The Ballad of Cody Rhodes
The Fandom and Fatigue Towards Cody Rhodes
Brandi and Cody Rhodes (courtesy of allelitewrestling.com)
It was naive to assume they would all remain a group forever.
That’s the ending we sought, stirred by the amazing confluence of chance and big balls that started AEW. The image of the intro to their inaugural PPV, Double or Nothing 2019, is one we savored the most: Kenny Omega, The Young Bucks, and Cody and Brandi Rhodes as a group, introducing the promotion to the world as a worker-led co-op. We all wanted it to work out—it was too good of a story. Four wrestlers partner to create a sensational indie show that capitalizes on the peak of the independent wrestling movement, then all become free agents at the same time, and then they align with a clandestine investor that’s not a money mark who has the connections to become a viable second option. And it fucking worked.
For a time, at least.
What broke it up is all speculation. And without being in the room with everyone together, we project and create what we think is the narrative.
Relationships in general are damn near impossible to maintain, let alone working ones. Communication, needs, vantage points, creativity, ambition, all evolve differently, at incongruent intensities and destinations. Nobody knows when Cody Rhodes felt like the relationship had shifted as he hasn’t spoken out yet. No less than Tony Khan himself stated in late ’19/early ’20 he took over booking full-time and everything creative was filtered through him. Was Cody’s exodus directly tied to his creative, was it money, or more?
We don’t know how much control Cody had over his own segments towards the end of his run, but let’s assume he had it at the start. He debuted with a universally recognized match of the year candidate with his brother, Dustin, that everyone with a soul found stirring. He did his thing with the Bucks, Spears, Jericho, got turned on by MJF, and had a standout moment against Wardlow in a cage with a great promo of which had a Sting-esque vibe to everything. Cody is a natural heel, and wrestles and performs at his best when he’s a heel. He was able to parlay his desire to be an earnest babyface and still wrestling like a heel when necessary as the first TNT Champion, a title, not unlike John Cena’s US Title Open Championship, that allowed him to wrestle anyone who wanted a shot. Depending on the opponent, Cody needed to be more of a face or a heel to make stars and give them their moment to shine. Cody defeated Jungle Boy, Scorpio Sky, Sonny Kiss, Ricky Starks and Eddie Kingston. The Starks and Kingston matches were so well done that they got AEW contracts for their effort. All this, along with the goodwill of AEW’s initial founding, endeavored Cody to goodwill from the fans (and likely some fans perpetually).
But in 2021, the on-screen character of Cody Rhodes became bafflingly painful as fuck to watch that the fans rightfully turned on his act.
The backlash went into overdrive in his program with Anthony Ogogo. During his impassioned babyface promo about America and her immigration, race and political fissures, he tried to convey he’d fight for America because of the progress he saw that allowed him to have a mixed race child in 2021. In the dipshit discourse of American politics today nothing can be digested without hyperbole and pants-pissing. It was neither the Tucker Carlson jingoistic rant or the woke liberal term-paper it was later remembered to be. It was just weird. And trying too hard. And failing to capture poignancy. That pattern would only continue.
Cody went over Ogogo, because of course he would. But then he went into a program with Malakai Black. Black needed to stay the hell away from Cody because the weird abyss of Cody’s orbit would swallow Black and not allow Black to create his own identity, because everything Cody was touching was in his own universe and it made no sense. Cody was becoming a liability to new talent coming in. Squandered talents from WWE like Malakai Black and Andrade, after being misused and released in a wave of cuts, needed to be rehabbed and given credibility in a new surrounding, to develop the potential they had before being jobbed to turd-like status in WWE. At first I thought it was a desperate attempt to maintain relevancy to bring in new people for him to go over because that’s what he felt worked for his TNT title run. Or to attach himself to the cool factor of a new debut. The program was an abysmal failure. Sure, Black went over twice on Cody out of their three matches (of which Cody actually made a winking reference to this in a promo that rolled more eyes than achieved anything) but their storyline was entirely focused on Cody going through some weird, invocation of Rocky III that had no teeth to it.
It was portrayed that the fans turned on Cody because he was too Hollywood because of his reality show and game show. The fans booed because those shows were Herculean heaps of shit, cementing the notion Cody had no discerning taste. Cody was cringeworthy to watch. A monolith for validation. His promos began to break the 4th wall, filled with insider terms and winks and allusions to smart marks that made no sense big picture and lead nowhere. In the biggest shows of 2021, in Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, fans began to hijack the shows by defecating over his earnestness, even throwing his weightlifting belt he threw into the crowd back into the ring and taking the audience out of the match entirely. Out of the ring, Cody would say to wrestling media that he heard the audience, and kept promising these pie-in-the-sky revelations for things to come that nobody had the ability to pull off, but apparently he did, and this was all part of his masterplan. Anyone could see he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. It was a weekly free-fall on TV. I likened it to the back-half of the second season of Twin Peaks, where the real creative force had pulled out his association (for this analogy to work, think Tony Khan in the place of David Lynch) and the scattershot, improvisational approach had the hubris of calling itself genius and you just didn’t get it.
I could list the things that were just fucking exhausting in the last few months of 2021 alone…Arn Anderson’s promo he cut at Cody’s house where he threw Cody’s tie in a hobo’s garbage can bonfire. The tag team alliance of himself with PAC against Black and Andrade that made zero sense even on his absence of motivation scale. The gasp from the audience had that Cody had the audacity to use the pedigree before it went into the tiger driver 98 to beat Malakai Black, thus necessitating Black be re-heated with promos and a new stable. When Cody clearly had some sort of KY Jelly fire retardant on his back to do a flaming table spot that looked phony where Cody took all the flame but he beat Andrade somehow anyways that exposed the show and buried Andrade for good. Those heel on heel promos of Brandi with Dan Lambert, the Top Team coach lambasting his wife by calling her a stripper while Cody did nothing. The TNT Title win, and unification loss to interim champion Sammy Guevara. That was his last match in AEW. Crazy that we saw it live. The Cleveland crowd almost entirely booed Cody, and trust me, being apart of it, it was not a smart mark audience well versed in dirt sheets and hosting wrestling podcasts.
Then, earlier this week, the press release came from AEW that Cody and Brandi would be leaving because they couldn’t come to terms with Tony Khan. There’s all sorts of speculation, and again, who knows what’s bullshit and fact. Dirt sheets reported sources that said the EVPs had a major falling out, Cody was aloof, nobody liked Brandi, people weren’t sad to see them go, etc. etc. etc. We’ll know what was real later. Or maybe we won’t. AEW has always been superb about not allowing bullshit to spread and spoilers, angles, signings, and inner-office heresy doesn’t come out, if at all, ever. So to think that Cody and Brandi’s fictional characters’ portrayal on TV is even a sliver of a reflection of their real personas is also naive.
While disavowing the narratives and speculation out there, I’ll allow myself to divulge in just one of my own. Maybe Tony Khan is a better worker than Cody. We do know that Tony had the chance to resign Cody earlier this year and chose not to. Notice how on the Wrestling Observer’s interview with Kenny Omega, when Omega referred to Tony Khan, he said the promotion was, “Tony’s baby?” Khan signed this group collectively to start the promotion the way it needed to be started, but assumed the power at his disposal. Does it make me a QAnon conspiracy theorist to surmise Tony Khan let Cody Rhodes run amuck this year so Cody’s internal value would plummet and Tony wouldn’t be the heel to not give Cody a dump truck full of cash when his worth was significantly lower than Punk’s, Cole’s, and Danielson’s? We’ll see.
Cody will bet on himself again. He’ll either be stupid or a genius. But for the time being, it’ll come Wednesday night again, and you’ll know what that means—we won’t have to fucking talk about this goddamn guy anymore.
