The whole Raw run [Laughs].
F***, we came back from Japan that one time, we did the greatest promo of all time for The Club. We were so hungover because we just came back from Japan. We almost fell off the stage when we went to commercial. John Cena was in the ring. We did the whole ‘beat up John Cena’ for the first time ever. Got a massive [pop], a big reaction on social media as well.
I don’t know how long we said it or if it was just that week. It got hot, I immediately went home and printed ‘Beat Up John Cena’ shirts and brought them to the house show loop. We were going to sneak them onto Raw, but Vince called AJ and told him…somebody called AJ, I feel like it was Vince, and told him we were never allowed to say ‘Beat up John Cena’ again.”
AJ Styles is currently set to square off against Edge at WrestleMania 38 in a true dream match. We will have to wait and see who will come out on top in the highly anticipated match.
h/t to Fightful for the quotes
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