Awesome / Cody Rhodes

Moment pages are Spoilers Off by default, so all spoilers were removed. Proceed with caution. You Have Been Warned.

The story is finished!

• His Wrestlemania 27 victory against Rey Mysterio Jr. stands out for two reasons: A. it being one of the few good matches on the card, including doing a fairly impressive delayed vertical Superplex, and B. Cody being the only relatively new guy who came out of 'Mania looking strong.
• His Intercontinental Championship victory.
• His short but explosive feud with Randy Orton that saw both wrestlers legitimately bloodied at least once each and (apparently) ended with an absolutely brutal street fight that required Orton to pull out all the stops to beat him.
• He put in a damn good showing at the 2012 Royal Rumble, where he entered at #4 and lasted until The Big Show eliminated him. Show entered at #30.
• In the World Title MITB match at Money in the Bank 2013, Cody went quite a ways in shedding the Butt-Monkey status he'd gotten in recent tag matches with Sandow and in singles action. In short order, he Cross-Rhoded back-to-back opponents, gave a delayed Muscle Buster to resident WWE strongman Antonio Cesaro onto a ladder, and wiped out the competition and the Shield by pushing Dean Ambrose off a ladder to the outside. If not for his "friend" Damien Sandow's last-minute interference, Cody would've won. To top this all off, the Philly crowd was going nuts for Cody all the while.
• Following on from the above incident, two weeks later on Smackdown, Cody steals Sandow's Money in the Bank briefcase and runs off with it. When Sandow calls him out on it later in the show, Cody is shown standing in front of the Gulf of Mexico with Sandow's ill-gotten prize. Sandow then chases him down and is reduced to begging as Cody threatens to dispose of it. After all of this, Cody defiantly flings the Jerkass' briefcase into the sea. Sandow's reactions were very satisfying to watch.
• Let's not forget when he and Goldust ambush The Shield before their 11-on-3 elimination handicap match in revenge for their father.
• October 6, 2013: At WWE Battleground, in the tag team match against The Shield to decide the Rhodes family's collective fates, Cody scores what may be the greatest, and certainly most emotional, win of his entire career, pinning Seth Rollins after nailing the Cross Rhodes with goddamn authority.
• October 14, 2013: Cody and Goldie hung tough with the Shield in their no-DQ WWE Tag Team title match despite being outnumbered and fought them tooth-and-nail to the very end of the match. With Goldust speared by Reigns through the barricade, that left Cody at a 3-on-1 disadvantage...until Big Show stormed through the crowd and KO'd Ambrose and Rollins in short order. Rhodes fakes out Reigns with a Disaster Kick, allowing Show to KO the Shield's muscle and Cody to pick up the pinfall and the tag titles for him and his brother, capping off their triumphant return to the WWE and dethroning the Shield in one fell swoop.
• If you put Cody Rhodes in a steel cage, you're more than likely going to end up seeing him doing a moonsault from the top of it.
• Despite (or even because of, depending on your POV) the weirdness of the gimmick, Cody Rhodes gets a moment of awesome for the switch to Stardust. Not only is he showing the ability to play an extremely cartoonish gimmick completely to the hilt, but he has changed his entire moveset and wrestling style to complement it. The list of people that can pull of a change of this caliber is very, very short.
  • Unfortunately, the Stardust gimmick never went anywhere and Cody's career stalled out as a result. Seeing the writing on the wall, he made the bold move of asking for his release and foregoing a steady WWE paycheck, eager to make a name for himself on the indies.
• The gamble seems to have paid off — Cody is now getting high-profile gigs in prominent spots across multiple promotions; not the least of which being the announcement in December 2016 that Cody would join New Japan Pro-Wrestling as the newest member of Bullet Club.
• Here's an interesting piece of trivia: Within a year's time, Cody appeared at the biggest pay-per-views for four of the promotions he's worked in that timeframe — Wrestlemania 32 (WWE — as Stardust), Bound for Glory (TNA), Final Battle (Ring of Honor) and Wrestle Kingdom 11 (New Japan Pro-Wrestling).
  • For perspective, the only man who's come close to that was AJ Styles, who only missed out on a Bound for Glory event. As such, it'll take a while before anyone manages to top that.
• As of Best in the World on June 23, 2017, he defeated Christopher Daniels for his first world heavyweight championship, the Ring of Honor World Title, with a raucous crowd and Bullet Club teammates all supporting him and celebrating with him. The Prince of Pro Wrestling is now a King.
• Cody, alongside The Young Bucks, decided to risk everything they had and hold their own major wrestling show, fittingly called "All In", even renting out the Sears Centre in Illinois to host it. Amazingly, they sold out in mere 30 minutes; to put this into perspective, they had 10,000 seats available and they sold out- not many indy promotions in North America have ever come close to those numbers, yet they did it on their first try.
  • The hype in the leadup to All In was through the roof, with it ending up the single most-anticipated non-WWE wrestling event of 2018 (and to smarkier fans, even more so than anything WWE could offer). It was, without question, the single biggest non-WWE wrestling event since WCW had gone out of business — hell, the first non-WWE or WCW event in the United States to sell more than 10,000 tickets since 1993, when AAA went on a California tour. And in the end it lived up to the hype! Cody and the Young Bucks decided to go big or go home and they went big!
    • And for Cody personally, this was the night he won the NWA World Title, the same title and championship that his father The American Dream held when he was a toddler, making him and Dusty the first father-son duo to ever hold the title. Dusty is surely smiling down on his son from heaven now.
• Cody and the Young Bucks followed up on All In in 2019 with the formation of All Elite Wrestling. Time will tell how well this goes in practice, but the fact that they have put WWE enough on notice to cause the wrestling juggernaut to adjust its business practices ^note signing talent to longer, more lucrative contracts, and making a concerted effort to re-sign talents with expiring contracts so they did not become free agents basically with word of mouth and a single press conference, before any matches have officially been wrestled for the promotion, has to be mentioned here. Out of the gate, AEW is being taken seriously as a competitor by WWE at a level that took other would-be threats several years to reach.
• The video announcement of "Natural versus Nightmare" for Double or Nothing was met with near-universal acclaim. Dustin's promo and new face paint was eye-catching, with many fans wondering what Cody's response would be. Watch it here and mark out:
  Cody: I love my brother. I have always loved my brother. When you're a little kid and you're going to the Omni in Atlanta, Georgia, and here he comes - tall, blonde, every woman in the place going absolutely nuts for him - well, I'd say at one point, he was my hero. You know, there's this regular, jilted, and lazy trope that commentators in wrestling will use. You'll hear them say "the prodigal son", and I have to wonder, I'm curious as to who out there listening actually understands the morals and implications in Luke 15:11, in that parable. There's two brothers. One does everything right, one works very hard, tries to keep his family whole. The other goes abroad, whores about, and makes every conceivable wrong choice you could possibly make. But it's the first brother who is equally in the wrong because he has an expectancy from the father for all of his good deeds and none of them matter. The father loved them the same. I've sat on enough couches and told my story enough times to know which brother I am. I'm good with it. And this notion of "brother versus brother", of "Natural versus Nightmare", it's all very marketable, all very romantic, albeit not very accurate. What's accurate is that this match is generation versus generation. I'm not here to kill Dustin Rhodes, I'm here to kill the Attitude Era. My whole lot, my entire class of peers, has been compared to these gilded late-90s to the early-2000s for over a decade, and it's an utter sham. Sure, you paved the roads for us, but gosh, you set the speed markers at 35 because you were terrified of any of us putting our fucking foot down on the pedal! You mean to tell me some pissant bodybuilder, making every match a no-DQ, meandering around the crowd, throwing the jib cam at his opponents compares with a Kenny and Okada match?! Or some bra-and-panties spectacular can match up with what the women did last September 1st? Or even Dwayne, as electric as it was, rhyming and raising? Was it really better than what Punk said sitting on that stage? (laughs) Listen, I am the least Rhodes of the Rhodes, but they gave me a pair of boots, I've got the basics. When you do something to death, when you ride something to death, that's literally what happens. When that animal can't go anymore and it falls out on the trail, and you can feel the tension in its eyes, its fluttered breaths of panic, and it knows it's going to die, it wants to die - you don't just leave it. Because you love it. So you pull from the hip, you roll your fingers on the steel of the chamber, you pull the hammer back, you do not anticipate the recoil, and you blow it away. Like I said, I love my brother.
  • The actual match also delivered. It was instantly held up as one of the best, if not the best, singles match of both brothers' careers. How much so? It got five stars from Dave Meltzer.
• This promo leading up to a title match against Chris Jericho at AEW's Full Gear PPV:
  Cody: If I do not defeat Chris Jericho at Full Gear, I will never challenge for the AEW World Championship again. Chris Jericho, that is a very big 'if.' It's not an incumberence, it's not an albatross that is going to sit on your chest and weigh you down. It is going to vanish. You've taken to calling my lot 'entitled millenials.' You've called me an 'entitled millenial bitch.' I neglected to read, in your best-selling book A Lion's Tale -– which you can get on Amazon for THREE DOLLARS, or at any FLEA MARKET — I neglected to read about the upbringing you had that was so hard. You talked about my silver spoon… Gosh! It must have been so difficult being the upper class son of a famous hockey player. It is almost like we shared the exact same silver spoon, YOU STUPID DICK! You've dismissed every accomplishment I've made. You've talked about my father. Well, you call me an entitled millenial? I call you a carny succubus, because the dirty secret about you? The dirty secret is you need this generation more than it needs you, and you've surrounded yourself with impressionable youth. This isn't about my dad. This isn't about the dead. It's about the living. It's about my mother. It's about my sister! It's about my WIFE! IT'S ABOUT THE FOURTEEN YEARS IT TOOK ME TO GO FROM UNDESIRABLE TO UN-GODDAMN-DENIABLE!!!
  • The above promo just so happened to get praise from none other than THE ROCK. While it's no secret that he regularly follows non-WWE brands of wrestling, along with his A-List status meaning Vince can't exactly punish him for saying it, for someone of his caliber to give his seal of approval even with the company not even being a year old speaks volumes for how much people are already paying attention to them.
• The climax of his steel cage match against Wardlow in the main event of the 19th February episode of Dynamite. After the monstrous Wardlow kicks out of a combination of a punch from the Dynamite diamond ring (which MJF had tried to pass to Wardlow to use against Cody but which Cody got his hands on instead) and a Cross Rhodes, Cody stands up. Almost entranced, he rapidly scales the side of the steel cage to the top (and the AEW steel cage is twenty feet tall) and, without hesitating at all, performs a fearless moonsault off the top that destroys Wardlow, allowing Cody to pin him and ensure he will get his chance to take revenge on MJF.
  • What makes the spot even more pants-wettingly awesome is that Cody visibly didn't even check whether or not Wardlow was in position before hurling himself backwards from such an insane height, putting all his faith in his belief that his opponent would be there to catch him. The lengths Cody is willing to go to in order to entertain the fans and tell the best story he can are unbelievable.
  • You want to talk about wetting your pants? Check out how Wardlow goes from standing to horizontal in a fraction of a second the moment Cody lands on him. That's the kind of impact that has ended careers, and not only did Cody do it in just a regular episode and not a PPV, after he won the match, he climbed back onto the cage to taunt MJF and bask in the audience's cheers. Most people would have given him the benefit of the doubt if he wanted to limp or be carted away, but no, Cody freakin' Rhodes stands strong for his people and his show.
  • Props also needs to be given to Wardlow for catching Cody. Half a second too slow or half an inch too far or too close and there could have been broken limbs. Hell, there was broken limbs—thankfully limited to a single bone off his foot, but that just goes to prove the point of how badly this could've gone.
• Cody returning to WWE at WrestleMania 38 to the tune of a twenty-minute instant classic against Seth Rollins. Not only did he come back with every aspect of his lovingly-built post-WWE character intact (from entrance to gimmick to wrestling style), not only did he prompt one of the loudest pops since the Attitude Era, not only did he win his first match back at the most grandiose event on offer, Cody Rhodes blew apart wrestling's fabled forbidden door and created legitimate wrestling history just by showing up when his rival company needed him most.
  • Made even more awesome with his entrance music being Downstait's "Kingdom" - the very same song he used ever since leaving the Big Dub in 2016 to form the foundations for AEW.^NoteSince Rhodes explicitly owned the rights to the song, he was eventually free to use the same anywhere he goes.
• June 5, 2022: Hell in a Cell 2022. Cody engages in a 24-minute classic with Seth Rollins, the grand finale of his trio against the Visionary. Impressive in its own right, especially considering it was widely considered to be the best of their already amazing trio, but Cody did so after suffering a complete pectoral tear during training the day before. The HIAC crowd went into an audible Stunned Silence upon first seeing the extent of Cody's injury, which had turned most of his right arm into a swollen, purple wreckage, and only built up engagement and heat from there as Cody, on the verge of actual tears at points, fought through the agony for nearly half an hour and ultimately managed to hit Rollins with a Pedigree, two Cross-Rhodes, and a sledgehammer shot in quick succession to pin him for a 3-0 sweep. A week later, Dave Meltzer baptized the match with his fabled five-star rating, the first WWE main roster match to earn that rating in over a decade.^note Said match in question? CM Punk vs. John Cena at Money in the Bank 2011
• After weeks of vignettes airing for Cody's return to WWE since his injury after Hell in a Cell 2022, he made good on his word that he will return, and finally won the 2023 Royal Rumble match...from the number 30 spot.
• During the 3/20/23 edition of Raw, Cody is having a promo with Roman Reigns where Reigns commits to his usual strategy of trash talk and mind games. Reigns once again brings up Dusty Rhodes (Cody’s late father and Roman’s former mentor) as a way to get into Cody’s head and notes that Cody has dealt with all his problems (Stardust, hitting a ceiling on the AEW roster, his famous pectoral tear) by “running away”, wondering if Cody will run away on April 3rd when he fails to take the titles from Roman at Wrestlemania. Not only does Cody not take the bait, he turns the mind games right back around on Roman by saying when Roman loses the titles, the entire Bloodline will leave him one by one until he’s “a Chief Without a Tribe.” Roman becomes so visibly disheveled and distraught by the thought that he just walks away without even responding.
• Though he ultimately lost to Roman at the show above and suffered a fairly miserable few months at the hands of his next opponent immediately thereafter, at SummerSlam 2023, Cody walked away from his third and final match with Brock not only with one last climactic defeat of the Beast Incarnate, but another intangibly massive gold star to add to his resumé alongside his five star rating: Brock's infamously nigh-unwinnable respect, something which nobody else in WWE history, not even The Undertaker and especially not Roman, can ever claim to have accomplished.
• Cody teaming up with Seth Rollins, a returning Randy Orton, Jey Uso and Sami Zayn to take on Drew McIntyre and the Judgement Day in an absolutely epic War Games Match at Survivor Series 2023.
• Cody winning again at Royal Rumble 2024, this time after an amazing half-hour performance that included a nearly five-star mini-match with CM Punk right at the end, and becoming one of only four men to win back-to-back Rumbles alongside Hulk Hogan, Shawn Michaels, and "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, one of the most mythical achievements in all of wrestling.
• Following the 2024 Rumble, a ton of sudden chaos in WWE (including Vince McMahon's latest legal scandals and various injuries) resulted in several major booking changes, by far the most shocking and controversial being The Rock of all people — having only just made his return to the company — pushing himself into the WrestleMania main event spotlight and attempting to claim the match against Roman Reigns for the Universal Championship for himself, with Cody being relegated to facing off against Seth Rollins. After intensely vocal outcry for Cody to claim his rightful place in the main event, he finally made his decision during the WrestleMania XL kickoff show: as The Rock and Reigns began celebrating their upcoming bout, Cody stormed in and asserted right to their faces that he won the Rumble, he was the one who will get to decide who he faces in the main event, and it will be him vs. Reigns. Things became intensely personal very fast, with The Rock decisively turning heel by slapping Cody in the face after insulting his bloodline (right after he and Reigns mocked Dusty, mind you), but the message was clear: Rhodes vs. Reigns was on.
• After years of Cody being broadly perceived as a basically good, but uninspiring and one-note microphone worker, the 3/18/24 edition of RAW saw him respond to weeks of taunting and hurled insults on the part of Dwayne Johnson by coming out and absolutely destroying the single greatest promo man in wrestling history in mic-to-mic combat. For bonus points, and on a note absolutely monumental to the wrestling industry, this promo was considered by many to be the long-awaited official death of WWE's maligned PG Era censorship, and a massive return to Attitude Era and Ruthless Aggression Era form in terms of mature content and language.
• WrestleMania XL: CODY. FINISHED. THE. STORY. He did what nobody thought was possible and toppled Roman Reigns, the Tribal Chief's 1,316 day reign and finally being able to lift the championship his father never won. This, after fighting an uphill war against the Bloodline Rules stipulation with John Cena and The Undertaker making surprise appearances to even the playing field against the Bloodline, to an overwhelming ovation from the Philadelphia crowd of 72,755 while his family, other babyfaces and even Triple H himself joined in the celebration.

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