John Cena, for good reason, doesn’t want to talk about Vince McMahon

The latest John Cena five-knuckle shuffle out of having to answer a Vince McMahon question is why WWE should stop having post-big event press conferences.

“Surely an uncomfortable question, and man, I really would much rather talk about what’s ahead of us, and that’s really important. I’ve been pretty honest with my opinion to answer that question, and if you didn’t see it, I know you can dig it up somewhere,” Cena told reporters at the post-“Money in the Bank” presser on Saturday.

Cena was at the podium because WWE had him at the event to announce the launch of a retirement tour that will culminate at Wrestlemania 41 next spring.

WWE started doing these post-event press conferences because Tony Khan has been doing them over at AEW, with similar disastrous results.

Actually, to be fair, AEW ended up losing its top star, CM Punk, as a result of a post-event media scrum, sorta, kinda – it took a year, but Punk’s tirade at the end of his post-“All Out” presser was what led to the pre-“All In” melee with Jack Perry that precipitated his departure last summer.

That’s unmitigated disaster territory there.

The worst that WWE has done is just ignore reporters’ questions on the McMahon sex-abuse scandal, and denigrate a reporter and two wrestling news websites over a question about the decision by WWE not to re-sign Drew Gulak over allegations that he had acted inappropriately toward women backstage.

Cena, for the record, trying to claim that “you can dig up” what he said about the McMahon scandal, is dramatically overstating with how “honest” he has been on that situation.

A quick Google search reveals him talking around the McMahon allegations with an impressive word salad in an interview with shock jock Howard Stern in February, in which Cena stressed his “love” for McMahon, and dismissed the awful circumstances of what McMahon is alleged to have perpetrated against a former WWE staffer as “super unfortunate.”

He came across as feeling sorry for McMahon in that interview, and it was obvious last night that he doesn’t want to have to reiterate that, because he has to know how it makes him look, siding with an alleged prolific sexual sadist because the guy happened to pick him out from among dozens of wrestlers to be his cash cow.

But that’s what you get in press conferences – a mix of softball questions about how it feels to have won whatever match or title happens to be the big story of the night, and hardball questions about uncomfortable topics like sexual-abuse allegations.

If WWE wants to avoid the hardball part of that game, just kayfabe the pressers in the future, like they do the stuff in the ring, because the worst thing that can happen with these press conferences is when they actually make news.

That, or just stop doing them altogether, because seriously, what’s the value?