What A New Cody Rhodes List Would Look Like For 2022
When Kenny Omega and Don Callis booted open The Forbidden Door in December 2020, sections of the wrestling fandom set about making entire cards of supposed dream matches between respective members of the Impact and All Elite Wrestling roster, and a strange reoccurrence in the lists made them rife for parody - there were loads of like-for-like pairings.
It was Stone Cold Steve Austin Vs Goldberg in 1998 but taken to the extreme with little understanding of the fact that the WWE and WCW top dogs looked similar was less than half the reason for wanting to see the fight.
When the side-by-sides weren't unflattering to whichever company was doing a better job with a gimmick, or fans weren't indulging in acts of grim inadvertent marginalisation, the resultant combos were criminally under-thought ways to take advantage of the brave new wrestling world.
AEW became a self-styled wrestling buffet pretty much from launch, and much of this was shaped in the image Cody posted when he first requested his release from World Wrestling Entertainment in 2016. Now an integral moment in North American wrestling history, Rhodes' list tweet brilliantly reframed an assumed WWE bubble guy as somebody with his ear to a ground he wanted his boots to walk on.
It seems wild to think about just five years later, but even with NXT's 2014-2016 golden era still sparkling, mid-2010s WWE still appeared to be a closed shop full of blissfully-happy-to-be-there staff. That Cody aspired to work Dalton Castle and Adam Cole for the first time instead of Dolph Ziggler and Adam Rose for the hundredth seems obvious now, but it blew minds back then.
He was thinking big. And when it comes to imagining what the 2022 equivalent of this might be, we should too.
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