Just What IS Cody Rhodes' WWE Story Anyway?!
Cody wasn’t as great as the seminal crew of headline talent, who were either in their prime or, in the case of Hiroshi Tanahashi, even better for being a bit broken physically. He joined the Bullet Club Elite. In a masterstroke, he leaned into his self-aware dickhead jock bit.
In the ring, he had the right idea, but applied it in a way that was a bit on the nose. He sought to deprive fans of the reversal-blitz that was the vaunted NJPW in-ring standard - by stalling, mostly. It was a bit prelim heel, but he set himself apart nonetheless. He joined the cast of Being The Elite, and was the most earnestly funny part of it. He was a total arsehole of a narcissist. His tormenting of Flip Gordon was priceless. A very studious pro wrestler, his attempts to generate heat were far more effective on YouTube.
A heel only draws a performative strain of heat in the ring nowadays; if they cheat in some lousy finish or other, the blame is directed towards the booker. Cody, in the days of ‘Bullet Club is fine’, when he was attempting to fracture the group from within to launch his own career as a superstar with Elite back-up, knew how to torment the 21st century wrestling fan. He went after their t-shirts.
Cody threatened to change the iconic Bullet Club design, and as trivial as that may have seemed, he was really onto something. He deliberately tried to make the cool thing lame. His idea - to intentionally “nWo” the Bullet Club - was a masterstroke. A lot of people were genuinely upset about this tease before he unveiled a literal stitch of a punchline. The new Bullet Club logo was exactly the same, only with his blonde hair on top of the skull and his beloved cigars where the guns used to be. The Bullet Club was the in thing. The modern wrestling landscape is unrecognisable without the profound influence of that unit. Cody, who veered between babyface and heel a lot during this time, was exceptional in both roles. As a face, sort of but not really, he charmed the hard-to-please modern audience by slaughtering Disco Inferno - “Stop. You know nothing. You have drawn 0 dollars.” - on Twitter.
As a heel, he knew what was borderline sacred to his audience and his attempts to “destroy” it were all the better for his self-aware megalomania.
Who does Three Star Cody think he is, trying to make the Bullet Club his own?!
The ‘Three Star Cody’ tag didn’t shake for a while. Cody leaned into it, with the aforementioned stalling, but it wasn’t the long-term solution to the one thing that held him back from achieving true super-stardom. As effective as he was at drawing heat and sending Twitter into a meltdown, between 2016 and 2018, he never wrestled the true classic match that was necessary to be talked about as a Best In The World type.
At Double Or Nothing 2023, however, he drew the real stuff - but before AEW, there was All In - not that the two things were directly correlated. No one person was responsible for launching the unicorn that was AEW - the entity with which Cody changed wrestling for the better. The Young Bucks, through Being The Elite and an absolutely incredible, transgressive run across ROH and PWG, had revolutionised the merchandise revenue stream, parasocial meet-and-greet racket, and a means of telling very silly but undeniably, inordinately effective episodic stories on YouTube. They were instrumental in leading ROH to its commercial peak. Kenny Omega, through his masterpieces opposite Kazuchika Okada and his Alpha Vs. Omega match with Chris Jericho at NJPW Wrestle Kingdom 12, elevated the in-ring standard and proved that true big-time box office wrestling could exist beyond WWE’s purview. Tony Khan was the unicorn, who adored the range of great wrestling and could finance its major label debut, but it was Cody - a not inconsiderable draw himself - who dreamed the biggest. He knew that wrestling could be competitive and big-time all over again after two decades of oppressive monopoly rule.
In a moment of serendipity that changed wrestling forever, the Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer was asked, on Twitter, whether ROH could ever draw a crowd in excess of 10,000 people. Driven by the Young Bucks and Cody, the promotion was hotter than it had ever been. Supercard of Honor XII drew a company record 6,100 to the Lakefront Arena on April 7, 2018 (albeit benefitting from the foot traffic of another huge WrestleMania Weekend).
“Not anytime soon,” Dave replied. Cody, insistent that wrestling simply didn’t have to be sh*t anymore - he saw the appetite for it - responded himself. “I’ll take that bet Dave.”
“This bet clearly was something Cody was serious about,” Matt Jackson wrote in the Young Bucks’ autobiography ‘Killing The Business’. “And he couldn’t get it out of his head”. When in discussions with then ROH Vice President of Operations Gary Juster - ROH ended up assisting with the budget and production, to their detriment, really, since the Elite had in effect elevated their own brand above it - the idea of the Sears Center in Chicago was floated as a potential venue. Cody immediately asked if it could hold 10,000 people; as Matt wrote in the book, Cody was “obsessed with that number”.
But why? Why five figures?
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