Back when Pro Wrestling Illustrated still did “Most Popular” and “Most Hated” monthly ratings, Cody Rhodes, the WWE champ, would be at the top of the “Most Popular” list, so what I’m about to say about wrestling’s “Most Popular” guy isn’t going to make me popular with wrestling fans, but whatever.
Cody Rhodes is so-o-o-o-o fake.
Now he’s saying his time away from WWE was defined by him losing his “compass” amid everything he was doing.
“I got overinundated with just information and stuff in the combination of office/wrestler, this/that, promoter particularly, that my compass got completely blown. I didn’t know what was good anymore. Is this good? Is this bad? But I really did lose a lot of my compass in my gut,” Rhodes said on “Busted Open Radio.”
Rhodes, you may remember, left WWE in 2016 because he was never given a shot to be a top-of-the-card guy, and by the end, he was reduced to being Stardust and wrestling on the off-brand shows “Superstars” and “Main Event.”
Pro Wrestling
- AEW ‘Dynamite’ Review: Debby does a number on Winston-Salem show
- Six reasons why it’s hard for me to watch WWE ‘Raw,’ ‘Smackdown’
- Notebook: What value, other than shock value, would Shane McMahon bring to AEW?
- Pro Wrestling 2024 Mid-Year Awards: Best wrestlers, tag teams, feuds
- Notebook: AEW’s Tony Khan claims WWE sticking its nose in his TV deal business
- How much will AEW get from its next TV deal? The math tells me $200M-plus per year
Tail tucked between his legs, Rhodes struck out for the indies, where you need an actual compass to get to your next high-school gym show.
The best thing he ever did was align himself with Matt and Nick Jackson and Kenny Omega in Ring of Honor and New Japan.
Because of those ties, Rhodes ended up being invited to be in the founding group behind the launch of AEW in 2019, and parlayed his famous last name into being given the honor of wrestling in the company’s first-ever TV match, on the Oct. 2, 2019, debut of AEW “Dynamite.”
The move to have Rhodes put as a stipulation to his title match with AEW world champ Chris Jericho at the 2019 “Full Gear” that he would never again challenge for the world title if he lost has been viewed as dumb booking by Tony Khan, but I’m starting to see it another way.
The whole “finish the story” business that was used as the motivation for Rhodes in his return to WWE comes across, to me, as, that one is the world title that I wanted all along, and when you see it that way, you can’t unsee that he didn’t want to have a world-title run in AEW because that would tarnish what he wanted to be able to do if and when he finally got back to WWE.
Which, fine, WWE was his dream.
I get that.
I think AEW fans sensed that, which is why Rhodes, who was always positioned as a babyface in his AEW run, had nuclear-level go-home heat from the fans for the last year of his time there.
It started to become obvious that Rhodes was treating his time in AEW as the prelude to his grand return to WWE.
I will say, it’s odd to me that WWE fans, who supposedly don’t watch AEW regularly or at all, took to the finished Cody Rhodes product, which was 100 percent the product that he had created in his three years in AEW, from Day 1.
And actually, you can tell by the way that I put it there, I don’t think it’s odd at all, and I don’t buy the nonsense that WWE fans aren’t aware of the competition.
Rhodes gets credit from fans and bloggers because he doesn’t torch AEW now that he’s back where he wants to be, but to me, I mean, come on, the guy took Khan’s money, basically booked himself into being the mid-card champ so that he could preserve a future WWE storyline, when he should have been the guy to take the belt from Jericho and run with it for a while, and he still wants everybody to like him.
I’ll give him credit here: he left WWE as a curtain-jerker, wrestled in high-school gyms, strategically befriended guys who took a call from the son of a billionaire who wanted to start his own TV company, took that guy’s money for three years as he used the TV time to complete his makeover, then played that into being asked to main-event WrestleMania.
It worked.
Doesn’t make him any less fake for pretending to be humble about how it all went down.
Share
Chris Graham
