The Ringer: All Posts by Mike Piellucci2018-09-04T10:57:30-04:00https://www.theringer.com/authors/mike-piellucci/rss2018-09-04T10:57:30-04:002018-09-04T10:57:30-04:00‘All In’ Just Showed Us the Future of Pro Wrestling
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/IMXsxxdkSwwEE5fiGJ1od51DoJ0=/800x0:3200x1800/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/61132805/03__1_.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="https://idrawforfood.co.uk/" target="_blank">Dan Evans</a></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The biggest independent wrestling show of all time took place Saturday. Here’s what it means to the wrestlers who created it, the fans who cheered it on, and the industry it’s disrupting.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="lghm6r">The look on Matt Jackson’s face lasted only for a moment, a raindrop in the ocean to come. It wasn’t meant to be remembered, or perhaps even noticed. I’m not even sure he was aware it was happening as he stood at the top of the Sears Centre Arena’s entrance ramp just after five o’clock CST, live on WGN America. </p>
<p id="W8Mz5R">Before him were more than 10,000 people chanting “All In,” the name of the largest independent professional wrestling show in history, which Jackson founded, promoted, and funded alongside his younger brother Nick and their friend <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2018/3/6/17072332/cody-rhodes-dusty-rhodes-all-in">Cody Rhodes</a>. They stood to his right, beaming and acknowledging the crowd the way exuberant promoters do. But Matt, the charismatic core of the bunch, was frozen with his hands on his head, elbows flared out like he was trying to catch his breath after a long run. </p>
<p id="0eyflN">Seven years earlier, Matt was broke with a baby on the way. He wasn’t sure he could make rent on the apartment he shared with his wife, Dana. He <a href="https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/kbd3wx/party-next-door-how-the-young-bucks-revolutionized-professional-wrestling">had his credit card declined in an airport Popeye’s</a> when he tried to buy a $1.99 biscuit sandwich. He told Nick that he might quit. He loved professional wrestling and the work they did together in the tag team called the Young Bucks, but he couldn’t starve anymore. </p>
<p id="3IuNCN">In the weeks leading up to <em>All In</em>, Rhodes would frequently characterize the show in media events as serendipitous. That there would be no record crowd, or astonishing sellout time, or all-star lineup, or accompanying mega-convention had countless moments not slid precisely into place. One of them—perhaps the most important of all—was Matt Jackson’s decision to ultimately press on in the hope that things would someday get better. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="Ync5SB"><q>Rhodes <a class="ql-link" href="https://twitter.com/codyrhodes/status/864546973461950465?lang=en" target="_blank">fired off the tweet</a> that would set everyone on a course toward history: “I’ll take that bet Dave.”</q></aside></div>
<p id="JLLB7q">Over the next five hours, <em>All In</em> would deliver one of the best wrestling shows in recent memory. Every single type of fan would return home happy. There was a first-time dream match for the purists (Kenny Omega–Pentagon Jr.), a thermonuclear spotfest for lucha libre enthusiasts (the six-man main event, which featured the Young Bucks and Rey Mysterio), nostalgia for the historically inclined (a clutch of wrestling legends plus Jay Lethal reprising his Black Machismo gimmick with the Macho Man’s brother, Lanny Poffo, in his corner), surprises (<a href="https://twitter.com/totaldivaseps/status/1036073285895815169?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1036073285895815169&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fuproxx.com%2Fprowrestling%2Fchris-jericho-all-in-kenny-omega-pentagon-attack-fozzy-show-video%2F">Chris Jericho sighting</a>!), a superbly worked four-way women’s match, outright violence (<a href="https://uproxx.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/adam-page-rite-of-passage-ladder.gif?w=637&zoom=2">can someone check on Joey Janela</a>?), a healthy smattering of laughs, and a powerful testament to the impact of a well-told story (more on that later). </p>
<p id="0KevQ8">But on a night bursting with big moments, one of the smallest resonated most. The look on Matt Jackson’s face was that of a man grasping in real time that he had just made history. It was the look of someone who had shattered every reasonable expectation wrestlers have been told to have. </p>
<p id="xx63EK"><em>All In</em> will change professional wrestling. That much was obvious well before the first bell tolled. It was on the lips of everyone I spoke to in suburban Chicago this week, from promoters to wrestlers to everyone adjacent. It represents the greatest hope <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/money-in-the-bank/">a historically exploited workforce</a> has ever had at leveling the playing field in their favor, for one thing. It’s also the culmination of a two-year crawl toward collaboration among non-WWE promotions, a move at least implicitly rooted in beginning to see wrestlers as partners more than strictly employees. It is a titanic victory for wrestling labor. </p>
<p id="nn4b9b">The questions concern the particulars. How did we get here? What form will that change take and how long will it ultimately last? And, perhaps most importantly, what impact will it have on the futures of the men who spearheaded everything?</p>
<p id="mKmoZE"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="kZFxhd">By now, <em>All In</em>’s origin story is codified into wrestling lore. </p>
<p id="lm7eOp">On May 16, 2017, wrestling journalist <a href="https://twitter.com/davemeltzerWON/status/864544120227848192">Dave Meltzer was asked on Twitter</a> whether he thought Ring of Honor, the company the Young Bucks and Rhodes are contracted to, would ever sell out a 10,000-seat arena. </p>
<p id="ZnSrE1">It was a monumental task. No one outside of World Wrestling Entertainment had drawn a crowd that big in the United States since World Championship Wrestling went under in 2001—a span of 17 years. Ring of Honor was on the upswing but still well short of where WCW was even in its dying breaths, to say nothing of present-day WWE.</p>
<p id="1qjpVJ"> So Meltzer replied with the only thing that seemed reasonable: “Not any time soon.” </p>
<p id="MA9PB7">Eleven minutes later, Rhodes<a href="https://twitter.com/codyrhodes/status/864546973461950465?lang=en"> fired off the tweet</a> that would set everyone on a course toward history: “I’ll take that bet Dave.” </p>
<p id="YD9Taa">In reality, the idea had already germinated for a month and a half, since the Young Bucks main-evented against the Hardy Boyz in a ladder match in front of 3,500 people on April 1. It was the hottest independent tag-team feud of the year and made for an easy sellout. It left Rhodes wondering just how much higher the ceiling could go. </p>
<p id="gen3yf">”His line was, ‘You guys would have put even more people in the building but there weren’t enough seats available,’” Matt Jackson recalled when I spoke to him in February. “‘Why wouldn’t there have been 10,000 people? We can do it.’”</p>
<p id="fgJVfI">Meltzer’s tweet wasn’t the spark so much as lighter fluid atop an already crackling fire. According to Jackson, Cody reached out later that same day, resolute that the show now needed to happen. The brothers agreed. </p>
<p id="BXbohq">“It became an actual thing in that moment,” Jackson said. “That was day one.” </p>
<p id="6obmev">But instead of working alongside ROH, they decided to go it alone. It would mean self-financing the entire show—a fair exchange, they decided, if it meant retaining control of every detail. </p>
<p id="ngE0JY">What those details were, exactly, remained to be seen. All they knew was that each decision needed to be unanimous—a true partnership. Among the first was ratifying the name suggested by Cody’s older sister, Teil: <em>All In</em>, at once a catchall for the level of commitment the trio poured into the show, as well as easy branding when it came time to announce talent. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="OHx6LC"><q>“The power behind that show, if you just look at us and how our careers have grown even in the last few months … it’s up there, if not the biggest thing I’ve ever even done in my wrestling career.” —<em>All In</em> wrestler Scorpio Sky</q></aside></div>
<p id="cLXUET">The decisions flowed from there. They stationed the show in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, a suburb 30 miles northwest of Chicago, where the local Sears Centre Arena boasted a capacity of more than 10,000. They filled out the card with a core of themselves as well as Omega, Hangman Page and “The Villain” Marty Scurll, their close friends and stablemates in the Bullet Club, the faction they all wrestled under in New Japan Pro-Wrestling. Slowly, they rolled out other talent to augment it, from global stars such as Kazuchika Okada to up-and-comers like MJF, taking care never to announce a full match. They secured a deal to broadcast the show via pay-per-view. They kept corporate sponsorships to a minimum.</p>
<p id="mYao7b">Tickets went on sale on May 13, 2018, almost one year to the day after the bet with Meltzer was placed. The Bullet Club crew, sans Omega, convened in downtown Chicago to hold a press conference to help drum up ticket buys. They arrived carrying a trump card in their pocket—the announcement of Mysterio, perhaps the biggest free agent in wrestling. If nothing else, they figured it would juice ticket sales over the ensuing three and a half months. After all, it would be foolish to expect a show this large to sell out in a few hours.</p>
<p id="NQaExk">They were right. It took 29 minutes and 36 seconds. </p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/qDjQ9ymw3ygqsTHZ7Mi_5fritdQ=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/12783735/AP_18244414826232.jpg">
<cite>George Napolitano/MediaPunch/IPx</cite>
<figcaption>The Young Bucks and Cody Rhodes</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="9RUAVf">Immediately, everything had changed. Their personal aspirations had inadvertently tapped into something far more significant. It confirmed something Rhodes had suspected for months: “Wrestling needs this,” he said during a conversation in February. Fans were tired of the WWE and its inevitability. They were wary of seeing names like Roman Reigns and Charlotte Flair anchored to the top of the card, no matter how loudly they shouted for something else. They were fed up with the WWE snapping up more talent than it knows what to do with, leaving some of the best wrestlers in the world to languish like baubles collecting dust on a shelf. They wanted, Jackson said, “a true alternative.” And they believed in <em>All In </em>and the men behind it enough to gobble up every ticket without knowing a single match. </p>
<p id="prFGrd">The show kept ballooning. WGN America offered up an hour of airtime, and a gateway into more than 80 million homes on basic cable. They filled it by booking 20 more wrestlers to compete in the aptly named Over Budget Battle Royal, a match which deep-sixed any dwindling hopes the trio held for fiscal restraint.</p>
<p id="VxbQIJ">A wrestling podcast convention sprouted up at the show’s official hotel in neighboring Schaumburg. They called it Starrcast in honor of Starrcade, the signature wrestling event crafted by <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2018/3/6/17072332/cody-rhodes-dusty-rhodes-all-in">Cody’s deceased father, “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes</a>, and it delivered four days’ worth of shows, appearances and autograph signings. Just like All In, Starrcast blew past even its founder Conrad Thompson’s expectations. </p>
<p id="HJpsys">“Originally we were hoping we could sell 800 tickets,” Thompson said. “[It wound up] over 8,000. … It’s a multiple of everything we ever hoped [for].”</p>
<p id="6WQk93">Two days before the show, the Hyatt Regency Schaumburg had been transformed into an infomercial for <em>All In</em> weekend. Hotel staffers were outfitted in purple Starrcast shirts, while the restaurant and bar menus offered items like the Bullet Club Sandwich and the Villain rum and coke. The hallways were a maze of podcasts recording episodes and wrestlers hawking their wares, navigated by hundreds—if not a couple thousand—of eager fans dressed in a full kaleidoscope of Bullet Club shirts. All it took was a glimpse of someone on the <em>All In</em> card to burst into cheers and chanting, a dress rehearsal for everything to come on Saturday night.</p>
<p id="VWCywp">Multiple wrestlers remarked that the scene was reminiscent of WrestleCon, the annual grassroots convention that pops up each year in the shadow of WWE’s <em>WrestleMania</em> elsewhere in the host city. Which in itself represents a watershed moment: Independent wrestling had replicated the same event without the need for WWE at all, in effect crafting a monoculture out of a subculture. It no longer needed to settle for being a planet orbiting <em>WrestleMania</em>’s star. In Chicago, <em>All In</em> proved that independent wrestling could function as the entire solar system.</p>
<p id="N7LPuR"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="aT7dLy">There’s a strong case to be made that the success of <em>All In</em> isn’t really about wrestling at all. As impressive as the actual matches were, the depth of professional wrestling in 2018 is such that it’s easier than ever to find great work and more difficult to stand out for it. </p>
<p id="UExgqx">“There’s so much good wrestling now,” Scurll said. “And it gets to the point where good wrestling is just not enough.”</p>
<p id="8kC81b">Perhaps the most compelling piece of evidence in support of that idea occurred at 7 p.m. on Thursday night, when Scurll hosted Elite Karaoke in one of the Hyatt’s two largest ballrooms. </p>
<p id="kaYu1q">Scurll, it should be noted, is not a singer. The closest he gets is his rather brutal portrayal of one in a YouTube series, something which under normal circumstances would not inspire dozens of people to pay hard-earned money for the opportunity to perform alongside him as Scurll belted out wobbly renditions of Celine Dion, Backstreet Boys, and Avril Lavigne tunes. </p>
<p id="Sc3mGe">These were not normal circumstances. Elite Karaoke was one of the hits of <em>All In</em> weekend, to the surprise of absolutely no one—except, that is, Scurll himself.</p>
<p id="L7Mslb">“I was like, ‘Damn, this is just shit,’” he said with a laugh. “And everyone was like, ‘Oh, this was amazing, it was so much fun.’ I was like”—he pauses to suck air through his teeth—‘OK, well, if you say so.’”</p>
<p id="ynmpYr">Truth be told, the idea was gold-plated from the very beginning, blessed by the Midas Touch that is <em>Being the Elite</em>, the Young Bucks’ weekly YouTube show whose channel to date boasts almost 240,000 subscribers. Among the innumerable groundbreaking things that happened in Chicago, the most important was the pivotal role that a show featuring maybe 20 seconds of wrestling per week played in creating the most culturally significant wrestling event this decade. </p>
<p id="pVJ6nl">”<em>Being the Elite</em> is the reason why this is happening,” said Scorpio Sky, who wrestled on the <em>All In</em> preshow and is a <em>BTE</em> series regular as part of the stable SoCal Uncensored, or SCU.</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="RbzStW"><q>“It’s all part of this revolution that you don’t need to have a billion-dollar company behind you, if you want to do it. You have to understand what an audience wants. It’s not money. They will support you to the end of the fucking earth if they believe in your message.” —NWA vice president David Lagana</q></aside></div>
<p id="td1jGa"><em>Being the Elite</em> began in May 2016 as a docuseries chronicling the lives of the Jacksons and Kenny Omega, collectively known as The Elite. It was pro-wrestling cinema verite, all shaky camera angles and choppy edits, with shockingly little schtick. Viewers spent long stretches of time in hotel rooms and rental cars, affording them an unvarnished window into lives of Matt and Nick Massie and Tyson Smith during the hours in between playing the Young Bucks and Kenny Omega. It was as honest as professional wrestling content got. It also wasn’t terribly interesting. </p>
<p id="aEj2oy">The show began to take a turn about 30 episodes in. Output became more consistent. Nick Jackson, who edits the series, grew more technically proficient and smoothed out the production’s rougher edges. More characters were added. And, in the tradition of all great reality-television programming, the lines began to blur. The travel sequences remained but now they stood in service to a new, larger conceit—a platform for the Young Bucks and Kenny Omega to develop their characters on their own terms, free from whatever creative shackles a wrestling promoter could place upon them.</p>
<p id="EjJknG">That alchemy was fully realized by the show’s first birthday, just in time for Scurll to join the Bullet Club at a Ring of Honor show by helping the Young Bucks turn on their longtime stablemate Adam Cole. The in-ring story line was straightforward enough to follow without ever watching a BTE episode, but those who kept up with the show were privy to weeks of backstory, the sort of time and attention that promotions simply cannot afford to budget for one angle. The ensuing episode, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1EjA_css0s">The Bullet Club Gets a Villain</a>,” unspooled weeks’ worth of behind-the-scenes subterfuge in a way more reminiscent of a television season finale than a wrestling show. It logged more than 405,000 views—or 100,000 more than the average number who tuned in weekly to watch Impact <a href="https://www.gerweck.net/tv-ratings/2017-tv-ratings/">Wrestling in 2017</a> and <a href="http://www.showbuzzdaily.com/articles/showbuzzdailys-top-150-wednesday-cable-originals-network-finals-6-1-2016.html">dwarfing </a><a href="http://www.showbuzzdaily.com/articles/showbuzzdailys-top-150-wednesday-cable-originals-network-finals-7-6-2016.html">Lucha Underground’s 2016</a><a href="http://www.showbuzzdaily.com/articles/showbuzzdailys-top-150-wednesday-cable-originals-network-finals-7-13-2016.html"> numbers</a> <a href="http://www.showbuzzdaily.com/articles/showbuzzdailys-top-150-wednesday-cable-originals-network-finals-5-25-2016.html">in its well-received </a>second season. </p>
<div id="pMDrem"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.2493%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N1EjA_css0s?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="Fp18Ym">That was 65 episodes ago. Today, the show operates as an even more exaggerated portrayal of its origins, with upwards of a dozen recurring characters and story lines that range from Page murdering series regular Joey Ryan in the world’s deadliest case of penis envy to Scurll getting signed to a record label and temporarily quitting the show in pursuit of a pop career. Within wrestling, it’s evolved into a sort of companion reader, a product so intertwined with Ring of Honor and New Japan story lines that Meltzer’s <em>Wrestling Observer</em> devotes a segment toward breaking it down each week. It’s elevated an undercard talent like Page into an indie mainstay and a solid hand like Scurll into a star. The trickle-down effect spills down to the non–Bullet Club members, too, like Sky and his stablemates, whose every movement at the Hyatt could be tracked by random passersby hooting “SCU!” </p>
<p id="X1Uh12">“The power behind that show, if you just look at us and how our careers have grown even in the last few months … it’s up there, if not the biggest thing I’ve ever even done in my wrestling career,” Sky said. </p>
<p id="Ozy0aa">But all of that runs secondary to a newer, wider audience that transcends wrestling. Suddenly, the <em>BTE</em> crew are YouTube stars. </p>
<p id="zTiUBK">“I’ve had, many times, people [approach me and] say, ‘I’m a big fan of you. I’ve never seen you wrestle before. Just seeing you on this show,’” Scurll said with an incredulous chuckle.</p>
<p id="7vPxbX">It comes with unparalleled trappings. Partly thanks to <em>Being the Elite</em>, Hot Topic began selling Bullet Club shirts last June June, <a href="https://www.cagesideseats.com/indies-independent-wrestling-indy-promotions/2017/11/30/16721904/bullet-club-claim-they-have-sold-over-400000-t-shirts">purportedly moving</a> more than 415,000 units in the first four months they were on shelves. TGI Friday’s called, after the Bucks lovingly referred to it as their favorite Japanese cuisine during a <em>BTE</em> episode in Tokyo. Ditto Cracker Barrel, following a series of posed shots from the <em>BTE</em> crew on the breakfast chain’s famous rocking chairs. On Saturday, they catered the wrestlers’ meal and scattered 500 Biscuit Party hats throughout the arena as an homage to the Bucks’ Superkick Party brand.</p>
<p id="zf060I">That kind of attention places both the <em>BTE</em> crew and the industry as a whole in unchartered waters. There was, at least in the broad strokes, a corollary for everything else that happened this weekend at <em>All In</em>. But there is no precedent whatsoever for independent wrestlers, as individual entities, carrying the type of corporate sponsors that even the WWE would make time for. </p>
<p id="EtR6Gu">”It made all the sense in the world to kind of run your own super show, because you would see these YouTube stars [say] ... ‘Hey, we’re meeting at the mall in an hour,’” said <a href="http://coltcabana.com/">Colt Cabana</a>, a 19-year indie veteran whose podcast and <a href="http://wrestlingroaddiaries.com/">documentary</a> helped birth the indie-wrestling internet movement, and who wrestled the preshow battle royal. “It’s the same idea.”</p>
<p id="LJwQ3D">Pro wrestling is a copycat business, which makes it a safe bet that other wrestlers or companies will try and piggyback off the YouTube model. It’s the best chance talent has to divorce their futures from those of companies they cannot control. </p>
<p id="5Pchno">Not all of them will succeed. The progenitor of wrestling YouTube, WWE’s Zack Ryder, saw his show’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/LongIslandIcedZ">momentum peter out years ago</a>, his career plateauing along with it. </p>
<p id="F95pgx">But some already are. The National Wrestling Alliance, for one, has resuscitated its brand over the last year in large part due to its <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSHCTJS2P4Hvu_reLKtiT6g/videos"><em>Ten Pounds of Gold</em></a><em> </em>docuseries, which constructs stories around the company’s champion in the spirit of an HBO boxing documentary. </p>
<div id="yAZpXg"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.2493%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_ptchVEftT4?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="FpbduL">”It’s all part of this revolution that you don’t need to have a billion-dollar company behind you, if you want to do it,” says NWA vice president David Lagana. “You have to understand what an audience wants. It’s not money. They will support you to the end of the fucking earth if they believe in your message.”</p>
<p id="wIy6MK">And on Saturday night, Lagana proved his point with a match which, after months of buildup, demonstrated that sometimes, good wrestling is still more than enough on its own. </p>
<p id="XAx3Ok"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="ASMxfJ">As a rule, super shows draw more on names and matches than story, and that mostly held true at <em>All In</em>. </p>
<p id="FBSSwv">The narratives that did exist were funneled through<em> Being the Elite </em>and largely rooted in circumstances that were tongue-in-cheek at a minimum, if not outright winking at the show’s smart audience: murder; being framed for murder; one wrestler insinuating that the other should be buried on WWE’s cruiserweight show; a untreatable case of multiple personality disorder; and a seemingly doomed quest to merely get booked on the card at all. </p>
<p id="LY4xA4">Cody Rhodes versus Nick Aldis was the great exception. It was an old-school match nestled in a new-school card, underpinned by the most traditional motivation in combat sports: One man wanted the championship belt that the other had. </p>
<p id="VT0rNt">The belt in question was the NWA world’s championship, the oldest surviving world title in pro wrestling. It has rested on the waist of legends for 70 years, from Ric Flair to Harley Race to Lou Thesz and, most crucially for the story line, Cody’s father, Dusty Rhodes. Now it belonged to Aldis, a former TNA stalwart who was mostly adrift until signing with the NWA shortly after Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan purchased the company’s assets in 2017. His nine months as champion were an elixir for both his career and the company at large. He gave the title credibility and the title gave him purpose. </p>
<p id="5vzsDU">Still, the initial reaction was tepid when the match was announced at the show’s press conference in May. It was hardly the most glamorous booking for one of the show’s driving forces.</p>
<p id="lP3HPa">“A year ago, Cody versus Nick Aldis was not a match anyone wanted to see, knew they wanted to see, nor did they think the NWA would be involved in,” Lagana said. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="p0g6Xe"><q>“This isn’t really competition to anything. It’s its own show. This is a unification of the industry—of many, many pieces of the industry. It’s a great festival. It’s a great celebration. So why not let it happen?” —Ring of Honor general manager Greg Gilleland</q></aside></div>
<p id="d264O8">So all parties involved devoted the next four months toward making people care. They stripped the narrative down to the studs until all that remained was the truth: a champion in search of respect, a challenger <a href="https://youtu.be/3-1NIrp8V_4?t=1162">who can’t distinguish his motivations as a wrestler from those as a son</a>, and a brand thirsting for a relevant moment on the national stage. Then they mashed those ingredients together and promoted it like a boxing match. They gave the match the full <em>Ten Pounds of Gold</em> treatment, and punctuated it with a Friday night weigh-in, skivvies and all. Each man walked to the ring on Saturday with a full entourage in tow. The referee, Earl Hebner, butted in after introductions to issue final instructions over the microphone. </p>
<p id="1gb48B">”[Floyd] Mayweather–[Conor] McGregor showed you that anything is possible and that is the build to this,” Lagana said. Forget the over-the-top story lines and inside-baseball winking. “Call this a fight between two people.”</p>
<p id="klgmPC">The thing about prize fights, though, is that they only really work if the crowd buys in. That also happens to be Cody’s foremost theory of wrestling. Time and again, he has gone on record caping for Hulk Hogan versus the Rock at <em>WrestleMania 18</em> as the greatest match of all time, for the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYmiD4QaBJw">way it whipped nearly 70,000 people</a> into the sort of pandemonium that topples governments. A skeptic would point out that the ring work was lacking. But what is a wrestling ring if not a conduit to make people feel things? </p>
<p id="6e5ZJo">On Saturday night, people felt things. </p>
<p id="76UGyA">They wanted Cody Rhodes to win and they wanted Nick Aldis to lose and they wanted those things with an urgency that felt like it was ripped from an era long passed. It was evident in the volume, but more so their itchy trigger finger, how they erupted at seven separate inflection points during Cody’s ring entrance, from when he first appeared on the Jumbotron through him kissing the center of the ring in longstanding homage to Dusty. And, just in case he didn’t get the message, they unleashed a sonic boom as the match started with its first collar-and-elbow tie-up, a roar that rolled through the building loud enough to make Cody recoil.</p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/UM5j884-ZEtq0iOgNMxrzg-Elcg=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/12783809/AP_18244414827248.jpg">
<cite>George Napolitano/MediaPunch/IPx</cite>
<figcaption>Nick Aldis and Cody Rhodes</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="9CIbqT">The match was witch’s brew of <em>WrestleMania 18</em>, a <em>Rocky</em> film and old southern style wrestling. It was physical more than technical, built on pacing and sustained by rest holds. The high-impact spots—a simple top rope splash, a pile driver, the figure-four leglock—had a distinct ’80s sheen to them. Naturally, someone got busted open.</p>
<p id="a80rgV">It was no one’s idea of a technical masterpiece, not that it mattered. Rhodes’s greatest strength as a performer has always been his emotional intelligence, how he probes his character for exactly the right look or gesture and hammers it home for maximum pathos. In this case, that meant playing off his wife, Brandi, the person whom he says succeeded Dusty as his best friend following his father’s death. </p>
<p id="0E2kaW">She carried the biggest moment of the match, draping herself over him to take the brunt of an Aldis flying elbow drop. But she aced the small gestures, too, like the way she clutched her husband’s wrists midway through the match as he lay face down in the ring, beaten half to death. Or, when Cody gutted out a roll-up victory to win the title, how she cupped her hands over her mouth as he pressed his forehead against the belt’s center plate and fell to the mat, shoulders heaving. </p>
<p id="67rI9N">The last one—the final moment of validation—felt like more than simple theater. It probably was. Even the best-scripted medium can’t force authenticity, and watching Rhodes, with blood streaked through his blond hair, raise the same title belt that he saw on his father’s desk as a child, was nothing short of magnetizing. </p>
<p id="lNDXhI">The crowd exploded, of course; how couldn’t they? It had gotten exactly what it wanted only a few months removed from not knowing they wanted it at all, which is about as perfect as professional wrestling gets. It was the culmination of a wrestling story as old as time, the good guy defeating the bad guy to win the title. That’s what made it timeless. </p>
<p id="N9agml"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="fk4pZi">There was, though, one unavoidably new-age wrinkle in that throwback match—the fact that it was even taking place at all. </p>
<p id="mFu6Lz">On one side, Rhodes is a contracted Ring of Honor talent. Aldis, meanwhile, is a contracted NWA talent. Every in-person interaction ahead of the match—including a previous title defense by Aldis two months ago against ROH star Flip Gordon—took place at ROH events. And the whole feud came to a head on a third-party show. </p>
<p id="inqFwh">As recently as two years ago, it would have been deeply unlikely to see any of this happen. Two years before that, it would have been unfathomable. Yet in 2018, cooperation between federations outside the WWE has become fashionable, just in time for <em>All In</em> to cull its dream lineup from whatever non-WWE corner of the wrestling world it chose. Every major American promotion was represented on the card, from ROH to Impact to Evolve to Lucha Underground. So was top talent from Japan, Mexico, Canada, and the United Kingdom. </p>
<p id="j9ngxY">This could have involved far more red tape than it did. Cody and the Young Bucks, for instance, are on deals that make them exclusive to ROH in the United States and required permission from company brass to pursue the show. A simple no and <em>All In </em>weekend never happens. </p>
<p id="rgS3og">Instead, everyone not only played nice, but went out of their way to usher the process along. Ring of Honor assisted in <em>All In</em>’s production, while New Japan will provide on-demand replay of the show via its online streaming network. Other companies like Impact and Evolve openly applauded—and in Impact’s case, <a href="https://twitter.com/IMPACTWRESTLING/status/1035890025043451904">borderline promoted</a>—the show on social media. </p>
<p id="Fz3iOU">“This isn’t really competition to anything,” said Ring of Honor general manager Greg Gilleland. “It’s its own show. This is a unification of the industry—of many, many pieces of the industry. It’s a great festival. It’s a great celebration. So why not let it happen?”</p>
<p id="NLKxba">Well, the entire history of the professional wrestling, for starters. One of the bedrocks of the industry since its inception was promoters cultivating talent and exclusively showcasing it on their terms for however long a wrestler remained under contract. Talent has always been the draw but the promoters have traditionally held the leverage, and so things went for the better part of 100 years. The house always won. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="hEtybF"><q>“People can see other wrestling besides WWE now. They can see everything—meaning, the best in the world isn’t defined by the company. It’s defined by the talent.” —<em>All In</em> cofounder Cody Rhodes</q></aside></div>
<p id="FL2REn">The first seeds of change were sewn in 2016, if for no other reason than the right confluence of circumstances had never existed until then. The indie scene was healthy enough to support a cluster of companies that offered a national platform and reasonable pay, and the internet had made them all accessible to anyone with broadband. Meanwhile, a new generation of performers had emerged, ones savvy enough to diversify their revenue streams and cultivate audiences loyal to them, not the places they worked. The consumer had choice and the wrestlers had options. </p>
<p id="a5W287">“The world keeps getting smaller and smaller,” Rhodes said in February. “All the bubbles are burst. People can see other wrestling besides WWE now. They can see everything—meaning, the best in the world isn’t defined by the company. It’s defined by the talent.”</p>
<p id="pliYct">That year, names like Johnny Gargano and Tommaso Ciampa freelanced for WWE’s NXT brand while still taking indie bookings. Impact (then still known as TNA) and Evolve wrestlers ran an unofficial invasion angle centered on EC3, arguably TNA’s biggest star, aiding Drew Galloway, who regularly worked for both. All four are now fully contracted to WWE, along with numerous other indie stalwarts from the same period. The marketplace for established independent talent shrunk in a matter of months, but instead of seeing the indie territories dry up, it gifted even more leverage to the draws who stuck around. There were now more places to work than there were big names to see.</p>
<p id="0KqoXg">Gradually, the promotions began to play ball. If 2016 was marked by the talent showing up in unexpected places, then the story of 2018 is their respective promotions’ eagerness to expedite sending them there. Impact and Lucha Underground have authored a widespread talent share agreement, while Ring of Honor continued to broaden longstanding ties with New Japan and Mexico’s CMLL—to say nothing of its burgeoning relationship with NWA, which Gilleland believes has “so much potential to grow it into something else.” Lagana, meanwhile, describes his own company as entirely “agnostic” about whom it does business with. </p>
<p id="9bzsEx">“We’ll work with literally anyone,” Lagana said. “If Triple H called tomorrow and wanted to book Triple H versus Nick Aldis for the NWA title, OK. ... We’re open to doing anything as long as we can have creative input and freedom in what we’re doing.”</p>
<p id="Vv5sSj">The endgame is relative. Neither <em>All In</em> nor the wider spirit it’s constructed upon is anywhere close to challenging the WWE’s hegemony over the wrestling business at large. “None of this is dinging them one bit,” Gilleland confirmed. “They’re going to take whatever talent that they want, whenever they want, because they can make millions of dollars.” But it’s made the rest of the world a more exciting, more profitable place. Saturday was simply the most obvious flashpoint, and a roadmap for where it can all lead. </p>
<p id="YMOLku">“It’s this amazing ballgame where we’re all playing,” said Chelsea Green, who wrestled in the women’s four-way match. “We can’t beat WWE, so why not all of us try as hard as we can to come together and do whatever we can to elevate each other and get at as high as we possibly can, get the most viewers that we possibly can together? Why are we separating each other, and we’re putting a little bit of the best talent here and a little bit of the best talent there, when we can have a show like this? </p>
<p id="W4FfxC">“This is the show that proves it: Collaboration is the future.”</p>
<p id="tAmtC6"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="AFNOsE">Something else is on the horizon, too. </p>
<p id="NMSk0f">At the end of this calendar year, the Young Bucks’ and Cody Rhodes’s contracts will expire with Ring of Honor, while Kenny Omega’s New Japan deal expires in January 2019. Rhodes <a href="https://www.sescoops.com/cody-kenny-omega-young-bucks-adam-page-pledged-to-stay-together-next-year/">is already on record as saying the group will stick together</a> wherever they wind up next. The WWE is expected to make an aggressive push, while Gilleland confirmed that ROH will “make every effort to retain them.” </p>
<p id="XGvBaN">Beyond that, the possibilities are seemingly endless now that they’re able to draft off <em>All In</em>’s success on top of <em>Being the Elite</em>. Lagana wonders whether <em>All In</em> could revolutionize the independents by allowing the <em>BTE</em> crew to branch off as full-time soldiers of fortune, ones who can promote their own shows and wrestle elsewhere only when they want to. </p>
<p id="SHnH5R">“These guys have leverage to create for themselves,” he said. “They [could] go, ‘Hm, I could make this much doing autographs. We do six shows a year and we put it on our YouTube channel and charge for it as pay-per-view [and] I don’t have to give anybody a cut.’”</p>
<p id="u9WKZ2">Even in the absence of a company, there is still a brand. In some sense,<em> Being the Elite</em> and <em>All In</em> have become a new promotion unto themselves, one that does business with larger companies instead of merely working for them. It’s a beacon for anyone seeking to carve out a career on the indies instead of flee to the WWE. It may even coax a few names to go the other direction and emulate Rhodes, who requested his release in 2016 after a 10-year career in WWE.</p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/sb7rUugcYcBLkD0X-3pBL6IDgDE=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/12783797/AP_18244415121761.jpg">
<cite>George Napolitano/MediaPunch/IPx</cite>
<figcaption>The Young Bucks and Cody Rhodes</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="dn5s81">”The biggest impact of all these guys has been actually on all the talent that is not on the show,” said Chris Harrington, cohost of the podcast <em>Wrestlenomics</em>, which analyzes the business of pro wrestling. “There are guys in WWE who are thinking, ‘Maybe I should walk away from this and go on the indies, because I’m that level of a marketer and a talent.’”</p>
<p id="hMBdEG">Or perhaps the inverse happens, creating an unprecedented vacuum. The mantra of indie wrestling is there’s always someone to take up the mantle whenever a main eventer signs with the WWE, but no one’s ever had to replace YouTube stars before. No one else is presently equipped to do it, either. </p>
<p id="ugUZUg">”If a handful or most of these guys decide to leave our world, if you will, it would obviously put a dent in it,” Cabana said. “Someone will take that spot, but it won’t happen within 30 days. It might be a year, it might be two years, it might be five years, it might be 10 years. Just like, first [Hulk] Hogan, then [much later, Stone Cold Steve] Austin.”</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="35IUGY"><q>“This is the show that proves it: Collaboration is the future.” —<em>All In</em> wrestler Chelsea Green</q></aside></div>
<p id="xfSiPd">Regardless of what they decide to do, the genie is out of the bottle. Already, independent wrestling is thinking bigger than it ever has. Ring of Honor and New Japan have <a href="https://www.rohwrestling.com/news/rohnjpw-present-g1-supercard-live-madison-square-garden">sold out Madison Square Garden</a> for a show during <em>WrestleMania</em> weekend 2019, a move that several wrestlers believe was a direct byproduct of <em>All In</em>’s success. It’s a popular refrain that may not be grounded in reality—Gilleland says the idea to go for Madison Square Garden was actually hatched after the promotion packed in 6,100 fans at New Orleans’s UNO Lakefront Arena at this year’s <em>WrestleMania</em> weekend—but, as is often the case in wrestling, the idea matters far more than the actual truth: On Friday night, Joey Janela sauntered into the <em>All In</em> prematch press conference to proclaim that his <a href="https://deadspin.com/how-joey-janelas-spring-break-became-pro-wrestlings-big-1825340372">critically acclaimed Spring Break shows</a> “will be the next motherfuckers to draw 10,000 people.”</p>
<p id="Ll5psv">SCU’s Christopher Daniels, meanwhile, expects a new wave of outside investors to roll in after <em>All In</em> achieved so much with so little. </p>
<p id="VdwKw9">”The iron is hot and so they’ll think, ‘This is the time to strike,’” he says. “You’re going to see people taking a chance on independent professional wrestling because they see now ‘Oh, there’s an interest, there’s a fan base and we can capitalize on that.’</p>
<p id="PoUV8A">This is the wrestling business, though, which means that a catastrophe is always looming. It’s not hard to envision a reckless promoter overleveraging and sinking his company in an arena-show arms race. It’s even easier to imagine someone disrupting the fragile peace the larger indies are brokering, the way the uneasy alliance between the AWA, WCCW, and CWA at Superclash III dissolved after they banded together to take on Vince McMahon’s WWF.</p>
<p id="yYrZoC">”Eventually somebody’s going to come along and ruin a good thing,” Thompson said. “It does feel like there are different eras in everything, and peaks and valleys. And I do expect at some point for somebody to draw a line in the sand and say, ‘We’re not doing that anymore and here’s why.’</p>
<p id="J3BUuT">But for now, there’s hope, the sort that Matt Jackson could never dream of all those years ago. His night ended in the main event, when he scored the final pin of the show and helped take <em>All In</em> off pay-per-view with just three seconds to spare. Now he stood as it swelled with family and friends. This time, he was ready to entertain. </p>
<p id="oqL25c">He snatched the microphone from his brother and regaled the crowd with the story Cody approaching Matt and Nick with the idea for <em>All In</em>. Then he passed out plaudits—to everyone in the ring, those in the back and, finally, to the 10,000-plus people who believed. </p>
<p id="WLTWBV">He knows what the crowd wants, he assured them. They want good pro wrestling. They want good entertainment. And for the better part of five hours, the crowd experienced three men’s vision for what professional wrestling could be. </p>
<p id="2FBhHX">Then he stopped telling and started asking the one question on everyone’s mind. </p>
<p id="IOWnVp">“Do you want more of this?” he bellowed, jabbing his pointer finger with each word. </p>
<p id="aQ3Vjo">“YES!”</p>
<p id="lkiHVN">He pulled the microphone down and began to pace. And then, he heard more than 10,000 strong chanting once again:</p>
<p id="arnNpF">“ALL IN 2!” </p>
<p id="wPDg8M">“ALL IN 2!”</p>
<p id="z8q0BE">“ALL IN 2!”</p>
<p id="pgFl68">You could call it a moment. This time, it wasn’t a small one.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="3Hb2k0"><em>An earlier version of this story misstated Colt Cabana’s years in the industry. He has 19 years of experience, not 16.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/2018/9/4/17816326/all-in-cody-rhodes-young-bucks-nwa-wrestlingMike Piellucci2018-08-17T06:20:01-04:002018-08-17T06:20:01-04:00The Next Great USC QB Shouldn’t Even Be in College
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/yat2oTxS9Y8HpHZptxUKuVQkGJE=/400x0:2800x1800/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/60881599/JT_Daniels_gewtty_ringer_2.0.jpg" />
</figure>
<p>JT Daniels is currently battling to replace Sam Darnold as the Trojans’ starter. He should still be in high school math class. After reclassifying to begin his college career a year early, though, the five-star prodigy is attempting not only to replace a legend, but to fend off failure so that he can become one himself. </p> <p id="f9dXB6"><em>Is Sam Darnold going to save the Jets? Who knows? Will he save … the world? It’s still too early to tell. But to all of the Jets fans out there who hope to protect themselves from the continued emotional horror that is rooting for whichever unfortunate individual has been shackled with the burden of quarterbacking this godforsaken franchise, we say: Life is too short. Darnold is audibling at practice! He’s throwing three touchdowns on a single preseason drive! His jawline could clog the Hudson River! So, rather than tempering the hysteria emanating from the Garden State, we’re diving right in. Welcome to Darnold Day! </em></p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="YlC7uX">
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="6HRPt0">If, someday, JT Daniels cements himself in USC Trojans lore, the story of how he became the school’s latest quarterback triumph will begin with him observing spring practice on a sun-dappled field this March, three months before he enrolled at the university and nearly six months before his first college football season. </p>
<p id="o9Ofew">He watched as an anxious offseason in Troy unfolded after Sam Darnold’s departure for the NFL. Darnold had been a rejuvenator, a player who had done more in two years to elevate the Trojans back to their pre-sanctions peak than anyone else had done in the previous five seasons. Replacing a quarterback of Darnold’s ilk is the most daunting on-field task a college football team can face, yet it’s also one that USC has somehow made routine. Since 2000, every quarterback who started a majority of the team’s games in a given season wound up getting drafted at the end of his Trojans career. All but one went on to start an NFL game. The chain is unbroken and quite possibly unprecedented, and the last two decades have made it appear as though it could be unending. There always seems to be another guy at USC.</p>
<p id="4YxFJc">For the first time in years, though, spring practice raised the concern that maybe that chain would finally break. For a month and a half, onlookers winced as redshirt sophomore Matt Fink and redshirt freshman Jack Sears wilted at the controls of the Trojans offense. Both quarterbacks were highly touted recruits; neither could dependably move the ball, and nearly every session featured a few too many passes sailing above an intended receiver’s head or into the arms of eager defenders.</p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="8DwoO7"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"My Large-Headed Adult Son: Sam Darnold and the Quest for One Great Athlete in This Miserable Life","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2018/8/17/17715104/sam-darnold-new-york-jets-quarterback-career"},{"title":"An Oral History of That Time Sam Darnold Called an Audible at Practice ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2018/8/17/17706298/sam-darnold-day-audible-training-camp-practice-new-york-jets"},{"title":"The Sam Darnold Dichotomy","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2018/8/17/17720040/sam-darnold-boring-quarterback-bright-lights"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="EFd54k">It wasn’t long before the bulk of fans and media shifted their focus from the quarterbacks out on the field to the one who wasn’t. Twice a week, Daniels, the premier high school quarterback west of the Mississippi and the reigning Gatorade National Player of the Year in football, made the trip from Santa Ana’s Mater Dei High School to USC’s campus to observe practice. He tried his best to remain unassuming, usually peering over coaches a few yards behind the action in either a black USC hoodie, black USC cap, or both. But the more Fink and Sears struggled, the more Daniels loomed over the proceedings. Fans applauded one Saturday when he arrived to watch a scrimmage. Media members regularly worked his name into press scrums. Some Trojans players even sought scouting reports from Daniels’s former high school teammates currently on USC’s roster.</p>
<p id="YG44fm">It was an overwhelming amount of attention paid to an unenrolled recruit, and it had to do with more than his consensus five-star ranking. After originally committing to USC in July 2017 as part of its 2019 recruiting class, Daniels announced in December his intention to skip his senior year of high school and enroll at USC in June 2018. This happened about two weeks before Darnold declared for the NFL draft, something Daniels insists he didn’t know was coming and didn’t influence his decision. “I had to go under the assumption that [Darnold] was staying or that I wasn’t going to play at all,” Daniels says. “It’s still worth it. I’d definitely get better as a player.”</p>
<p id="Rn9UL2">Reclassifying required Daniels to pass 10 classes—chemistry, history, government, economics, algebra 2/trigonometry, two English classes, and three religion courses—in the back half of his junior year, in addition to fulfilling the school’s mandatory community service hour requirement for all students. “A senior year in a semester,” as his father, Steve, puts it. </p>
<p id="pOz6NQ">It also <a href="http://www.espn.com/college-sports/recruiting/football/story/_/id/21849491/jt-daniels-usc-recruit-reclassify-class-2018">generated national headlines</a>, which hardly surprised Daniels. “When Marvin Bagley did it, it was fucking huge,” he says, referencing the one-and-done Duke basketball star who went through the same reclassification process last year. Still, he’s grown weary of fielding questions about something he views as relatively inconsequential.</p>
<p id="j5LFKv">“It’s not that big a deal,” Daniels says. “I’m old enough, I’m definitely good enough, I’m ready to play college football. It’s that simple.” What happens next won’t be. Only two college football players, former USC quarterback John David Booty and current South Carolina quarterback Jake Bentley, are believed to have attempted what Daniels is now trying to do: go directly from playing as a high school junior to starting as a college freshman. Neither Booty nor Bentley managed that. </p>
<p id="jURcSa">Yet, increasingly, the masses seem to take it as fait accompli that Daniels will be the Trojans’ starting quarterback this fall. Some of that stems from his unblemished potential; he hasn’t yet disappointed anyone around USC, which of course makes it easier to imagine that he won’t.</p>
<p id="mATRKG">He hasn’t disappointed much elsewhere, either. He’s been precocious from the very beginning, a prodigy with a seemingly paranormal understanding of how the game is played. Something will give this month: USC’s hopes of making a third consecutive New Year’s Six bowl game may hinge on an 18-year-old QB who’s never before failed in a meaningful way—and who’s now trying to achieve the unprecedented.</p>
<p id="6aMr70"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="VEXims">At first blush, Daniels is an unlikely protagonist—barely north of 6 feet, with no eye-popping tools. His most notable physical trait is his legs, which are contoured like a running back’s and tailor-made for the high gym shorts he loves to wear during workouts, mostly to incite ribbing from his buddies. There is nothing obvious about him, which only enhances the idea of him—he is a teenager who borders on a tall tale. Every five-star prospect has a distinguished résumé; Daniels practically has a mythology.</p>
<p id="bCtzFE">One of the earliest entries in that canon came when Daniels was just 6 years old. His father, Steve, loved playing <em>Madden </em>on the family’s Xbox, and JT wanted to be his coach. So father would fire up the console and son would put on a headset to coordinate the offense, refusing to start the game until he looked the part. Steve remembers it all as child’s play, at least until the day when JT abruptly barked at him to put the receivers in motion pre-snap so JT could ascertain whether the defense was sitting in man coverage.</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="3kIEtX"><q>“I just love getting better each and every day. If that’s my goal, how can I fall off?” —JT Daniels</q></aside></div>
<p id="1ErKp8">By eighth grade, Daniels had already carved out a reputation as a star quarterback on the Pop Warner circuit, one gifted enough to work with not one but two private coaches who trained NFL players. The summer after Daniels graduated middle school, one of those coaches, Scot Prohaska, brought Daniels with him one morning when his professional skill-position clients needed an extra arm to throw passes. A multiyear NFL starting quarterback was throwing that day, too. When the session was over, Prohaska surveyed the receivers to see how Daniels had comported himself. “Every guy to a T said, ‘Hey, bring that kid back, we like his ball better,’” Prohaska recalls. </p>
<p id="SVyV00">Daniels had dreamed of quarterbacking Mater Dei since the fifth grade, and had been on campus so often ingesting schematic kernels that his middle school years played like a dress rehearsal for this offseason. Despite routinely popping up at Monarchs practice before his tenure began, he broke camp in his first season as the varsity team’s second-string quarterback, albeit the only freshman on its roster. Then, early in the second game, the starter broke his wrist. Daniels came off the bench cold. His second pass was intercepted.</p>
<p id="431n0J">Prohaska, who also works as Mater Dei’s director of sports performance, winced on the sideline. He caught his protégé’s eye as Daniels made his way back to the bench, bracing himself to see frustration or anger or dejection. What he got was a wink and a smile.</p>
<p id="NoaV6A">“Got that out of the way,” Prohaska recalls the then-15-year-old cracking. “That won’t happen again.” It would be six weeks before Daniels threw another pick.</p>
<p id="ioH56S">He never surrendered the job back to the incumbent, and one year later, his football acumen was sharp enough that Mater Dei’s coaches handed the sophomore full control over the offensive play-calling. It took Matt Barkley, another decorated Mater Dei and USC product, until his senior year with the Monarchs to earn the same privilege. Daniels responded by throwing 67 touchdowns against six interceptions in arguably the most talent-saturated conference in the country. Scholarship offers rained down, but he was unfazed. Instead of celebrating the offers, he stewed over his mobility, the one blemish in his game. “You’re just slow as shit,” he scolded himself, and so he and Prohaska spent the offseason figuring out how to speed him up. They worked on making Daniels’s frame leaner and reengineering his stride, first elongating it and then committing the new steps to muscle memory by having Daniels run routes. He emerged fast enough to rip off <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUHhubl7JcA">50-yard scrambles</a> and bouncy enough <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZbhptqqIAs">to hurdle defenders in full stride</a>.</p>
<p id="FARXp3">“He went from like a C-minus to an A,” Greg Biggins, a national recruiting analyst for 247Sports who has covered West Coast recruits for more than two decades, says of Daniels’s mobility. “I haven’t seen anything like it.” Daniels’s newfound ability as a runner sparked a season even better than his last, culminating in Daniels becoming the first junior to win the Gatorade award—the high school Heisman—in a decade.</p>
<p id="mfb4Td">Daniels had randomly selected jersey no. 18 at the start of his Mater Dei career, but the figure gradually began to seem prophetic. His Pop Warner team, the Irvine Chargers, hadn’t won a championship in 18 years until Daniels ended that drought in seventh grade. His junior season marked the 18th year since Mater Dei had won a sectional championship, but Daniels saw to that, too, leading the Monarchs to a state title and a national championship for good measure. Before that playoff run began, Daniels’s future teammate at USC, center Justin Dedich, chatted up friends at Vista Murrieta, Mater Dei’s first-round opponent. Dedich recalls them speaking about playing against Daniels like someone had asked them to slay a dragon. “They were so scared,” Dedich chuckles.</p>
<p id="VQgfrP">Daniels finds most of the narrative about his prowess to be absurd. He’s aware of the way people lionize his accomplishments, calling it “a hype train,” and refuses to lend credence to any sort of mystical explanation. He got faster because he ran more. He took 10 classes because he manages his time well. His vaunted game sense is drilled in, not innate. “I’m no genius,” he says, flatly. “I don’t ponder this shit just all the time in my free time and come up with profound discoveries. I learn from everybody else around me. ... If you understand [something] and learn it and practice it enough, there should be no problem doing that in a game for anybody.”</p>
<p id="EeQVVG">Those who know him best, then, have a second set of Daniels stories, ones about a boy with an almost fanatical desire to better himself. Steve Daniels remembers the time when a family friend came to visit and stopped by JT’s room to say hello. He opened the door to find a 5-year-old JT midway through a set of push-ups. </p>
<p id="LiZAjI">“Can’t talk, Jeff,” Steve recalls JT telling the man. “I’m doing my workout.” </p>
<p id="KaoPoZ">Teammates at Mater Dei marveled at the exhausting amount of hours he spent in film study, cycling through old game tapes so often that he could reconstruct entire sequences on command like a football party trick, down to an eerie amount of detail.</p>
<p id="Ku64Wf">“You could ask him, out of nowhere, ‘Hey, what’s this play?’ from a game prior … and he would go down the board of everybody’s responsibility,” says Bru McCoy, a five-star athlete in the class of 2019 and Daniels’s best friend since seventh grade. “He watched so much film that he knew the plays by heart in order, by number, just literally from going through constantly, clicking it through and playing it over and over.”</p>
<p id="JYPVQy">His official visit to USC came in early January, nearly six months after he’d committed and one month since he’d decided to reclassify. He was part of an elite group of recruits on campus that weekend, and the Trojans coaching staff compiled a full itinerary to impress them. Daniels was on a different schedule. As the rest of the prospects took in the sights, he camped out in the film room with the coaches all afternoon. When he got hungry, he walked to snag takeout from Wahlburgers so he could spend his meal time cramming in even more plays ahead of his early enrollment. “Just football the whole time,” says USC offensive coordinator Tee Martin. “I’ve never seen that before.”</p>
<p id="CwL9hE">Moments like that are why it’s so tempting to presume that Daniels will transcend the boundaries of history and inexperience to start this fall. His career to date is a monument to conviction. </p>
<p id="LTgdhP">“I don’t think he’s no. 1 in any physical category that I’ve seen,” says Jordan Palmer, the quarterback guru who trains Daniels and counts Darnold, Deshaun Watson, Blake Bortles, and Josh Allen among his other clients. “He certainly doesn’t have the best arm I’ve ever seen. … What he has is the most relentless pursuit of perfection of anybody I’ve seen at this young age. And he’s physically talented enough to max that to have it be probably the highest ceiling I’ve ever seen.”</p>
<p id="j7bT6d"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="KA8c5I">The concept of reclassification began as a joke, after Mater Dei defeated Las Vegas’s Bishop Gorman High School in early September 2017 in a battle of the nation’s two top-ranked high school teams. Despite missing his best receiver, fellow future USC signee Amon-Ra St. Brown, Daniels threw for 313 yards and a pair of touchdowns. It was Gorman’s first loss in nearly four years.</p>
<p id="I01coe">After the game, Biggins, who has known Daniels since the QB was in the eighth grade, approached him with an icebreaker. “I said, ‘Dude, JT, you should skip your senior year and go to USC right now. You could start for them next year,’” Biggins recalls, making sure the quarterback could hear the humor in his tone. “We were talking and he kind of laughed it off. And [then] he asked, ‘Can you even do that?’”</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="ExPMRH"><q>“I tell him sometimes to be more of a kid. Go enjoy life.” —Bryan Ellis, USC quarterback coach</q></aside></div>
<p id="HSvzxH">After conferring with academic personnel at both Mater Dei and USC, as well USC’s compliance staff, Daniels realized he could. After discussing the issue with his parents, he began to think he should. He was outgrowing his surroundings a bit more each game and he could feel stagnation approaching on the field. Many of his close friends were a year ahead of him academically, too, a byproduct of Daniels’s family having him repeat eighth grade largely to help him gain weight before playing high school football. Reclassifying would allow him to graduate with them. </p>
<p id="Dk3RXD">He’d mostly made up his mind when he dialed Prohaska’s number. After four years of working together, their relationship transcends trainer and client. These days, Prohaska trains Daniels’s mind as much as his body. He’s assigned Daniels reading for years, beginning with Jeffrey Marx’s <em>Season of Life</em>, a book about reinterpreting masculinity. Now, Daniels is just as apt to provide recommendations in return. About once a week, they’ll hop on the phone for as long as 90 minutes at a time to discuss Daniels’s evolving views on anything from neuroscience to philosophy to religion.</p>
<p id="o7mD7z">Before Daniels could make his case for the early jump, Prohaska preempted him.</p>
<p id="htvhzO">“Before we talk about what decision you’re going to make and calculate all the good and bad of each option, I want you to admit something to yourself,” Prohaska says he told Daniels. “You’re a very smart kid and you’ve been around smart people … but you have no wisdom yet. You are not old enough and have not lived enough to have wisdom.”</p>
<p id="SPmnOv">Make no mistake: The adults in Daniels’s life are thrilled with the person he’s becoming. Behind the bluntness, bravado, and considerable blue streak is an empathy that belies Daniels’s age. “My focus was more on ‘How do I cultivate good relationships and really be there for other people and care about other people more than I care about how successful I’m going to be,’” Daniels says. His greatest point of pride from last offseason wasn’t the ticks he shaved off his 40 time, but the curriculum he developed to tutor the team’s younger quarterbacks. He scheduled his own film sessions and held private seminars, eventually getting so immersed in the whole endeavor that, according to Prohaska, Mater Dei’s head coach, Bruce Rollinson, had to lecture him about being more selfish.</p>
<p id="gz0NIz">Daniels can’t help himself. He’s enamored of human potential, and a considerable chunk of his free time is spent devouring content about how to maximize it. His favorite product is a YouTube series called <em>Impact Theory</em>, in which host Tom Bilyeu mines the life experiences of successful guests for teachable moments. Daniels could envision himself doing something similar one day. “My real purpose on this planet is not just to play football,” he says. “I want to inspire people to find happiness in themselves and find a purpose in themselves, because that’s just not something we do enough as human beings.”</p>
<p id="VT9BlK">He’s still calibrating his message, but promises that once it’s fine-tuned, he won’t be shy about speaking his mind—about anything. “I don’t care if people take what I say badly,” he says. “I just like to bring thought-provoking things to attention. … If you’re not attacking anyone else’s beliefs or bringing them down, what’s the issue with being outspoken?”</p>
<p id="IstA83">Plenty, as far as the NFL is concerned. Only a few months ago, Daniels watched UCLA’s Josh Rosen, another blunt quarterback from Southern California, slip to 10th in the draft in part due to the way some in the league parsed his candor. Daniels believes a similar fate would be a worthy trade-off if he’s staying true to himself. “The thought of losing out on money doesn’t concern me in the slightest,” he says. “I don’t need a fucking mansion and a Bentley.”</p>
<p id="0r343C">That’s the kind of declaration that straddles the line between authentic to the man Daniels is becoming and something a boy says when he’s 18 and believes himself invincible. It’s also the sort of bluntness that could get him into trouble if it were channeled at the wrong time, in the wrong room, on the wrong subject.</p>
<p id="Bj8qUR">Prohaska doesn’t want Daniels to face a storm, but does wonder whether his pupil would benefit from failing in some tangible way and learning before the stakes become too high to recover from a misstep. It’s a frequent subject of their more recent conversations, and perhaps the toughest. Daniels perceives failure the way an average person would assess winning the lottery: He understands it in the abstract, but can’t truly grasp the implications. “Logically, I can see that of course it’s going to happen, but I don’t think it will affect me, Scot,” JT told him recently.</p>
<p id="uMF4Az">“That’s the wisdom part I talk about, right?” Prohaska says now. He often wonders what might happen if Daniels does, in fact, continue to defy all reasonable expectations and postpone failure indefinitely. What if it finally arrives in the NFL, when there’s nowhere to hide from the panoptic scrutiny that comes with being a professional athlete? What if it isn’t until after that, in his post-football life? Will his well-considered beliefs endure?</p>
<p id="63ETC0">Prohaska, like so many others, doesn’t anticipate the first big setback coming on the field at USC. But if it does, he says, “My question is, ‘Let’s see how he handles that.’ Where my next [challenge] is going to be with him is mentally, emotionally, if that failure lasts a little bit longer than expected, if it’s a little bigger than he expected. What’s going to happen, is my big question. What are we going to be dealing with then? I don’t know. I’ve never had to deal with it [with him].”</p>
<p id="GKWwFz"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="MAWTns">Fifteen years ago, John David Booty was JT Daniels.</p>
<p id="gh9hEG">It was 2003, and Pete Carroll’s team was in transition. Carson Palmer, the school’s first Heisman-winning quarterback, was about to be selected first overall by the Bengals in that year’s NFL draft, and Carroll needed to suss out a replacement. There were two highly touted arms already on campus, but his most alluring option was Booty, a small-school quarterback from Shreveport, Louisiana, <a href="https://247sports.com/college/football/recruiting/Article/John-David-Booty-Talks-About-Skipping-Senior-Year-104049966/">whom Biggins at the time regarded</a> as the best high school quarterback he’d ever seen. </p>
<p id="LeGBZZ">No high school quarterback had ever skipped his senior year to jump right to college ball, but every now and again, John David and his father, Johnny, would bandy about the notion. John David’s high school, Evangel Christian, ran K through 12, and Booty had racked up enough extra credits over the years to try to graduate early, if he so chose.<em> </em>Still, John David says it never would have happened had Johnny, who was head of school and quarterback coach at the school, not lost his job in the spring of John David’s junior year. Once he did, John David had little incentive to stick around. He was already committed to USC, with the intent of enrolling a semester early. After some digging, he realized he only needed to tack on one summer class to skip the full year.</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="NS89Sl"><q>“If that failure lasts a little bit longer than expected, if it’s a little bigger than he expected. What’s going to happen, is my big question. What are we going to be dealing with then? I don’t know. I’ve never had to deal with it [with him].” —Scot Prohaska, Daniels’s former coach</q></aside></div>
<p id="EkbuQz">That spring, he hopped on a plane to Los Angeles to catch a glimpse of practice, where he watched the two incumbents, Matt Leinart and Matt Cassel, duke it out to mostly uninspiring results. He returned to Louisiana with one thought in his mind.</p>
<p id="VMsvgr">“I was like, ‘Man, I can go in and start,’” Booty says.</p>
<p id="LL0WJc">He was wrong. Booty came out firing in fall camp but tweaked his back midway through. He watched as Leinart won the job and etched his name in college football history, piloting the Trojans to two national championships (one since vacated by the NCAA) and winning a Heisman. Booty would wait three years for his chance to start. By any measure, he enjoyed a fine career: two Rose Bowl wins, an all-conference nod, and a fifth-round NFL draft selection by the Vikings. But it never matched the world’s expectations, nor his own. Leinart became a College Football Hall of Famer. Cassel, despite never starting a game at USC, has carved out a 13-year-and-counting NFL career. Booty sells real estate in Orange County.</p>
<p id="eRyqiL">Looking back, Booty sees the flaw in his plan. “Would I have been served better to have a senior year?” he asks. “Probably so, just physically.” Maybe things would have been different if he had waited. Nevertheless, he says, “I don’t regret my decision whatsoever.” There was no way to foresee the consequences of the choice he made so many years ago, just as there’s no way for JT to know them now. Projection isn’t certainty. </p>
<p id="968eLj">Nobody stands to benefit from Daniels’s gambit more than Bryan Ellis, Daniels’s quarterback coach at USC. He watched Daniels internalize concepts with lightning speed, fast enough to make Ellis certain that “he’s further along than any freshman I’ve ever been around” even though Daniels played only three years of high school football. Still, something gnawed at Ellis amid the film marathon official visit and Daniels’s decision to stay on campus to attend both the Thursday and Saturday sessions of spring ball. </p>
<p id="kCLiha">“I tell him sometimes to be more of a kid,” Ellis says. “Go enjoy life.” </p>
<p id="pHHZwG">But in Daniels’s mind, he is. This is his truest self. His mother, Ali, nicknamed him “The Nutty Professor” when he was in elementary school for the way he’d fling himself so deeply into thought that the whole world seemed to recede into white noise around him. Being Big Man on Campus for his senior year would inhibit his passions more than enable them. </p>
<p id="OcDuLG">“What I dreamed of doing was living on a facility where I can go from film to lift to practice to train, shit like that, all day,” Daniels says. “That’s college. I could not wait for that.” </p>
<p id="WB8YFw">That might be the most unusual thing about him—not his intellect or endless achievements, but the sheer joy Daniels puts into each task, great and small.</p>
<p id="iF0ukL">“All these guys love the game … [but] I think this guy has a different level of love for the game and love for all the aspects of the game—the boring stuff, the studying, the learning,” Jordan Palmer says, bemusedly. “He loves this part of it.”</p>
<p id="f7BT6j">Which is why, to Daniels, missing out on his senior year really is a pittance. He can’t move forward if he’s standing still. </p>
<p id="vDSbKp"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="blAi9D">Soon after winning the Gatorade award in December, Daniels had an epiphany.</p>
<p id="E6Cjr3">The trophy was the final piece of a near-perfect season, and the last great milestone of his storied high school career. Daniels had officially achieved everything he’d set out to accomplish, but all he felt was hollow. “This should probably be a lot cooler than it is,” he told himself. “This should be the time of my life. But it feels no different.” He announced his decision to reclassify 11 days later. </p>
<p id="X4xmYM">In January, he stumbled onto Buddhism through an <em>Impact Theory</em> episode. Daniels is still sorting out its place in his life, but says that much of his worldview “align[s] with” the religion’s tenets, particularly the concept of nonattachment. Exploring Buddhism has taught him to divorce success from arbitrary endpoints. His goal at USC isn’t to win a Heisman or a national championship, although both of those things would be nice. It’s merely to improve every day.</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="kMADAv"><q>“I’m old enough, I’m definitely good enough, I’m ready to play college football. It’s that simple.” —JT Daniels</q></aside></div>
<p id="ovCWdL">“If your reason why is to get to the NFL or just to be famous … once you start getting that, you’re not going to want to work as hard,” Daniels says. “Once you achieve your goal, what else is there to do? I just love getting better each and every day. If that’s my goal, how can I fall off? Because my goal is never-ending like that. If that’s what I want with football, there’s no reason for me to stop working, because I like the work.” He wants to learn. Any outcome beyond that remains murky. He could dazzle in his first few games like Darnold or create a new benchmark for success like Leinart. He could start four years like Palmer or wait his turn like Booty. He could fail or he could flourish. Unlike the rest of the world, Daniels is the first to acknowledge that all of those possibilities are in play. “There’s no reason for a hype train,” he insists.</p>
<p id="zlQuaq">But he’s also aware enough to know that the hype isn’t going anywhere. </p>
<p id="PftgNO">Sears, in particular, <a href="https://247sports.com/college/usc/Article/USC-football-Dont-write-off-Jack-Sears-in-Trojans-quarterback-competition-120683870/">has earned praise from Ellis</a> for his “night and day” improvement from the spring, but Daniels has sizzled, and so thoroughly dominated the team’s first full scrimmage that <a href="https://usc.rivals.com/news/daniels-delivers-jtko-in-usc-qb-competition">some media</a> <a href="http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-jt-daniels-hernandez-20180811-story.html">members wondered</a> whether the competition was over before it really began. </p>
<p id="bGTAau">Those who have seen Daniels play for years aren’t surprised. Whether it happens directly out of camp or midseason like in his first year at Mater Dei, they envision Daniels as the Trojans’ starting quarterback sometime this year. They, and he, know no other reality.</p>
<p id="etBJht">“If either of [Fink or Sears] falters and JT gets in there, that will be it,” Biggins says. “Once JT gets in there, he’s not going to look back.”</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="ZA9NVd">He never has before. Why would he start now?</p>
<p id="9yP75r"><a href="https://twitter.com/mikelikessports"><em>Mike Piellucci</em></a><em> is a writer and editor based in Dallas. He is a former staff writer at</em> Vice Sports, <em>and his freelance work has been featured in </em>Sports Illustrated, Los Angeles Magazine, Bleacher Report, <em>and </em>Deadspin.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/2018/8/17/17711400/usc-trojans-jt-daniels-quarterback-hypeMike Piellucci2018-03-06T00:01:01-05:002018-03-06T00:01:01-05:00Cody Rhodes Is the Future (and Past) of Professional Wrestling
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/7RM99gAZyr1bYEUKGHPsUxZEiaY=/302x0:2777x1856/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/58917381/cody5.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><a href="http://www.jayanicely.com/">Jaya Nicely</a></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Cody Rhodes lived and worked in the shadow of his father, Dusty Rhodes, one of the greatest professional wrestlers who ever lived. Now he’s carving his own path in his father’s memory.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="Xpz6m7">It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon in Tennessee and Cody Rhodes is telling a story.</p>
<p id="yCadrI">Like many of the ones he tells best, it concerns his father, Virgil Runnels, better known as “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes, among the greatest professional wrestlers who ever lived.</p>
<p id="gESvii">It happened nearly a decade and a half ago, when Cody was 19. He and Dusty were driving home from breakfast at the local Waffle House in Marietta, Georgia, when Cody worked up the nerve to tell him that he wanted to join the family business. That he, too, would become a professional wrestler.</p>
<p id="jBlBlg">Cody was home visiting from Los Angeles, where, as he puts it, he’d “blown a lot of [his parents’] money” trying to become an actor. Before that, it was amateur wrestling, during which he won two state titles and earned a full scholarship offer to Penn State. Deep down, all of it was a distraction. He had dreamed of becoming a pro wrestler since he was a child, living vicariously through his father and his older half brother, Dustin, who has wrestled for the better part of 25 years under the name Goldust.</p>
<p id="UfQP2l">He knew he couldn’t begin his own career without Dusty’s blessing, and it would not come easy. It would not be enough to merely inform his father he wanted to wrestle.</p>
<p id="iSoyxe">So he announced, “I don’t want to do anything but wrestle.”</p>
<p id="vtcYFs">Dusty frowned. He looked, Cody remembers now, as though his son had just informed him that he’d gotten his girlfriend pregnant. He sat there silently behind the wheel of his champagne Ford F-250, mulling over how to tell the youngest of his four children that he did not want this for him — that Cody should, in fact, be an actor. Or go to college, or work a desk job, or do anything at all besides subject himself to a life of endless comparisons to his father, the kind that are impossible to live up to.</p>
<p id="zAQcgP">Except that wouldn’t be a very Dusty Rhodes thing to say.</p>
<p id="bz4tMW">“If Dusty was speaking to a homeless man and asked him, ‘What do you want to do?’ and the man said, ‘I want to be an astronaut,’ he would sit there with that man and create a plan about to get him to be an astronaut,” says Cody’s wife, Brandi. “He just believed in people, and he wanted to see them through.”</p>
<p id="Y55lie">Which is why, after a few minutes that felt more like hours, Dusty Rhodes relented — on one condition.</p>
<p id="QKULM6">“If you’re going to do it,” Dusty decided, “then be the best.”</p>
<p id="kf0UXz">Cody has told this story many times before. He has recounted it to an audience of thousands, at a national television taping, and to an audience of one — World Wrestling Entertainment chairman Vince McMahon, in McMahon’s office. At the time, he believed the latter telling to be a seminal moment in his young life, the prologue of a journey that would one day culminate in Cody winning the WWE Championship, the one title of significance his father never held. That, to him, entailed being the best.</p>
<p id="biU4DY">Today, he tells it at a National Guard armory in Newport, Tennessee, population 6,833. The armory sits atop a hill at the epicenter of a trailer park whose homes rest on unpaved turnoffs off an unlit main drag. Clouds curl off the Great Smoky Mountains in the distance. In just over an hour, a few hundred people and a large mutt will filter in to watch him main-event Next Generation Wrestling’s “Round 2.” That same evening, roughly 600 miles away, WWE will host its <em>Backlash</em> pay-per-view event at the Allstate Arena in Rosemont, Illinois. The announced attendance is 9,800.</p>
<p id="DoqgRS">Dusty Rhodes has been dead for more than two years, a fact that has nothing and everything to do with why Cody, now 32, is the only man in Newport who could claim with a straight face that he’d rather be here, hawking his own merchandise from a plastic folding table jammed against a wall of bleachers, instead of performing for the biggest wrestling promotion on earth. There’s every chance he’d be on the same path were his father still alive. His career had stalled out, and he tumbled far enough down the card to convince himself he’d never measure up as a main eventer in the WWE’s eyes. In the final months of Dusty’s life, they’d privately discussed the possibility of Cody leaving the company to strike out on his own.</p>
<p id="vKEmkd">“If you don’t think they’re taking you to the top, then you need to coordinate with them. ‘Hey, are we going this direction?’ And if not, you need to get out,” Cody recalls Dusty telling him.</p>
<p id="Ha3kVW">But it was only after Dusty’s death in June 2015 that Cody channeled his frustration into a course of action. If he couldn’t honor his father by achieving what Dusty couldn’t, then he would do it by emulating what Dusty had. Cody walked out on WWE and a guaranteed six-figure paycheck in May 2016 to barnstorm the country, crisscrossing small venues and independent promotions the way Dusty had decades earlier in wrestling’s territorial era. He became “The American Nightmare,” a sneering twist on his father’s sobriquet, one befitting a world where the United States is better suited to play the bad guy. He wanted to prove his worth.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/wG0T5yBkvF-NlxnHvUVz7XDwJ2Q=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10333055/IMG_0577.jpg">
<cite>Courtesy Chris Hall / Ring of Honor</cite>
</figure>
<p id="kbYOI2">That still doesn’t explain why Cody is here, of all places. Business is booming: Over the past year, he’d been a regular for every major non-WWE promotion in the country as well as New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW), arguably the most respected wrestling company in the world. Several organizations approached him about a long-term deal. He refused, continuing to stuff his calendar with smaller dates like the one in Newport, oftentimes several in the same weekend.</p>
<p id="WuaHr8">He isn’t traveling so much as searching. Closure has proved elusive. He sat alongside his mother, Michelle, in a hospital room for nearly 30 hours uninterrupted, as they watched Dusty wither away in front of them. She urges her only son to forget what they saw, but Cody cannot. Sometimes, he’s not sure he even wants to. The hospital represents their final memories together. “Pain is my last connection to him,” he says.</p>
<p id="WKYmvm">Cody has never been diagnosed with depression, but his family believes he weathered some form of it, especially in the first year after Dusty died. Cody lashed out on Twitter and cried at shows. He loves the history of the sport and so he’ll routinely turn on the WWE Network, where his former employer broadcasts decades’ worth of old matches, with the intent of burrowing into some unfamiliar corner of the past. Somewhere along the way, he always finds himself watching his father’s work instead.</p>
<p id="90hCtP">The closest he comes to catharsis is inside a wrestling ring, but never the ones in big arenas or at television tapings. It’s in places like Sacramento and Seattle and Spartanburg, South Carolina — small buildings and loud crowds. Those were the types of venues Dusty liked best. Cody isn’t much for religion and he’s unsure of what awaits in the afterlife, but he knows in the very depths of his soul that in the right building, on the right night, he’ll feel his father’s presence more than if he stood by his tombstone.</p>
<p id="7rTksS">Which is why, later that night, Cody Rhodes is steeling himself for more than a professional wrestling match as he vamps behind the curtain in black tights, white boots, and a black leather jacket with an American flag plastered on the back.</p>
<p id="Eled1B">His theme music, a snarling rock anthem called “Kingdom,” hits and he bursts through to the crowd. He makes it to the ring apron in time for the pre-chorus.</p>
<p id="FvmNSf"><em>And my father said</em><br><em>When I was younger</em><br><em>Hard times breed better men</em></p>
<p id="CLOZ6M">He’s here to see Dusty.</p>
<p id="zX6GdM"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="v97SYy">Dusty Rhodes was a legend. In the South, he was a cultural icon.</p>
<p id="ovKKvy">He was born in Austin, Texas, but cultivated his name throughout the Southeast in the 1970s and ’80s as one of the most charismatic performers wrestling had ever seen. He radiated authenticity through his years at the top of the National Wrestling Alliance, and when he arrived in WWE (then still the WWF) at the twilight of his career in 1989, they saddled him with a “Common Man” gimmick that was too on the nose only because he never needed shtick to seem relatable.</p>
<p id="RLJiNk">In a sport that prizes physique, he was a headline draw with a paunch, jowls, and an unruly mop of blond hair. He proudly billed himself as “The Son of a Plumber,” and the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9py4aMK3aIU">most famous promo of his career</a> was a love letter to unemployed workers who lost their jobs to automation and outsourcing. His death was among the select few in professional wrestling that became a national event — <em>TMZ </em>even ran the 911 call — in part because arguably no wrestler in history succeeded in becoming so roundly beloved.</p>
<div id="STuCXt"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.2493%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9py4aMK3aIU?rel=0&" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="k6kyXA">“I had somebody reach out to me [after his death]. Growing up, he didn’t have a father, but he knew at 6:05 on Saturday, Dusty would be there,” says Teil Gergel, Cody’s older sister. “He thought of him as a dad. We heard that a lot.”</p>
<p id="7IzVqn">He got married in 1965 at 20 years old and had two children, Kristin and Dustin. He spent the first part of his career as an absentee father and husband, the worst sort of wrestling cliché. He paid for it, first with a divorce, then later with a five-year estrangement from Dustin at the height of Dustin’s own wrestling career.</p>
<p id="MLkv4X">His second chance came in 1978, when he remarried Michelle Rubio. This time, he got things right. He had two more children, Teil and Cody, and became, as Teil puts it, “aggressively supportive.” Dusty retired from in-ring competition in 1991. He transitioned full time into a career behind the scenes, creating events and story lines as a booker for the now-defunct World Championship Wrestling. The family settled in Marietta, Georgia, a short drive from his new office in the CNN Center in downtown Atlanta. He became a fixture at school plays. He coached football.</p>
<p id="kkFG6P">Cody was the fourth child. He sees himself as his mother’s son. Dustin profiles as a lankier, less fleshy version of their father, but thanks to Michelle’s genes, Cody looks the part of a matinee idol, with a tight jawline, abs and, until a recent dye job, dark brown hair. His personality bore even less resemblance to his father. Dusty was hard-charging and irrepressible, a raconteur whose borderline-unbelievable stories made barrooms revolve around his orbit. Like Michelle, Cody is serious and introspective, the star athlete who also wrote poetry for his high school literary magazine. Dusty wore denim and flannel. Cody favors suits and pocket squares. Dusty hunted and watched baseball. Cody reads comic books, plays <em>Zelda</em>,<em> </em>and binges sci-fi.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="r7egKE"><q>“If you’re going to do it, then be the best.” —Dusty Rhodes</q></aside></div>
<p id="m422zT">Before his first tour with New Japan, Cody had a conversation with Tiger Hattori, a company staple who had known Dusty for decades. It reaffirmed every suspicion he had about his father, at once his idol and his opposite.</p>
<p id="mIAQh1">“You’re nothing like him,” Hattori said. “You’re like a businessman. He was a cowboy.”</p>
<p id="JGHu1t">Nevertheless, father and son were inseparable. They didn’t need common interests. Instead, Cody says, “we bonded over his efforts.”</p>
<p id="hElanB">Dusty didn’t understand <em>Star Wars</em>, certainly not like Cody did, but that didn’t stop him from driving to the local video store one day when Cody was in school to pick up the original trilogy box set on VHS because it contained a glow-in-the-dark Yoda action figure his son pined for. And when, somehow, the Yoda was nowhere to be found in that box, Dusty Rhodes drove back to the same store and laced into the clerk so badly that, a week later, it arrived in the mail directly from that man’s home address.</p>
<p id="MC2uZr">Dusty knew nothing about amateur wrestling when Cody took up the sport in high school. It didn’t stop him from attending every match and wearing the same outfit — jeans, flannel, and a Cleveland Browns T-shirt sent to him by a team equipment manager; Cody says he went undefeated in his junior year, and Dusty thought his outfit brought his son luck.</p>
<p id="vWLVZj">Even then, Cody understood how the world saw him. Marietta can feel smaller than it is — smaller, still, when your father is the most famous man in town. Cody’s opponents on the mat stared him down as though they were wrestling Dusty Rhodes instead of Cody Runnels. A victory meant a story to tell. Cody rarely surrendered one, but that never stopped them all from trying, from eying him the way they did.</p>
<p id="eRQ1oK">He loved pro wrestling so much that, years later, he convinced himself he could withstand it forever. He had just turned 21 when he debuted in Ohio Valley Wrestling, WWE’s developmental territory at the time. By then, he was neck deep in what would become the defining conflict of his life: How much is he Dusty Rhodes’s son and how much is he his own man?</p>
<p id="WcWlNP">He introduced himself that way in wrestling only once, in his very first tryout. “I’m Dusty’s son,” he said, and it felt so unnatural that he never did it again. For a while, he tried to conceal his heritage at all costs. He even denied it to Brandi shortly after they first met, when she was working as a WWE ring announcer under the name Eden Stiles.</p>
<p id="5m3yl6">“My canvas, if it’s a big piece I’m putting together, it has so many links to the history of my family, whether I want to publicly place them in there or I don’t,” he says. “You’ll never have a clean slate.”</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="WWE Monday Night Raw In Las Vegas" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/NZehUjjorP5EIb1wZMGigDcEdo8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10347697/90070782.jpg.jpg">
<cite>Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images</cite>
</figure>
<p id="6PJliM">There was no more hiding when he was called up to the main roster, but it helped that he played characters as far removed from Dusty as possible. His breakout angle came alongside Randy Orton and Ted DiBiase Jr., two other descendants of prominent wrestling families. The trio, dubbed the Legacy, traded on a sense of entitlement their famous fathers never had. That begat “Dashing” Cody Rhodes, in which he claimed to be the most handsome man in WWE. When he broke his nose in a match, he paid out of pocket for a clear protective mask he’d seen former Detroit Pistons star Richard Hamilton model in the NBA. He was now “Undashing” Cody Rhodes. He listened to “The Music of the Night” from <em>The Phantom of the Opera</em> to ease into character before each show.</p>
<p id="XcsyNO">He won his first Intercontinental Championship in 2011, shortly after his 26th birthday. It was the company’s traditional dividing line for upcoming talent, a chance to catapult himself into the main-event picture or forever moor himself to the midcard. Every week, he pitched segments to creative. More often than not, they’d bite. He could feel himself inching closer to his dream.</p>
<p id="zfXowp">“It was the most happy I ever was,” he says.</p>
<p id="phnJjl">Still, the insecurity never faded. Eight months later, he was in a hotel ballroom in Miami, plotting out the biggest match of his life. It was <em>WrestleMania XXVIII</em> and he was scheduled to drop the title to the Big Show, a gargantuan who had known Dusty since the WCW days. The two wrestlers holed up in one corner of the room. In another, the Rock and John Cena were talking strategy ahead of the biggest main event the company had put on in years.</p>
<p id="5hcfDP">There was a loud banging on the door. It swung open and Dusty came swaggering into the room, to the delight of everyone but his son.</p>
<p id="mdyMl7">“What’s the finish?” he razzed Big Show, knowing full well the answer. “You guys should rethink the finish!”</p>
<p id="iMLPPU">Cody was mortified. Don’t be, Big Show told him later, after Cody practically shoved Dusty back into the hallway. “I would have killed for my dad to have come in the room just then,” he said.</p>
<p id="vJ5mbQ">“And I felt like an asshole in that moment,” Cody says. “But I didn’t get it until [later].”</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="4tmoZm"><q>“[Dusty] didn’t want them to tag … just because of their personalities and the pressure. While they love each other and they’re brothers, Dad thought that was not going to end well.” —Teil Gergel</q></aside></div>
<p id="FYOp3L">Nor did he get it when, a year and a half after that in 2013, he stood backstage at <em>WWE Battleground</em> in Buffalo with his father and his older brother, preparing to wrestle with Goldust — Dustin’s bizarro WWE persona — as a tag team for the first time, with Dusty in their corner. It was the final reconciliation of the Rhodes family: the famous patriarch, the prodigal son, and the crown prince. All Cody could think about was how they’d be coming out to Dusty’s music — trapped forever in his shadow. “Being a prick,” he says now.</p>
<p id="ezL1lS">They won that night and Dusty stole the show. His knees were shot and he spent most of the match stationed near the ringpost in boots and a cowboy hat, observing the action. The crowd reactions ebbed and flowed; nothing the four men in the ring did held their attention. But the audience rose to its feet when it saw Dusty amble toward Dean Ambrose, the other team’s cornerman. He chucked his hat in Ambrose’s face, pulled off his belt and whipped it wildly. Then, the coup de grace: a Bionic Elbow, Dusty’s signature move. The building came unglued.</p>
<p id="RrBAVl">Dusty loved Westerns, and when Cody watches it back, he sees an aging gunslinger limping into battle one last time. He had no way of knowing that it would never get better in WWE than that night, with three of them hugging and crying and hollering in celebration, true emotion bleeding into the ring.</p>
<p id="4hWZ6F">He began to team with his brother regularly, which worked until it didn’t. Cody and Dustin were 16 years apart. They grew up in different homes, became different men, and had wildly different relationships with their father during adolescence. The partnership was fraught with tension.</p>
<p id="kGk6jf">“[Dusty] didn’t want them to tag … just because of their personalities and the pressure,” Teil says. “While they love each other and they’re brothers, Dad thought that was not going to end well.”</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ocQoSn2YQBayV9vCCcBLR4H7AIM=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10347737/RAW_1067_Photo_129.jpg">
<cite>WWE</cite>
</figure>
<p id="PlAdel">He was right. Eight months later, creative asked Cody to become Stardust, a takeoff on Dustin’s character. Goldust wore face paint and a leather bodysuit, so Cody did, too. Dustin shaved his head and now Cody would, too. Teil had gotten wind of it before Dusty, and she braced herself when he called one afternoon while she was driving.</p>
<p id="kyfFkX">“Have you seen what they’re going to do with Cody?” he asked, according to Teil. The break in her father’s voice told her everything she needed to know about his opinion.</p>
<p id="zSwr2Z">Cody was skeptical, too, but he threw himself into the assignment. WWE gradually gave him more leeway with the role and Cody sold himself on interpreting it as a comic-book villain. He turned off the Andrew Lloyd Webber soundtrack and found a new muse in Jim Carrey’s interpretation of the Riddler in <em>Batman Forever</em>. Every night, he painted his face while watching Carrey blow up the Batcave. He created a lexicon for the character, and before long Stardust babbled on about “the Cosmic Key” and “the Fifth Dimension.” All of it worked better than it had any right to. Still, Dusty was wary.</p>
<p id="Uf23pA">“This is not going to go the way you think,” he warned Cody.</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="BaWDQf"><q>“You’re 29 years old. You can stay there and continue on the path there. You can take the money or you can do something else. Only you can decide what you want to do.” —Dusty Rhodes</q></aside></div>
<p id="xqLbLQ">Things fell apart in the spring of 2015. Creative finally split up Stardust and Goldust, only to pit them against each other, with Dusty playing the father caught in between. In the story line, Stardust had consumed Cody Rhodes, poisoned him against his family. “Cody Rhodes is dead,” he hissed at Dusty <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOezptZoeIM">during the climactic promo</a>, “and as far as I am concerned, so is my father.”</p>
<p id="NKMwR2">His family hated it. Soon enough, Cody did, too. The angle never paid off in the climactic match the family expected, and once the feud ran its course, WWE was out of ideas for the Stardust character.</p>
<p id="WFSXoA">He and Dusty spoke every day, be it over the phone or in person, smoking cigars. Cody’s future became a regular talking point. Now more than ever, he needed to find his place in this world his father helped build.</p>
<p id="MxRjV7">“You’re 29 years old,” Dusty told him. “You can stay there and continue on the path there. You can take the money or you can do something else. Only you can decide what you want to do.”</p>
<p id="H93YaA">He was nowhere close to the answer. And then, in the middle of those deliberations, Dusty died.</p>
<p id="8dpB1M"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="N03OrM">For years, it was accepted fact that Dusty Rhodes had battled stomach cancer, but his family has no idea how that story took hold. They say that it isn’t true. After his passing on June 11, 2015, it was widely reported that the events that led to his death began with a fall in his Orlando home a day earlier, which isn’t quite true, either. According to Cody and Michelle, Dusty Rhodes died of septic shock, and to this day, Michelle believes her husband might have died where she found him, slumped in a rocking chair in their bedroom, had she not awoken in the middle of the night.</p>
<p id="qDEEGK">She spent 20 years as an operating room technician, and for months her medical training had told her something was very wrong with him. In fact, something already was: Dusty had been diagnosed with hepatitis C about eight months earlier. But he was responding well to treatment, and Michelle says she had weaned him off sodium to ease the strain on his body. His blood work was consistently strong. He’d even showed up to work at his latest job, as a creative writer, trainer, and de facto father figure for WWE’s developmental brand, NXT, on June 9, the day before he collapsed.</p>
<p id="AwSA3v">The hepatitis C diagnosis didn’t explain the fatigue. Or the weight loss. Or the encroaching feebleness that led Dusty to read Teil’s two children a bedtime story in their mother’s room the last time he saw them, because he couldn’t make it up the stairs to their bedrooms. Those were on top of various other ailments his body accrued from decades of wrestling and hard living, like the smattering of keloid scars and the lower legs that had long turned black from fluid accumulation. He was 69 and slowing down, but this was something more.</p>
<p id="oZwBcI">“You’re not <em>that </em>old,” Cody would admonish.</p>
<p id="7Al12c">Cody got the call at Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport. He and Brandi had moved into a house in nearby Denton only a couple of weeks earlier. It was long in the making — a dream delayed by dread.</p>
<p id="TvB2Vf">“It was literally one of my biggest fears, us moving to Texas and him dying,” Cody says.</p>
<p id="MgheVd">Now he was confronting it on the airport tarmac just after his flight home from that week’s WWE shows had landed. “I think this is it,” Michelle told him. He opened an app on his phone and booked a flight to Florida before he’d even deplaned.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/z9aoAJEIMDYPXkuPa31KWwjkiJ4=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10347797/oNJCgEU.jpg">
<cite>WWE</cite>
</figure>
<p id="qXmTpK">Dusty was awake when Cody arrived. Friends and family had trickled in throughout the morning, much to the old man’s chagrin. He hated hospitals and doctors and, besides, this was all ridiculous anyhow. “Why are you here? Y’all need to go,” he grumbled. His back was killing him; maybe it was the hospital bed. Otherwise, he felt fine.</p>
<p id="bIhPyO">It was lunchtime when the doctors confirmed he wasn’t. His heart rate was irregular. They decided to intubate him shortly before dinner. While he was under, a medication would stabilize his heartbeat. He motioned to Michelle. “My angel,” he called her. A few final words were spoken between husband and wife. Then Dusty closed his eyes.</p>
<p id="Cmnpnj">No one in the family remembers when, exactly, his vitals began to crash. There were eight of them in the room by then, but instead of kicking them out of the ICU, the hospital staff simply ushered everyone into the hallway. Everyone, that is, except Michelle Runnels. There was no point in subterfuge: She knew the medical codes.</p>
<p id="zSjT8t">“They treated us differently than they treated other families,” Cody says. “Sometimes, I wish they had treated us like other families.”</p>
<p id="E7JuG0">Which is why no one stopped Cody from walking back in a few minutes later. Over the final 30 hours of Dusty Rhodes’s life, almost everyone in his world had left the hospital at some point, either to shower or sleep or change clothes. His youngest child did none of those things. Apart from those few minutes in the hallway and a quick walk to grab coffee, Cody sat wide awake at his father’s bedside in the same blue Hugo Boss polo and Armani Exchange jeans, clothes he would later ask Brandi to throw away because he could no longer stand the sight of them.</p>
<p id="NGID44">He was there when Dusty’s organs began to shut down, and when they hooked him up to a dialysis machine to boost his flagging kidneys, and when Michelle agreed to let the attending physician paddle Dusty’s heart in an attempt to correct its rhythm, which in turn could reset his organs into proper function. He heard the music blaring from the dialysis technician’s headphones as he pierced Dusty’s arm with a needle — too loud for 2 a.m., Cody thought, and was the tech even paying attention? He watched a throng of medical students observe his father getting electroshocked, trying to reconcile his inner turmoil with their pedagogical detachment.</p>
<p id="Ol7AdL">He talked to Dusty, encouraged him, which was stupid because his father couldn’t hear him, or could he? In which case he’d be foolish to stop now, so he kept going, even though he couldn’t think of much to say. Why couldn’t he? Why did he allow himself to succumb to the notion that he was watching his father’s last moments on earth, to wonder what happens when he’s gone? “That’s a terrible way to think,” Cody told himself. “Stay on message. Stay positive.”</p>
<p id="DwUiWH">Mostly he just stared up at the left corner of the room, where a small monitor displayed Dusty’s blood pressure. Dusty stood a chance if those two numbers dipped just a little bit, so Cody fixated on the monitor’s pixels, willing them in the right direction for so long that the hours seemed to melt together. “Almost long enough to drive yourself crazy,” he says now.</p>
<p id="qtOysM">It was nearly dawn when Dusty lost oxygen to his brain. His eyesight was gone and he faced a lifetime of physical and mental incapacitation, presuming he’d awaken. The back pain, the family says, was a harbinger of an infection his doctors didn’t uncover until it was too late. Michelle decided against an autopsy, but she says that she thinks it originated in his kidneys as a side effect of his hepatitis C medication.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="W77WEU"><q>“They treated us differently than they treated other families. Sometimes, I wish they had treated us like other families.” —Cody Rhodes</q></aside></div>
<p id="UWWNJt">Living that way would have been the worst fate imaginable to Dusty Rhodes. Years earlier, he and Michelle tended to his mother and her father after age rendered them incapable of caring for themselves. “Living death,” Dusty and Michelle called it. Long before Dusty ever stepped foot in that hospital, Michelle says that he provided his wife with a directive that superseded all others. “Don’t ever let me get like that,” he told her.</p>
<p id="ORjZtN">And so, nearly a day after he first arrived, Cody Rhodes was moved to pray — not for his father’s survival, but for an easy, painless death.</p>
<p id="tEBFst">“I don’t know what I believe in — heaven, hell, I really don’t know — but I do think there’s more to this than this,” he says. “Whatever that was, I felt he would be better there than laying in a hospital bed for months or however long.”</p>
<p id="grE5qj">Michelle directed Dusty’s doctors to discontinue medical care, surrounded by his family. By then, he was so bloated from the medication that he barely resembled himself. “This isn’t my husband,” Michelle would say each time someone new entered the room, whereupon she’d reveal a photograph of them together as proof. Then she made a request. Out went their children and spouses, the nieces and nephews — including, finally, Cody himself. The medical staff helped her detach the IVs and tubes from Dusty’s body, and then everyone but a single nurse left, too.</p>
<p id="g0Ls97">There, nearly alone in that room, Michelle Runnels washed the body of her husband of almost 37 years.</p>
<p id="Ti6L1R">“I’m an old Southern woman,” she says. “We bathe our dead.”</p>
<p id="PgnF1G">When it was over, Cody had been awake for two days straight. Brandi begged him to go to sleep. He knew she was right, but he couldn’t see the point. “It didn’t matter to me. It just didn’t matter,” he says, slowly, piecing the words together like he’s processing a betrayal. In a sense, it was. The life he knew wasn’t supposed to evaporate so unexpectedly.</p>
<p id="wxy9Nd">“Maybe that’s why I sat there the whole time, because I was so shocked by it all,” he says. “I thought I would be shocked again and he would wake up. Or I’d be shocked and there’d be something about science and medicine I don’t know, and he could kick out. But he didn’t.”</p>
<p id="K6hqRm">No one needed to ask who would do the eulogy. Cody invited all of his siblings to talk, but he was hell-bent on going last. The father of a close friend told him to speak from the heart, which amounted to well-intentioned bullshit — the heart alone could never convey all the things Dusty Rhodes did and meant. Cody spent two days writing his remarks, then paced the theater room of his new home memorizing every word and inflection. “I didn’t want to look at that paper once,” he says.</p>
<p id="gsE0zA">Cody told Dusty’s mourners about the love notes his father wrote Michelle and his penchant for mentoring wrestlers no one else would bet on. How he promised Cody his prized gold Rolex whenever his son did win that WWE Championship, never letting on that he’d pawned it years earlier to finance Cody’s acting lessons. Cody referenced <em>Big Fish</em>, a Tim Burton film about a son and a dying father and the father’s lifetime of stories, all of which — implausibly enough — had some element of truth to them.</p>
<p id="aVHKqh">“<em>Big Fish </em>is my life,” he says now.</p>
<p id="rdi15y">He closed with a request. Don’t just dream, he implored, because Dusty Rhodes had done so much more than that.</p>
<p id="YmSgoR">“Have an American Dream,” he told them.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Joe Torre Safe At Home Foundation's 12th Annual Celebrity Gala" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/7GWXdF5OX-g0d0zNCWLgdbuzQqs=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10347629/458939528.jpg.jpg">
<cite>Photo by Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images</cite>
</figure>
<p id="Szz6A9"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="r6fspE">Professional wrestling has a complicated relationship with death. The sport trades on nostalgia, and few mediums are more adept at paying homage to fallen idols — largely because few are better equipped to profit. Entire careers have been made by it. In a single story line, WWE once leveraged the abrupt death of former world champion Eddie Guerrero to make an onscreen character out of his widow and elevate his friend Rey Mysterio to a run with the world title.</p>
<p id="s02L35">So when Cody returned to work a month after his father’s death, it was a reasonable assumption that, sooner or later, he’d revert to being Cody Rhodes. The WWE audience clamored for it. His friends and family did, too. He couldn’t carry on Dusty Rhodes’s legacy playing a character who disavowed every shred of it.</p>
<p id="jdm1mS">Cody himself was less certain. Dusty was on WWE’s writing staff at the time of the Rey Mysterio angle, and he had bristled whenever someone suggested Eddie would have loved it.</p>
<p id="6niSah">“His thought was, ‘How do you know? You really can’t know,’” Cody says. “I never forgot that.”</p>
<p id="1hKAo9">It felt cheap to use this as the fulcrum for a long-awaited fresh start — to effectively be rewarded for his father’s death. Not that anyone had approached him to do so in the first place, which was its own bizarre indignity. In the coming months, WWE peppered NXT with tributes to Dusty. It established an annual tournament called the Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic. Many of the wrestlers wore yellow polka dots, a staple of Dusty’s “Common Man” character. <a href="http://www.wwe.com/shows/wwenxt/nxt-takeover-respect-2015-10-07/dusty-rhodes-nxt-influence">The company championed them as</a> “Dusty’s NXT kids.” Meanwhile, his own son was stuck in a gimmick long past its sell-by date, no endgame in sight.</p>
<p id="Gi85gh">“Yeah, ‘Dusty’s kids’ are cool but his actual kids actually work there, too,” Teil would grouse.</p>
<p id="6OTCAV">Cody soon found himself in a tug-of-war between what was easiest and what he wanted. On the one hand, he was crumbling. He’d returned to work too soon, which was already a week later than planned. He was supposed to show up on television in Chicago, which got derailed when he was confronted in the airport by collectors beseeching him to sign pictures of Dusty. “I landed, flipped out, and flew back home,” he says.</p>
<p id="WQnRNS">Stardust became his armor. All those old story lines Cody once hated came in handy now. No one could ask Stardust about his father, because he had none. Cody could show up for work and go home, and paint on a blank canvas in between. He felt safe.</p>
<p id="KZSuxk">“I’d rather be Stardust because I don’t have to be me,” he’d think.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="wfaLUa"><q>“And I thought he’d understand that. He did not. It wasn’t his dad. And at the end of the day, he does so much for Dusty. But I’m not Dusty. Dusty is not here.” —Cody Rhodes</q></aside></div>
<p id="X9yZc9">But underneath, he was still the same man who aspired to be World Champion. That dream felt more urgent than ever with Dusty gone, and Cody knew he’d never get there on Jim Carrey histrionics. He began to politic to become Cody Rhodes again, mapping out story lines and character arcs. He even had new gear made.</p>
<p id="SBPMMU">Creative nixed it. He tried harder — more angles, different avenues. If they listened to him once, they could do it again. He grew more discouraged, which in turn made him more depressed. But he kept at it. All it would take is the right idea.</p>
<p id="1EgNG4">It went on that way for more than six months. In one pitch meeting, the writer across from him didn’t even power his laptop on, but he pantomimed typing to humor Cody. Cody wanted to choke him. He found Brian “Road Dogg” James, a retired wrestler now working as a WWE producer, and seethed. “I would have knocked him out,” James told him. Dusty wouldn’t have sat through the indignity in the first place. Cody, ever the businessman, did nothing.</p>
<p id="qYxk7c">“I kind of wish I had a little of that in me,” he says.</p>
<p id="RUZrg8">The nadir came on a tour of the United Kingdom that lasted nearly two weeks. The company traveled by charter, and every night before the plane took off, he’d stop into a duty-free shop to pick up a bottle of Southern Comfort — he swears it tastes better overseas — and some Diet Coke. He’d sit next to Cesaro, a Swiss wrestler who’d become a good friend, and get stone drunk while they watched old matches of Kurt Angle, a prolific talent who nearly destroyed himself through substance abuse.</p>
<p id="yPJfxl">“Nothing felt cool about it,” he says. “It felt more like, ‘This is legit pain reduction.’ … I wasn’t a big party guy and yet here I am downing half a bottle of Southern Comfort every night.”</p>
<p id="i58Cy9">Around the end of the year, he began to contemplate life outside the company in earnest. He calls it his “escape,” and he spent six months making preparations. He chatted up Kevin Owens, a protégé of Dusty’s who had worked the independent circuit for a decade before WWE. What could he make? Cody wondered. Where should he work? How much should he charge promoters? Who should he talk to about merchandise?</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/fZNx6i9WJvd_NbLh1KZowEMTWCM=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10347645/Stardust_bio.png">
<cite>WWE</cite>
</figure>
<p id="RdymFg">Yet the WWE cocoon was all he’d ever known. More than that, leaving would definitely close the door on that world title, possibly forever. He wasn’t ready for that yet, so he tried some more. The conversations with creative became less about offering ideas than seeking explanations. He just wanted answers.</p>
<p id="uD5O6m">“What am I not doing?” he begged them. “Because if you tell me what I’m not doing, I’ll try to do it right. If you think I should gain weight, if you think what I’m doing in the ring is not up to par — tell me how to fix it.”</p>
<p id="MyfEem">But in their eyes, he was fully realized. Not everyone can be world champion, after all. “The WWE is a play,” Paul “Triple H” Levesque, a semi-retired former world champion and the company’s executive vice president of talent, live events and creative, told him. “Everybody has their role and needs to act it their best.”</p>
<p id="3xzGTb">“The best actors don’t want lesser roles,” Cody shot back.</p>
<p id="kGtZv7">NXT was Levesque’s brainchild. That made him Dusty’s boss. The two men, however, enjoyed a relationship that went far beyond employer-employee. They knew each other for more than 20 years, ever since Rhodes gave Triple H his first big break as a wrestler by hiring him in WCW. Levesque was the first person in the company Cody notified after Dusty died. He helped ensure that WWE paid Dusty’s medical bills and handled security at his funeral. Levesque was the one who pushed for Dusty’s memory to remain omnipresent in NXT. He <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKArzDfySmQ">fought back tears</a> before a 10-bell salute on the first show after Dusty’s death.</p>
<p id="nSmlxA">It made Levesque and Cody’s relationship a complicated one. Dusty was both their greatest connection and their greatest disconnect. On one side, a man who loved Dusty like a parent, who resolved to do right by his family after his death. How could Cody be unhappy after all he’d done? On the other, Dusty’s son, who’d spent his whole life trying to figure out who he is outside his father’s shadow. Why couldn’t Levesque understand that doing right by Dusty and doing right by Cody were two different things?</p>
<p id="7b1kDT">At last, Cody reached his breaking point. He made an ultimatum.</p>
<p id="fe8uVC">“I’m not putting on that fucking suit again unless I’m doing it to tell the story of me coming back as Cody Rhodes,” Cody told Levesque.</p>
<p id="SaNan8">“And I thought he’d understand that,” he says now. “He did not. It wasn’t his dad. And at the end of the day, he does so much for Dusty. But I’m not Dusty. Dusty is not here.”</p>
<p id="yvU2rS">Two weeks later, on May 16, 2016, Cody was backstage at <em>Raw</em> in North Carolina’s Greensboro Coliseum. Dusty loved that building. It was the site of his first great triumph as booker, <em>Starrcade ’83</em>, in which Ric Flair defeated Harley Race for the NWA title, and where he himself won the title from Flair two years later. Cody was bumped off television that night, a healthy scratch. He stared at his locker. On one side sat the Stardust suit and makeup. On the other, the test gear he had made up to return as Cody Rhodes. He thought about the legends who’d dressed in that room three decades before him — about Flair and Race and Ricky Steamboat and, of course, his father.</p>
<p id="dw67SJ">“What would any of those guys have done if they thought they had a brand, if they thought they had value?” he says he asked himself. “And I knew it was not, ‘You’ve got to be coming back to work.’ I knew.”</p>
<p id="JrlGtd">He called Mark Carrano, WWE’s vice president of talent relations, to request his release. Carrano couldn’t believe it: Wrestlers rarely walk out of their own volition, and Cody was practically family. He had grown up in WWE, came from wrestling royalty; he’d have a job for life if he wanted one. “Don’t do anything rash,” Carrano told him.</p>
<p id="kQ6iJg">Cody had his mind made up. He told Carrano he would release his own statement by Saturday, a move designed to back himself into a corner. “I knew if I tried to keep this contained within me, I wouldn’t do it,” he says. On Sunday, he was officially a free agent.</p>
<p id="DALzHB">That afternoon, he <a href="https://twitter.com/PrinceCGR/status/734501299337584641">tweeted</a> a two-page statement detailing what precipitated his departure from WWE. It made headlines for being unsparing — three former members of WWE’s creative team declined comment for this story — but ultimately it resonated as a message of hope. “I do believe the cream rises to the top and hard work prevails,” he wrote. “My work just needs to be elsewhere.”</p>
<p id="PJWdZn">(When reached for comment, WWE offered the following statement: “Creative differences aside, Cody has always handled himself in a very professional manner. His future is clearly bright, and we continue to wish him nothing but the best in everything he does.”)</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="z7CcuX"><q>“I think everything he does in wrestling is somehow tied into, ‘Would Dusty like this? Would Dusty approve of this? Would Dusty respect this? Is this something Dusty would do?’” —Matt Jackson</q></aside></div>
<p id="dPFZQ1">He got right to work. He jotted down a checklist of dream opponents and must-have experiences, then asked Brandi to copy it in cleaner penmanship. He <a href="https://twitter.com/codyrhodes/status/736634204604092416?lang=en">tweeted a snapshot</a> of hers, which went viral. Before long, he was living those experiences. He showed up in early September at Pro Wrestling Guerrilla’s Battle of Los Angeles, the one event on his list, with his wife in tow as his personal ring announcer. She introduced him as, among other things, “The Grandson of a Plumber” and “The Star That Left Them in the Dust.”</p>
<p id="17KkaI">A year after watching his matches in a drunken haze, Cody wrestled Kurt Angle three times on two continents. The only tag team on his list, <a href="https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/kbd3wx/party-next-door-how-the-young-bucks-revolutionized-professional-wrestling">the Young Bucks</a>, instead became stablemates that December when Cody joined the Bullet Club, New Japan’s most prolific faction and arguably the most recognizable faction in professional wrestling today.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/P0qWiuJVd3Pagg4h2qY02DzNZoU=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10347817/ROHFB_1463.jpg">
<cite>Courtesy Chris Hall / Ring of Honor</cite>
</figure>
<p id="orKti2">He felt rejuvenated, but it came at a price. The barriers were down. There are hundreds of Newports in independent wrestling, each with their own crowd eager to interact with someone that national television made so familiar but always kept at arm’s length. Mostly, they want to talk — and, in the first year especially, talk about Dusty.</p>
<p id="qXkKg4">He has to remind himself sometimes that Dusty was theirs, too. Cody has his own memories of his father, loving a man they’ll never know, but the character on television, shimmying and elbowing and booming on the microphone? Cody has no more right to that than anyone else did. Dusty’s fans had mourned, too.</p>
<p id="C8X4bB">He was now the public face of the Rhodes family, which made him the conduit for their grief. It was touching. It was exhausting. Several times a week, in venues around the world, he felt like a one-man receiving line at his father’s ongoing wake. Some shared stories. Others offered gifts. One fan even brought him a pair of Dusty’s ring-worn boots.</p>
<p id="8J69kS">“I loved your dad,” they’d tell him.</p>
<p id="L2GgQc">“I loved him, too,” he’d respond.</p>
<p id="M9yukR">“He was my favorite wrestler.”</p>
<p id="25oIEq">“He was my favorite, too.”</p>
<p id="xud4KT">He was still fragile. His new life was a firehose of warring emotions, one that could overwhelm him without warning. He found himself in tears at appearances and after matches. One particular <em>Raw</em> segment devastated him. In it, one of Dusty’s favorite pupils, a female wrestler named Bayley, gave Goldust a small Dusty-themed teddy bear as a gift, only for two other wrestlers to snatch it away and tear it to shreds.</p>
<p id="yDmNZ6">“Whoever produced that, I hope they never know what this feels like,” he <a href="https://twitter.com/CodyRhodes/status/813569446333644800?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cagesideseats.com%2Fwwe%2F2016%2F12%2F26%2F14084938%2Fcody-rhodes-tweet-wwe-raw-dusty-rhodes-bayley-bear-segment-goldust-karl-anderson">tweeted</a>. The internet pounced, as it is wont to do, and he added a follow-up. “I’m not perfect,” he <a href="https://twitter.com/CodyRhodes/status/813630894913110016?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cagesideseats.com%2Fwwe%2F2016%2F12%2F26%2F14084938%2Fcody-rhodes-tweet-wwe-raw-dusty-rhodes-bayley-bear-segment-goldust-karl-anderson">said</a>. “I just miss him.”</p>
<p id="SdJAN9"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="9dhOLb">Now more than ever, Cody embraces the implications of being Dusty Rhodes’s son. He worked his heritage into multiple story lines at Ring of Honor, arguably the country’s second-largest promotion after WWE. He became their world champion on June 23, 2017, making him and Dusty only the second known father-son duo in United States history to hold major world titles. Three days later, he <a href="https://twitter.com/CodyRhodes/status/879203757770371072">tweeted a picture</a> of his new belt. A small action figure of Dusty rested atop one of its gold plates.</p>
<p id="KjvItt">“I think everything he does in wrestling is somehow tied into, ‘Would Dusty like this?’” says Matt Jackson, one half of the Young Bucks. “‘Would Dusty approve of this? Would Dusty respect this? Is this something Dusty would do?’”</p>
<p id="SVYy2w">A week and a half week later, Cody sits in a back booth of a restaurant in a hotel near Los Angeles International Airport. He had just worked two nights in Long Beach for New Japan’s first shows on United States soil. He headlined the first show, against the company’s wildly popular champion, Kazuchika Okada. But he couldn’t stop talking about what had happened the second night.</p>
<p id="JSUs6d">He was on the undercard, working a multi-man tag match with fellow Bullet Club members. Among them were the Guerrillas of Destiny, two Tongan American half brothers whose father, Haku, is among the more revered tough guys to ever wrestle. Haku led his sons to the ring that night in a Bullet Club T-shirt tucked into dad jeans, his belly gently stretching the group’s trademark skull-and-bones logo. Cody was thrilled.</p>
<p id="0rhxQY">“The toughest man in the history of the business is just playing dad,” he says, a smile creasing his face. He took in the scene, careful not to interject the feelings it stirred inside him. Finally, the full weight of Big Show’s words from five years earlier sunk in.</p>
<p id="qYHvbA">“I wanted to tell [his sons], ‘Hey, I would kill for Dusty and Haku to be in this photo together,’” he says. “‘I would kill if the old man could have a Bullet Club shirt on. Just enjoy it.’”</p>
<p id="iW7Tdz">Ten minutes pass. He breaks down the Okada match. He knew he’d get booed out of the building, so he turned himself into a billboard for American dystopia, marching out in red, white, and blue behind four men in masks commemorating some of the most controversial presidents in United States history — Clinton, Nixon, Reagan, and Obama. He smoked a Fuente 858, the unofficial Rhodes family cigar, on his way to the ring. Dusty would have relished the pageantry of it all. “I think he would have understood me as a performer more than he ever [had],” he says.</p>
<p id="mHDHdz">And then, abruptly, he circles back to Haku.</p>
<p id="iVZdyc">“That was so cool. Haku in the Bullet Club. Wearing his son’s shirt,” he says, but softer now. He’s stretched out longways across the booth, staring out the window into Los Angeles traffic.</p>
<p id="vMi9ED">“That guy, man. It made my day.”</p>
<p id="jsllkI"></p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/SklfFZNqoQv3Q-ToTEfYOiPaylw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10333061/IMG_0718.jpg">
<cite>Courtesy Chris Hall / Ring of Honor</cite>
</figure>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="Aw43cs">Three months after Long Beach, Cody signed an exclusive contract with Ring of Honor. He is free to work wherever he’d like overseas, but it marked the end of his vagabonding in the United States. He would get paid more to work less and do so only for larger houses. He won’t be visiting his father in those small venues anytime soon.</p>
<p id="6D03Ss">Cody doesn’t need it the way he used to. Dusty will be gone three years this June and he’s found a way to miss his father without it crippling him. Plus, like always, his career needs to be about more than just his heritage. “I can’t spend the rest of my life being the ambassador for Dusty,” he says.</p>
<p id="1imaxJ">Except it’s different now. The old insecurities are gone, perhaps because, for the first time, he suspects there’s more of Dusty in him than he realized. Brandi finds it hilarious. Maybe her husband is finally getting in on the joke.</p>
<p id="XgB74i">“He has no idea. It’s annoying that he doesn’t realize it,” Brandi says with a roll of her eyes. “Those two were two of the same person, just with a little bit of a generational gap.”</p>
<p id="aj7qpc">No one in the family — certainly not Michelle — ever bought that Cody was so much more her child than Dusty’s. He’s a born storyteller, just like Dusty, and he’s become so good at embellishing that even Brandi struggles to ascertain the truth within his more fanciful tales. Dusty was always shit with money, something Cody — whose tongue-in-cheek life motto is “Spend it now, make more later” — definitely inherited. And Teil has no doubt that, were Dusty in Cody’s position at the end of his WWE days, their father would have walked out, too. “[Dusty’s] own brother once told told my mom, ‘He was the king of movin’ on,’” Teil says.</p>
<p id="XTH94E">Most of all, Cody has his father’s mind for the wrestling business. There’s a little bit of Dusty in each character tweak and gimmick update, in Cody’s eternal hunger to keep his character fresh. This year, he’s set his sights on producing a signature event of his own. It’s called All In, and it was born out of a <a href="https://twitter.com/codyrhodes/status/864546973461950465?lang=en">Twitter bet</a> with wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer. It’s been nearly two decades since a non-WWE wrestling company packed a 10,000-seat arena in the United States. Last May, a random Twitter user asked Meltzer if ROH would break the cycle. “Not any time soon,” he replied.</p>
<p id="j1hvuL">So Cody partnered up with the Young Bucks and set out to prove Meltzer wrong. On September 1, they’ll hold All In<em> </em>at the Sears Centre in Chicago. It’s still half a year away from fruition, but Cody has had versions of the full card drilled into his head for months. Maybe this can be his <em>Starrcade</em>. “Maybe,” he says, “it’s a gift to my dad.”</p>
<p id="LXH93J">Apart from permission to use contracted talent and some help with logistics, they’ve asked nothing from Ring of Honor. They’ve turned down bulk sponsorships, and plan to fund it largely with their own money.</p>
<p id="cACaBZ">“Some people think it’s the dumbest thing ever and some people think it’s the smartest thing ever,” Cody deadpans.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="2NJjKo">There’s no real reason for it, other than they want to try it and they believe they can pull it off. Which, for Cody, might be the very best part. It offers a window into the man he’s still becoming — his father’s son. For once in his life, he isn’t making a business decision. It’s a cowboy move.</p>
<p id="zGzo7R"><a href="https://twitter.com/mikelikessports"><em>Mike Piellucci</em></a><em> is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. He is a former staff writer at</em> Vice Sports, <em>and his freelance work has been featured in </em>Sports Illustrated, Los Angeles Magazine, <em>and </em>Deadspin.</p>
<p id="p20P11"></p>
<p id="UzIchA"></p>
<p id="8w600t"></p>
<p id="1cGaDq"></p>
<p id="8ZN4sJ"></p>
https://www.theringer.com/2018/3/6/17072332/cody-rhodes-dusty-rhodes-all-inMike Piellucci