John Cena on his current relationship with The Rock

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s return to WWE last month popped the crowd in Denver and a big rating. During his unexpected appearance of SmackDown, The Rock also renewed acquaintances with the man he faced in the main event of both WrestleMania 28 and 29 — John Cena.

Cena’s working a lot more dates than Johnson during his Hollywood free time, and one appearance included sitting down with Kayla Braxton for a 20 minute interview that premiered today (Oct. 4) on The Bump.

During their conversation, that backstage meeting with Rock came up. Kayla asked Cena what it was like running into his old rival, but he “adjusted” her question to “what was it like to see a friend that I haven’t seen in a long time”:

“In between the times we’ve spent with each other, I’ve openly come to a realization that the first foray into us competing against each other probably was a professional mistake on my part. I’ve been very apologetic and open with my apology that the way I conducted business was in the realm of trying to do good business and we did great business.

“It was really nice to see a friend who’s actually generous with his time. We actually conversed for a little bit and that’s the first time we’d seen each other since publicly apologizing for that and I just wanted to make sure he heard it from me face to face as well and it was really nice to see a friend.”

Cena’s apologized to Johnson for some of the shots her took during their 2011-2013 program, which ranged from accusing The Rock of abandoning WWE for Hollywood to calling him out for writing promo notes on his wrist in marker.

Those apologies worked, with Rocky saying in the past that he and Cena went from almost coming to blows to “great buds”.

And it sounds like they still are.

You can watch all of Braxton & Cena’s talk here.