Report that John Cena told NXT crowd he'd be back in three weeks was erroneous

What a mess the online reporting of John Cena's surgery, to remove bone chips from his elbow, has been this week.

First we had WWE.com jumping the gun and reporting that Cena will be out of action for only two to three weeks, based on discussions they had with his surgeon, Dr. James Andrews, before the surgery had actually taken place. However, when he went under the knife it became clear that the damage was a lot more serious than originally anticipated, with much more work needing to be done and many more bone chips to be removed than expected. Hence, the initial prognosis was wrong and Cena would be on the disabled list for at least twice as long as WWE.com first claimed.

Rather than privately complaining to WWE.com about the mistake and asking for their report to be corrected, instead, he unprofessionally took to Twitter to bury the poor scribe that wrote the initial post. No-one would have batted an eyelid if the former had happened, but Cena's course of action made a mountain out of a molehill and ensured that the story blew up into an online controversy. That may have been the purpose of his Twitter rant if the WWE creative team wanted to work the Internet into believing that Cena would be on the shelf for much longer than he actually would be, but for such a minor injury that would seem pointless.

Then a correspondent for PWTorch.com passed on the information that John Cena had told the crowd at the September 20th NXT tapings(that he appeared in front of--as scheduled) that he was sorry he couldn't wrestle as planned, but he would "return on October 11 to compete". Which James Caldwell took to mean that Cena would wrestle in just over three weeks and thus was lying on Twitter.

The first rule of journalism is that you should always get a second source before publishing a story, but that wasn't the case here. So perhaps unsurprisingly, according to Bryan Alvarez of f4wonline.com, the Pro Wrestling Torch's report was bogus:

"Despite a report online, it appears from talking to others who were at last night's NXT taping that John Cena did NOT say he would be back wrestling on October 11th."

The actual wording was that he would return to wrestle in front of the audience at Full Sail University in Florida "when he could". So that wraps up that mystery. At least until Monday night, when we will find out how WWE handles his injury in their storylines on Raw. I can feel your sense of anticipation, Cagesiders!