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It was quite the Royal Rumble. The biggest star in the business appeared, completely unexpected, at the most dramatic moment, impossibly beating the odds to not only just be there at all but to win the whole damn thing. That single electric instant, when John Cena's music hit on no. 30 and he grinned his little grin out on the ramp, turned a solid show into one of the most memorable Royal Rumble ever. It was what all those bad bookers chase so hard and have no idea how to get - the perfectly set up, out-of-nowhere shock that gets fans talking and leads to more and better main events.

But that was just a show, an illusion, a work. The reality of that shock is that John Cena returned in only three months, bigger and badder than ever before from a pectoral muscle tear, an injury common to bodybuilders and pro wrestlers and not many others. That injury usually takes six-to-twelve months to heal. Cena came back in less than four months - and thicker than he's ever been in his pro wrestling career.

So, knowing what we all know after all those hours of television coverage, all those thousands of words in print, all those doctors and major leaguers and movie stars and amateur pharmacists and all that damage and that long list of deaths, John Cena and WWE have some obvious questions to answer.

Yeah, I know. WWE doesn't acknowledge the existence of a wrestling press. Well, that's not quite true. If WWE didn't acknowledge its existence, it wouldn't spend so much energy chasing down anybody in its employ who might possibly talk to it off the record, much less on. WWE will never put themselves in a position to answer questions publicly from any reporter with the background to ask the tough, relevant questions that need to be answered.

As for as the mainstream press and WWE? WWE is both gutless and defensive in any of its dealings with them. Fortunately for them, most of the press has lost interest in the pro wrestling story - for now. Still, if I was a producer on CNN's "Death Grip: Inside Pro Wrestling," I would be very interested in this latest development in John Cena's career.

None of that - none of the arrogance of WWE or the failures of the media - changes the simple fact that John Cena's shocking return, and shocking physical state, raises some real questions. Someone ought to ask John Cena those questions and he ought to answer them. He stood up for his business and himself before and he ought to do it again.

Here are those questions:

How did you recover so quickly from a pectoral muscle tear, an injury that usually takes athletes twice as long to recover from as it took you?

What was your recovery regimen?

Did you use steroids or Human Growth Hormone as part of that regimen?

Yeah, I think I know what he would say in response. But you know what?

I want to hear him say it.

Bruce Mitchell has been a columnist for Pro Wrestling Torch since September 1990. He and PWTorch editor Wade Keller discuss the headlines of the week and wrestling's history for about two hours every weekend for the PWTorch VIP Audio Show section, which features around 60 new VIP-exclusive audio updates every month. A full backlog of years of previous audio shows is available to all members. Mitchell's longer-form columns appear about once per month exclusively in the PWTorch Newsletter, a 16 page print weekly published since 1987 and also published online exclusively in the VIP version of PWTorch.com.

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