6 Ups & 5 Downs From WWE Raw (April 18)

Downs…

5. ‘Six Years Away’ Doing Nothing

Cody Rhodes Kevin Owens
WWE.com

WWE loves to make it seem like whenever a wrestler leaves the fold for an extended period of time, they’re not doing anything related to sports entertainment. Maybe they’re doing construction, or maybe they’re hermetically sealed until it’s time to come back.

But Cody Rhodes, whose journey away from and back to WWE is ridiculously well-documented, got the same treatment so many other superstars got from the announcers Monday night, as Jimmy Smith commented on “how sharp he looked” after six years away from WWE, adding that he “hasn’t missed a step.”

Yeah, the guy wrestling all over the world who started up what’s now the country’s second-biggest wrestling company somehow managed to stay sharp away from WWE.

Come on. We get that you want to make WWE out to be the most important company on Earth. That’s a given. But ignoring everything else outside that bubble insults fans’ intelligence. And yet WWE keeps doing it.

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Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.