Just What IS Cody Rhodes' WWE Story Anyway?!
Brock and Jinder reigned with the top titles throughout much of 2017. It didn't matter how good, over or present they were. Vince wanted them pushed, so they were pushed. This was the epitome of WWE's "F*ck you!" era. The absolute minimum requirements to be a top champion were not met. Twice over!
Cody himself had been betrayed by a false promise.
At Battleground 2013, in one of the few intentional highlights of the time during which the Authority stable presided over WWE, Cody Rhodes and Goldust defeated Roman Reigns and Seth Rollins, reinstating their jobs per the storyline stipulation. This match was incredible. Stakes; drama; fire: it was as close to bonafide southern electricity as WWE had ever generated. At the finish, Cody put Seth down with the Cross Rhodes. This was the first glimpse of Cody Rhodes: headlining megastar. The fans were going apesh*t. He took his time to register the drama. He roared before saving his brother and his father as if their jobs were actually on the line. He roared so fiercely that there was a black hole where his face used to be. He was drenched in belief at that moment. While his in-ring arsenal, as ever, wasn't flashy or fashionable - he was never really on trend as a worker at a time when contrarian fans demanded somebody, anybody with a pair of kick pads supplant John Cena at the top of the card - he was so remarkably assured in the ring. Great matches aren't necessarily great for the content; pacing is the true magic, and that tag seesawed between despair and hope to nigh-on unbearable effect. The emotion was off-the-charts by the standard of a WWE PPV midcard match for that era. All four men - and Dusty and Dean Ambrose on the outside - achieved something truly special that night.
This was the sort of performance that, in a functional promotion, could launch a talent's career. A dysfunctional promotion - WWE - repackaged Cody Rhodes as Stardust in under a year. This was Stephanie McMahon's idea, as Cody revealed during a Starrcast panel in 2019. In the gorilla position, as the Brotherhood were about to make their entrance for a match months later, Steph, out of nowhere, said to Cody "Why don't you paint your face like your brother?"
This was probably a euphemism for "Your pops are getting quieter". Perhaps it was even casually, inadvertently insulting - "...because you know, you're a bit bland" - but Stephanie probably wasn't aware that she had just ruined two years of Cody's athletic prime. That she in that moment altered the course of professional wrestling history.
"Someone" was instantly besotted with the notion, and Stardust - a mischievous alien entity, or some such b*llocks - was born.
Cody tried. He tried to have a bit of fun with it, to be a team player. He knew the character was terrible. He knew that Stardust was never going to headline WrestleMania. He also knew, in a warped way, that he could potentially impress people by committing to the bit. Even if the bit itself was a cringeworthy creative atrocity, he was operating in a post-smart world. Everybody watching knew he was doing what he was told. The heat is almost invariably on the booker. He tried to portray that he had lost himself within the character. He took a wild swing and turned it up to 12. If he was going to be Stardust, he was going to be Stardust. His line readings were pure am-dram; he seemed to play it like a fading Shakespearean theatre actor cast in some risible sci-fi schlock in a naked cash grab. The very best he could do was a very intense stripe of so-bad-it's-good. He couldn't do tongue-in-cheek. The character was useless; a career death-sentence of an early-to-mid 1990s anachronism. The man who went on to wear a dapper suit at every single indie appearance however approached it like a complete professional. He could never be accused of not doing what he was told to his utmost. Even at his most undignified, nobody could accuse him of not treating every day on the job as his first. Nonetheless, the idea that anything earnestly good could emerge from under that paint was impossible.
With one historical curio of an exception.
Ahead of their disastrous match at Fastlane 2015 - picture the exact opposite of their AEW Double Or Nothing masterpiece, and you're still nowhere near close - Goldust interfered in Stardust's match against Jack Swagger. It was a WWE match. The distraction led to the finish and nobody in the audience cared at all.
In a "digital exclusive" promo cut after the show, something a talent could perform without Vince McMahon blowing a gasket at them for screwing up, something Vince likely never watched, you could glimpse the real Cody under the paint. He knew he could tell a better story than WWE - he'd prove that definitively just over four years later - and tried to do that in secret, almost. He talked some waffle about the "age of Aquarius" before getting to the point. Using what has become a well-worn wrestling cliché, he claimed he was hungry. That he wanted to eat some "steak". But, before he could do that, he wanted to cut out the fat. He compared the gristle to Goldust but did not stop there. He said that the fat was Kane, the Big Show, Mark Henry. "Old men talkin', young men dyin'" was his rather over-the-top way of saying that the stars of the Attitude Era were holding back the current generation.
This promo was the first draft of the interview that acted as evidence of All Elite Wrestling's ability to fulfil its promise. Ahead of the inaugural Double Or Nothing event, Cody on AEW’s YouTube channel compared his older brother to a dying horse that needed putting out of its misery. "It knows it's going to die and it wants to die. You don't just leave it. Because you love it. You pull from the hip, you roll your fingers on the steel of the chamber, you pull the hammer back, you do not anticipate the recoil, and you blow it away. Like I said: I love my brother."
"I'm not here to kill Dustin Rhodes," Cody lamented. "I'm here to kill the Attitude Era".
WWE's total inability to get over the Attitude Era was a key factor in the formation of AEW. Dolph Ziggler was part of Cody's "class of peers" who had been relegated by the "gilded" stars of the late 1990s and early 2000s - a never-ending development that Cody claimed in that promo was "an utter sham". Ziggler was similarly annoyed by WWE's stop-start treatment of his generation, the lack of belief in them, the poisonous way in which their careers were fated to die. Cody, Ziggler, countless more: all were stigmatised by this process of normalisation. Ziggler - and it is no coincidence whatsoever that the most profound thing that "Mr. Ziggles" ever said was not written by a member of the creative writing staff - referred to his "lot" as the 'Gratitude Era' on Edge & Christian’s Pod of Awesomeness.
WWE was so besotted with this short-term thinking that they in effect destroyed a truism. The cream no longer rose to the top. Cody eventually did, of course, but it took nothing less than the most seismic and improbable series of events to get there.
CONT'D...