Two years ago, at WrestleMania 39, Cody Rhodes had his defining moment. It was the day many felt that he should have won the Undisputed WWE Universal Championship from Roman Reigns, but Rhodes failed to do so. He had made a triumphant return to WWE a year prior as Seth Rollins’s mystery opponent at WrestleMania 38. He spent the year as one of the biggest stars in the company before winning the Royal Rumble and challenging Reigns for his WWE title at WrestleMania 39. Everything seemed to be in place for him to win, it was the last match of the night, and probably every fan in sold-out SoFi Stadium assumed that Rhodes would come out on top. And he lost.
After the match, after Reigns had already left for the back, in an arena still full of confused, despondent fans, Rhodes sat in the ring with his arms on his knees and cried. Cody Rhodes, the son of an all-time legend, had a noteworthy decade-long WWE career before leaving to work the indies, TNA, Ring of Honor, and New Japan Pro Wrestling; helping found All Elite Wrestling (while being a face of that company); and finally returning to WWE. He had already had a career that outranks most others in the business. He was arguably WWE’s biggest star. But it was that moment in the ring, staring at the lights after his biggest loss, that defined him.
The match with Reigns was centered on Cody’s quest to “finish the story”—to claim the WWE title belt that had eluded his father, Dusty Rhodes, during his illustrious career. But even if there was some logic—and poetic justice—in this, there was a sense in which it got the Dusty Rhodes story exactly wrong. Dusty wasn’t a hapless loser, and he wasn’t the victim of a backstage coup. (There were lots of backstage politics in Dusty’s career, but that could be said of every wrestler.) He was the Common Man, the American Dream. He was an underdog. At his peak, just at the moment when it seemed inevitable that he would win a title like the NWA World's Heavyweight Championship from Ric Flair, something would get in the way—a broken ankle, a screwy finish. Those moments never deterred Dusty, and they never diminished his popularity. In fact, they made it stronger. He won world titles, but his ability to win on a given night was never the point. The real championship gold was the people he inspired along the way.
Even so, invoking his father’s legacy was meant to give credence to Cody’s championship aspirations. And he seemed convinced that he was destined to win at WrestleMania 39. In an interview with Ariel Helwani last year, Helwani asked when Rhodes found out that he wouldn’t win that night. It’s a good question—one imagines a tense conversation between Rhodes and WWE creative boss Paul “Triple H” Levesque in which the rug was formally pulled out from under Cody. This is the part of pro wrestling that exists just beyond the reach of knowability for fans, the part of the story that is the most enthralling, the part where the superheroes face real emotional stakes. But Cody, ever the purist, wouldn’t give it away.
“So it’s a great question, and I'm of the thought that … there’s a movie called The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Have you ever seen it? There’s a quote in there … ‘When the fact becomes a legend, print the legend.’ So, for the purpose of this answer and that question, what I’ll tell you is I found out in the ring, in the moment that he hit me with the spear and pinned me, 1-2-3. That’s when I found out.” This is keeping kayfabe of the highest order. Cody is an expert in the old art of protecting the secrets of pro wrestling, even in the modern era. Cody is an accomplished liar. He was also schooled in the ways of kayfabe by a father who kept up the facade of injuries and story lines, even with his children. He’d see Dusty shake hands with his fiercest rivals in the locker room, and his dad would still explain it away: “He says, ‘Respect back here, out there is the only place where we can truly compete.’” Cody bought it as a kid, and he passed that on to the fans of the modern age.
The insistence that he didn’t know the ending evokes another wrestling legend, Hulk Hogan, who always retells the story of WrestleMania III in ways that imply he didn’t know how his match with Andre the Giant would end until Andre told him to slam him in real time in the middle of the ring. We laugh at Hogan because it’s so obviously false and because Hogan is a legendary liar. Hogan’s lies serve almost entirely to burnish his own legacy. Rhodes’s lies serve to BUILD THE EXPERIENCE, REINFORCE THE BUSINESS.
There might be a grain of truth in both instances—even if there are set plans, they can always change them. Cody could have been holding out hope that Triple H would hear the crowd roaring in his favor and call in an audible to the referee for Cody to win the match as it was happening. More likely, though, it just didn’t really set in until it was over. Cody had journeyed for years to get to that point, to that moment, and there was probably a part of him that didn’t believe failure was possible until it became a reality. Until he was sitting in the ring afterward in tears. We don’t really need the window into the backstage conversations with Cody Rhodes: He lets us in on the internal emotions right in front of our eyes.
“The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes was always the most compelling, believable wrestler there was, in part because he was self-aware. “I admit, I don't look like the athlete of the day's supposed to look,” he once famously said in a promo. “My belly’s just a little big, my heinie's just a little big, but, brother, I am bad, and they know I'm bad.” Dusty was indeed bad. He was one of the biggest wrestlers in the world from the mid-’70s to the late ’80s. He was a star all over the United States, but his first taste of megastardom came in Florida. He was such a big star there that he earned a main event spot at Madison Square Garden wrestling WWWF champion “Superstar” Billy Graham for the title that was the progenitor of the current WWE Universal Championship, under promoter Vincent J. McMahon.
At MSG on September 26, 1977, Dusty Rhodes held the WWWF title belt for the first and only time. And we use “held” here only literally—he was never champion, having defeated the reigning titleholder via count out. Despite the fact that Rhodes wrapped the belt around his waist and celebrated as if he were the new champion, titles don’t change hands on count-out decisions, so Graham never lost the belt. But Dusty got his taste of being the champ, and the fans got their taste of elation and disappointment as they celebrated with him and watched the belt get ripped away. This would go on to be the defining characteristic of the “Dusty Finish,” the kind of match ending that Dusty was known for, in which a win would be rescinded on a technicality and the hero would have defeat pulled from the claws of victory. It was a powerful (if occasionally repetitive) way to keep the chase going. And it told a good story—a story so poignant that Cody Rhodes was able to latch on to it 45 years later to give meaning to his own title chase.
It also made Dusty a certifiable star in New York. According to Vince McMahon in the Mr. McMahon docuseries (full disclosure: I was a producer on it), he considered Dusty Rhodes for the role of top babyface in the WWF when he took over the company from his father—the Hulk Hogan spot. But, according to Vince, Dusty didn’t want to give up his Florida work to take on the full-time job. It’s hard to know whether it’s true, but it presents an interesting thought experiment. If Vince had accepted Dusty’s less than superheroic physique in exchange for all of his otherworldly charisma, would he have booked him the way he did Hogan?
Imagine Dusty slapping the Iron Sheik with the Bionic Elbow and taking the world title off him at MSG on January 23, 1984. Imagine Dusty backing Wendy Richter at the Brawl to End It All, or teaming up with Mr. T against Piper and Orndorff at WrestleMania 1. Imagine Dusty holding the belt for 1,474 days until he lost it to Andre the Giant on the Main Event due to some nefarious dealings with twin referees. (Hogan owes a lot of his mannerisms to Rhodes to begin with; Dusty’s outrage about the fake Hebner would have been tremendous.)
Actually, as long as we’re rewriting history, let’s go all in. Forget Mr. T. Imagine if the build for the first WrestleMania saw Bruno Sammartino, former record-setting 2,800-day WWWF champ, coming out of retirement to congratulate Dusty, only to attack him and leave him bloody in the middle of the ring. Imagine that as your WrestleMania main event. That’s pretty much what we have here, 40 years later at WrestleMania 41, where Cody is defending the WWE Championship against a suddenly heelish John Cena.
It’s fitting that Cena’s heel turn came at the behest of the Rock, the longtime pro wrestling icon who has been in an odd relationship with Rhodes for over a year. When the Rock returned to WWE in early 2024, it was as a fan favorite, and he teased a match with his cousin and WWE champion Roman Reigns, which had been a dream for many for years. But the match, were it to happen, would have come at the expense of Rhodes, who had been aiming for a WrestleMania rematch and who won last year’s Royal Rumble to earn that spot. Ever one to wear his emotions on his sleeve, Cody played along but didn’t hide his displeasure. As he shook the Rock’s hand and embraced him on the February 2, 2024, episode of SmackDown, nominally giving the Rock his spot at WrestleMania, Rhodes seemed to be on the verge of tears.
Just as the fans cheered when Dusty grabbed the WWWF title and booed when it was pulled away, the modern WWE fans followed in lockstep with Cody’s plight. They rejected the Rock’s claim to the WrestleMania main event, and WWE pivoted to put Cody back into the match, now with the Rock playing heel and backing Reigns. Cody and Seth Rollins lost to Reigns and the Rock on Night 1 of WrestleMania XL, but Cody pulled off the victory over Reigns in a one-on-one match the following night. He emerged the champion, finally avenging his loss the year before and redeeming his father’s failure to win the belt all those years earlier.
Except, well, I guess I have to say it. The September 26, 1977, match wasn’t some grand moment of dispossession. It was a standard ending to a Dusty match. The win-but-not-quite-win was the Dusty Rhodes routine, night after night. It wasn’t even the only time it happened against Superstar Graham. Rhodes and Graham wrestled at least 55 times, 11 times for the WWWF title. Graham won one of those matches. Rhodes won 10—one by count out, four by referee’s decision, and the rest by disqualification. I’m sure the fans celebrated with Rhodes after every win and booed lustily when Graham still walked out with the title. The routine was a successful one—it split the baby, drawing fans to the arena with promises of a title shot and allowing Rhodes to “win” without disrupting the status quo. That status quo was that Graham was the champion, and more importantly, Rhodes was the chaser. The underdog. It was a successful formula, not just for maintaining equilibrium, but also for making Rhodes into the megastar he would become. Dusty’s championship losses, here and throughout the rest of his career, were exactly the point. They didn’t deprive him of the glory of being champion. Those losses were what made him a legend.
After his loss at WrestleMania 39, Cody had a phone call with Cena, a call, he said, that he would have had with his father if he had still been alive. “It would have been a great call to make to my dad—didn’t have that choice,” Cody told Helwani. “So I had John kind of present me with the challenge. The challenge that he presented to me was ‘Just be the champion without the belt.’ Right? And here’s your barometers. Look at your merch, look at your ticket sales … look at everything, and that will keep you honest. That will let you know, are you the champion without the belt?” Cody lived and worked the next year under this rubric and came out victorious—not just as the champ without the belt, which he was, but by claiming the title itself at the following WrestleMania, despite the loss at 39, despite the Rock’s attempted interference, despite his family’s legacy, despite everything stacked up against him in the story line and real life.
Dusty finally came to the WWF full-time in 1989 after being fired ignominiously by WCW as both star and booker. He had bled in a match despite a new no-blood policy, and then, after being censured for it, he doubled down and staged a bloody attack on himself by the Road Warriors, wherein the Warriors detached a metal spike from the shoulder pads they wore to the ring and stabbed him in the eye with it. Nothing that Rhodes did in his career affected me the way the Road Warriors’ assault did. I remember watching it when it was broadcast on TBS, and it left me shook. I was too young to register that Dusty was fired; I just thought he had been compromised to a permanent end.
Dusty’s run in the WWF wasn’t at the level of his NWA and WCW fame, and it certainly wasn’t what his 1983 run could have been. He dressed in yellow polka dots and danced a lot, holding down the midcard instead of chasing the world title. There are long-standing rumors that the polka dots and the booking in general were retribution for his failure to come to the McMahon empire earlier and working for its rival for the intervening years. Both Rhodes men deny this, as does McMahon, but it’s a compelling theory. What’s indisputable is that Rhodes never got close to the world title, despite his fame. It evokes the middling (but thoroughly entertaining) run that Cody had in the months before his initial WWE departure, playing the face-painted oddball Stardust, seemingly light-years away from the main event picture. Cody had to leave to come back, to reclaim everything he had lost.
When Cody finally laid claim to the championship last year, he “finished the story,” but it was his gnarly beatdown at the hands of Cena and the Rock (and Travis Scott) at the 2025 Elimination Chamber that rewrote the history of his father’s canning by WCW. Blood is an intrinsic part of the pro wrestling experience, if it’s not overdone. Moreover, Dusty was furious at the WCW higher-ups for meddling with his story line. Cody had reclaimed not just the world title but the bloody mantle of old-school wrestling storytelling, and he did it in the face of the meddling attempts of people like the Rock. He had overcome everything his father never could.
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So what do you do after you accomplish everything on your career checklist? What’s next after you finally escape and set fire to your father’s shadow? How about the man who stood in for your father a year ago when you needed those words of advice? How about the icon of the last time Cody was in WWE, when he failed to make it to the main event? Cena is one title win away from passing Ric Flair as the most prolific world champion of all time; it’s inevitable that he will secure the record at some point on his retirement tour. If ever there was a champion without the belt—looking at merch sales, at ticket sales, and at the inevitability of the whole thing—it’s Cena. In the intervening period since Cena’s turn, the new villain has made only three episodes of Raw, while Cody has been a constant fixture on both Raw and SmackDown. Consider it a new challenge from the sage Cena: not to be the champion without the belt, but the champion without an opponent.
If you look at Cody’s last year, the goalposts have been moved; he’s not trying to match his father anymore—he’s on pace to be Hogan or, more pertinently, to be Cena. Losing to Cena at WrestleMania on Sunday may seem to some to be a failure of this mission, but in fact, it might give him a new purpose. It might be the kind of loss that etches someone’s name into the history books. Maybe the most interesting outcome of Sunday’s main event would be if Cody loses, if only so we can see whether he can get comfortable back in his father’s comfort zone: being the fan favorite with the world title withheld from him, always just out of his grasp.
Dusty’s lack of a WWF championship—his inability to win that title and the NWA and WCW titles so much of the time—wasn’t a knock on his ability or worthiness. It was a shtick, a routine, and a very successful (and profitable) one. Cody finished the story, sure, but it’s just as fair to say that he rewrote it or even that he contradicted it. Certainly, being the WWE champion for the past year with only incidental competition is the opposite of everything his father ever did. That’s a compliment in a lot of ways, but it’s also a correction. Cody took Dusty Rhodes’s underdog routine and used it as story line fuel to become Hulk Hogan. Not that the truth matters much; as the man said, when legend becomes fact, print the legend.
