Cody Rhodes has revealed he thought his in-ring work suffered while with AEW.
After leaving WWE in 2016, Cody Rhodes set about reinventing himself as a performer and set out on a journey that would change his career immeasurably. The American Nightmare wrestled in Japan, IMPACT Wrestling, and ROH to name just three, and eventually helped launch AEW in 2019 alongside Tony Khan, Kenny Omega, and The Young Bucks.
The star stayed with the promotion until February 2022 and won the TNT Championship three times as well as serving as Executive Vice President behind the scenes.
Interestingly, Rhodes now believes that trying to juggle a management role and a full-time in-ring career may have been a mistake.
Appearing on the Insight podcast with Chris Van Vliet, Rhodes said that his in-ring work suffered as a result of not wrestling frequently enough, and he wasn’t alone.
“I think the wrestling took a backseat right away. Because I thought, my bigger mistake. And this wasn’t an AEW mistake, this was a Cody mistake. My biggest mistake was thinking, I’ll stay as good as I am in the ring only wrestling twice, three times, maybe just once a month. Sorry. And the Gen Z crowd out there is about to lose their mind, and I hope they understand what I’m saying, you have to do live events. You cannot learn how to work a live audience unless you perform in front of a live audience.
So I was getting worse, as was everybody. Some of the best wrestlers, you name them, in that first year, the crowd was incredibly generous to us because we were new, we were fresh. Some of the stuff isn’t going to hold up just because we weren’t, we weren’t able to do this on the regular and get it down and sharpen our tools. And that’s just, maybe it’s just me, maybe it’s nobody else, but you have to be able to do it. So that’s an area where I think I was suffering from immediately.”
Cody Rhodes Blasts Reports About AEW Exit
During the conversation, Cody Rhodesclaimed he was subject to a disinformation campaign” from veteran journalist Wade Keller, who helped create a “fog of misinformation” around the situation.
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