Since exiting the company he founded with Tony Khan, The Young Bucks & Kenny Omega (among others) in early 2022, Cody Rhodes hasn’t said much about the “personal issue” he and AEW leadership “couldn’t move past” that led to his departure.
He still didn’t reveal much during an appearance on the latest edition of Cheap Heat with Peter Rosenberg. But Rhodes’ answer when asked is he still roots for AEW to succeed gets closer than he has in the past:
”These questions, I always now — I’m very careful about because they’re the number one question that will be cited when this interview hits. I’ll say: the narrative changed a lot about my contributions to AEW, and that was very disappointing. There were some people, I’m not going to say their names, they know who they were, who kind of tried to put some propaganda out when I left.
“There’s a quote in The Young Bucks’ book about how I was last to the signing. And me and Matt & Nick [Jackson] are as close as ever, so glad that I’ve had them in my career and my life. But if we are being honest, AEW does not happen without me. It doesn’t. And with that in mind, I could never root against it. It’s like having a kid and they go off to college and they get a DUI or they get in trouble… I’ll always have that in my heart for them.
“It certainly was a wound that was more gaping and painful than people realize, because now they look at the situation and they’re like, ‘Oh man, you’re on top of the world, you have everything.’ Maybe they don’t understand that I really gave everything I could. I did. And, yeah, I could never see a day where I was rooting against them.”
Given what he says after it, Cody’s reference to Matt & Nick Jackson’s autobiography is likely from a section of Killing The Business where they discuss AEW’s formation and how Rhodes was on the fence about it after the first ALL IN. Even with his hesitation, The Bucks felt Cody was “the one missing piece to the puzzle”.
Less clear (at least to this writer) is what the WWE champ is referring to when he said that “random things said at press conferences” about him and wife Brandi sometimes make it hard for him to pull for AEW’s success, even though he believes that success is for the good of the entire pro wrestling business:
“And then from a completely outside of me perspective, my relationship to AEW or anything, my friends, the kids I signed, the people from my school, all that stuff. But from outside of that, it’s very important that they hang in there. Because if that was to go away, I don’t think anybody in the locker room has any clue the financial repercussions that that would have on the wrestling business. The trickle-down effect it would then have on independent wrestling. We’ve created a really comfortable environment in sports entertainment for men and women to feed their families and to do well and to be treated on the level that their global penetration ask for. And I would hate to see that bubble burst.
“So that’s another random fear I have of, you know, when they’re down or if they’re up or whatever it may be. But, yeah, I would never root against them — in any case. That’s not always easy because random things said about you at press conferences, and that’s a big no-no, you should never say me or my wife’s name, Tony should have told you that. So, yeah, I’ll never root against them. I really won’t.”
Maybe he’s talking about Timeless Toni Storm’s promo at -Dynasty scrum? Let us know what I’m forgetting, and let us know what you make of Cody’s latest comments on his AEW departure, in the comments below.
You can listen to Cody Rhodes entire appearance on the Cheap Heat podcast here.
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