WWE Champion Cody Rhodes discussed his experience with AEW during an interview on the Cheap Heat podcast.
Rhodes helped launch AEW in 2019 and was a key executive with the promotion before leaving for a WWE return in 2022.
“The narrative changed a lot about my contributions to AEW. 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. Me, Matt, and Nick are as close as ever. So glad I had them in my career and my life. If we are being honest, AEW does not happen without me. It doesn’t. With that in mind, I could never root against them. 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 was certainly a wound that is more gaping and painful than people realize because now they look at the situation, ‘oh man, you’re on top of the world, you have everything.’ They don’t understand that I really gave everything I could. I did. I could never see a day where I was rooting against them. From a completely outside-of-me perspective, my relationship to AEW, my friends, the kids I signed, and the people from my school. From outside of that, it’s very important that they hang in there because if that were to go away, I don’t think anybody in the locker room has any clue of the financial repercussions that would have on the wrestling business. The trickle-down effect that would 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 be treated on a level that their global penetration ask for. I would hate to see that bubble burst. That’s a random fear I have when they’re down or if they’re up or whatever it may be. 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. I’ll never root against them, I really won’t.”
H/T to Fightful for the transcription