“Co-opted.”
That was the charge laid at my feet when my feature story on Cody Rhodes appeared on Bleacher Report’s front page. Complete with a huge company wide push, it was a story that had made some waves, a portrait of the game-changing wrestler on the eve of a spectacular triumph—the debut of a new wrestling promotion on Turner Network Television.
It was the damn dog that got me in trouble.
I’d gone to Cody’s home in suburban Atlanta to watch him film an interview with the legendary Tony Schiavone. Cody’s dog Pharaoh, perhaps appreciative of the attention while everyone else was too busy working to pay him much mind, had gravitated to my side and I took a picture of him licking my face. I didn’t think anything of it. He’s a beautiful dog and it’s the kind of photo, as a chronic picture taker, I’d snap anywhere.
To critics, however, it was evidence that I was in the bag for AEW and Cody, blinded by the celebrity dog, incapable of delivering an honest report on what I’d seen while spending the day with a very busy young wrestler. Because AEW’s pay-per-views were broadcast on Bleacher Report Live and their upcoming television show Dynamite would appear on TNT, anything I wrote was automatically suspect in many eyes, considered little more than propaganda in a world full of it.
The truth was a little more complicated. When I’d first pitched a story on AEW, I’d wanted to focus on Cody specifically. I saw his family’s decades long battle with the McMahons for the heart of the industry as particularly interesting and he was pretty clearly the force that had helped drive a collection of independent wrestling stalwarts to start thinking differently about how big it was possible to dream.
And Bleacher Report said no. Not just to the Cody angle. To the whole thing. It could be done, I was told, for the wrestling section of the site, a small-budget hamlet filled mostly with show reports and analysis that was generally overlooked by the bigger promotional machine and lacked the budget to fund my rate for a feature story.
Senior editors, at the time, were completely unaware of the new wrestling promotion, unfamiliar with their pay-per-views on BR Live (a Turner subsidiary that was connected to Bleacher Report only by its name) and skeptical that a wrestling promotion not named WWE would draw any eyeballs or clicks.
The idea that I was given marching orders to sell Turner’s latest property was completely wrong. I’d had to sell my ass off just to get assigned a story, ultimately convincing the brass, which didn’t watch wrestling, that this was going to be something bigger than Ring of Honor and TNA, two brands that had died brutal deaths anytime they were featured more widely on our website. This, I’d told them was going to be big.
Of course, a savvy reader will notice I haven’t directly answered the charge of being “co-opted” in the writing of the piece. Because that, too, is a little complicated.
On July 26, 1980 my life changed forever. That sounds like a bombastic claim, but considering my now decades long love affair with professional wrestling, it’s not as absurd as it seems.
That was the evening that Ole Anderson betrayed Dusty Rhodes on an episode of Georgia Championship Wrestling, accepting his tag in a cage match at the Omni with the despised Assassins and, instead of aiding his fallen partner, attacking a helpless “American Dream” in one of the sport’s most brutal double crosses.
That day on television, Anderson explained his actions, his cold calculation somehow making it all worse.
"I plotted and plotted for a year and a half to get rid of Dusty Rhodes," Ole said. "I told no one. I bided my time to a place where I could get Dusty Rhodes all alone. And I finally did it. I had to take a lot of hard knocks from my old friend Ivan Koloff and The Assassins and everybody else but I wouldn't tell them what was on my mind. The only one who knew was Gene, and that's why he hasn't been here in a year because he couldn't stand the sight of me hanging around with Tommy Rich or Stan Hansen or Lars."
I was five years old and had never known such hatred in my heart as I did in that moment, nor such love. Rhodes was as valiant, in my eyes, as any man had ever been, every bit the hero Luke Skywalker was, as brave and bold as Marshall Dillon himself.
I was, in a word, hooked.
So, in the spirit of full disclosure, I didn’t come into my story on Cody Rhodes completely free of bias. I was there as a decades long Dusty Rhodes fan, a wrestling enthusiast beyond anything approaching normal, and someone very, very interested in a company promising to bring back a style of wrestling closer to the one I’d grown up with than the one that had grown from the detente following the last two wrestling wars.
The story Bleacher Report took only reluctantly out-performed a more expensive and, frankly, better supported story about college football and opened some eyes internally about the potential of All Elite Wrestling as regular subject matter for our site.
We’d been down a similar road on the MMA side of the house when ONE Championship, like AEW, was broadcast on BR Live. That didn’t lead to regular coverage of the promotion from our MMA team because no one clicked on it. That would have likely been AEW’s fate had we not seen this early success and decided to give it a chance. Burned out from more than a decade on the MMA beat, I spent my final year with the company primarily covering professional wrestling, going live to a number of AEW events as the company continued to exceed all expectations, fighting to for every inch of real estate on a website that still placed articles about Tony Khan’s promotion in a section called “WWE.”
Watching Cody’s subsequent success as AEW grew into a formidable force in its own right was revelatory. At one point I remember turning to my wife as Cody held the crowd in his hand and wondering if we’d inadvertently joined a cult. That I, too, would kill for this man if he but asked was left unspoken but not unknown.
While we stayed in infrequent contact after my article published, I can hardly claim any insider knowledge of how Cody ended up leaving the promotion he’d helped make possible to return to WWE. The cracks that formed in the relationship between Cody and the other founders of AEW were never fully exposed to the light but could still be seen from the outside. Cody often appeared to be operating in a promotion all his own, his angles and matches occurring on Cody island, nearby but distinct from the more cohesive world the rest of the AEW roster called home.
When word leaked that he hadn’t re-signed with AEW, I wasn’t surprised. We’d often speculated on our podcast that Rhodes saw the new promotion as an opportunity to prove to WWE that he had main event chops, a chance to advance several places in the pecking order instead of spending his career mired in the middle, which seemed like the path he was on and didn’t know how to escape.
“The thing that matters the most and what defines a pro wrestler for me is your ability to capture their imagination,” Rhodes told Variety in an interview that posted as he was making his entrance to the ring. “That means they leave that show thinking about you, talking about you, discussing whether it was good or whether it was bad. When you get a hold of that, it’s like a dog with a bone. You can never let it go. I didn’t find that connection until 2015, 2016 until the infamous betting on myself, you know?”
As Stardust, Rhodes would have spent his career fighting just to make it onto the big show. Returning as a conquering hero, he had a bonafide “WrestleMania moment” instead, emerging from his six year absence to a huge pop from a crowd that clearly saw him as a big deal, then delivering a note-perfect main event style match with one of the WWE’s best performers Seth Rollins.
If this was another proof of concept opportunity for Rhodes, consider that case made. What’s next, anyone can guess. But Cody is in position to make a run at that top spot which he’d always felt was his destiny. If you’ve watched him operate in this notoriously cutthroat industry for the last six years, you’d be a fool to bet against him.