What Wrestling Legends Really Think Of AEW
8. The Rock
On the November 6 Full Gear go-home Dynamite, Cody talked fans into the building and onto the streaming apps with the greatest babyface promo of this generation.
He set himself the ultimate challenge, thus creating the ultimate stakes: if he couldn't defeat Chris Jericho, he would never again challenge for the AEW World Championship. He created unreal drama around the match, and put himself over as the ultimate babyface World Champion - allowing MJF the most cruel, agonising platform for his transgression when he robbed fans of it.
He was defiant in the face of Jericho, the "carny succubus," galvanising the AEW base to support him on his quest to reclaim the soul of AEW with searing passion, emotion, and an expletive that didn't, unlike some other uses of the trope, feel like he was meeting a quota. He trembled and he quivered, using what the match meant to him in reality as motivation to cast real doubt over the planned fiction of its unhappy ending. He sold it like the biggest fight of his life, and the biggest match in all of wrestling.
No less an authority in the field than the Rock put it over - big - on Twitter.
"Rhythm, cadence, tone, intent, passion, execution. Great promo, brother. You dropped that MF @codyrhodes," he tweeted.
Then again, Rock recently put Dolph Ziggler over as the complete main event package in the year of our Lord 2020, so...