Just What IS Cody Rhodes' WWE Story Anyway?!
AEW should not exist. The odds on it are so vastly improbable. The exact conditions that converged to create it were as improbable as they were perfect. It is a fever dream made real, and it was Cody who dreamed of a movement big enough to fill 10,000 seats. None of this is to undermine what was very much a team effort. None of it happens if Kenny Omega doesn’t convince enough people that he has wrestled the best match ever. It probably doesn’t happen if Chris Jericho - who in 2019 was on career form - acts as the bridge leading curious viewers into a new phase of their fandom. It doesn’t happen if the Young Bucks don’t positively humiliate the mainstream with their outmoded ideas of how to get over and how to work. Dynamite might not go as well if Jon Moxley doesn’t portray AEW as the cool place over which to jump.
Hell, as Matthew Jackson himself said, his father deserves a credit: none of this happens if he didn’t build a ring for his boys when they were too obsessed with wrestling to concentrate on their studies. It was Cody however who refused to believe that 6,000 fans in one building was big enough.
It is no exaggeration whatsoever to state that the idea of WWE ever getting good or worthwhile again was just as - if not more - fantastical. The rejuvenation of WWE, honestly, is as improbable as AEW’s formation.
WWE between 2017 and 2021 was wretched, and if that scans as “AEW bias”, it isn’t. WWE itself apologised for how dismal it was on its own programming. WWE in that period was a place in which careers and fan investment died. Roman Reigns being smothered in dog food. The Revival scooting across the canvas as if they were threadworm-afflicted canines. Mojo Rawley screaming into a mirror with his face looking like Luna Vachon for some reason and then doing nothing. Lars Sullivan cutting promos with his shirt off for no reason and then doing nothing. Virtually every ‘Superstar’ on the roster doing some insane bullsh*t and saying the worst, most inauthentic dialogue you’ve ever heard in your life - and then doing nothing. Bad. Historically, unacceptably bad.
WWE was handily defeating AEW before Cody returned, and the brilliant repackage of the Tribal Chief Roman Reigns character cannot go understated, but Cody was great in WWE before Vince McMahon mercifully left and is drawing huge houses now he’s gone. He is a true emotional, believable figure who can smash through the synthetic presentation and make you feel something. His matches are timeless, universal experiences that play to the back row as well as the first. He has the fire, the sincerity, the sheer goodness to be the leading man. Finally, after years of awful indentured stand-up comics, WWE has a top guy who knows how sh*te the patter was and can get away with calling it out.
Cody Rhodes has made two promotions reach peaks - one that shouldn’t exist and one that had no artistic right to exist - and is the common denominator.
This is why so many fans are desperate to see him win the big one.
Even if he somehow doesn’t finish the story, the story he has already told since 2016 is the most compelling and necessary story in the modern history of pro wrestling.
Nobody across the 21st century deserves it more.