10 Major Stars Who Escaped WWE Creative Jail
2. Cody
He tried.
To his eternal credit, and arguably to his greater embarrassment, Cody refused to phone in the goofiest gimmick of the decade. As Stardust, he turned up an all-the-way-to-11 gimmick to 12, but it was too difficult to respect his professionalism. The act was simply so sh*tty that any notion of it being a labour of love plunged him to the depths of Rob Conway.
He tried, in a February 2015 exclusive, to project the human beneath the paint. This prison journal is fascinating, in retrospect; Stardust rages against the "fat" weighing WWE down. "Old men talking, young men dying," he says.
But nobody listened. He had to make noise elsewhere.
Cody, in a deeply ambitious bit of wordplay, referred to himself upon his 2016 departure as the 'Star who left them in the dust'. Did he f*cking ever; the new 'Game', Cody learned that rehabilitation, not punishment, is the more difficult path needed to upheave the system. From the insidiously humble babyface to the out-front Don of Independent wrestling, Cody bet on himself, time and time again, and in doing so has rebalanced the very industry.
Those young men are no longer dying; whether tied to WWE or a prospective AEW recruit, they are making more money than the boys have made in years.