10 Most Old School Wrestlers Of WWE's Modern Era

Cody Rhodes says that his father didn’t smarten him up to the business until he freaked out watching the old man join the nWo in WCW, and only then after his wife demanded that he stop lying to the kid.

Before his untimely passing, ‘The American Dream’ Dusty Rhodes was said to be maintaining kayfabe from angles he’d been involved in three decades before. Cody is no different. He’s the Dream’s kid, and the words ‘old school’ are stamped on his bones.

Cody Runnels grew up with kids at school calling wrestling fake, and even after his father smartened him up, Cody still felt the deep-seated need to defend his honour. Later in life, that instinct would broaden to cover the business as a whole. If you follow him on Twitter, you’ll have known this for a couple of years or longer: but Cody Rhodes absolutely loathes smart marks, the dirtsheets and the whole culture of ‘insider’ outsiders that the internet has accumulated over the last two decades or so.

He can’t stand fans and critics of pro wrestling using so-called insider terms like ‘babyface’ or ‘heel’, or ‘gimmick’, ‘heat’ etc. For one thing, he asserts that their use is archaic these days, and that he knows very few people in the business that actually use these words on any kind of regular basis. Apparently his father always called fan favourites ‘protagonists’.

Committed to character almost beyond reason, for nearly two years he refused to admit that he and Stardust were the same person, running parallel Twitter accounts for the two and claiming on his personal account that he wasn’t currently working - even that he was training for an in-ring comeback.

And then of course there’s that lisp. There have been whispers for a long time now that his father’s famous speech impediment was a work: that he’d been faking it since the seventies. That could be one of wrestling’s notorious conspiracy theories, of course… but if it’s not? That means that Cody Rhodes has been faking his own lisp for a decade, in tribute to his father. Even if it’s not true, it sound exactly like something the man would do and never, ever tell anyone about.

In 2016, now a free agent and undertaking regular media appearances to promote his independent dates, Cody Rhodes is fully aware that his is an old-fashioned mindset, and that demanding that others cling to a kayfabe that’s been six feet under for decades is contrary, to say the least… but that’s the old school perspective for you, bloodyminded to a fault.