Back in late April AEW announced that Cody Rhodes would be taking on his half-brother Dustin Rhodes, better known for his time in the WWE as Goldust, at the Double or Nothing pay-per-view on Saturday night in Las Vegas. The day after the announcement, Dustin officially confirmed that he was no longer with the WWE. At age 50 the former Intercontinental Champion last wrestled a math for the WWE in June 2018, and a month later he had surgery done on both knees. The veteran wrestler has somewhat hinted at Saturday night’s match might be his last, and Cody seemed to confirm in a new interview with Chris Van Vliet on Thursday.
“I would think it is,” he said. “Now that has not been stated and we’re not putting some sort of element like that on it because that’s his decision and his world and one of the big things about this match is it’s really now or never.”
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Back in 2015 it looked like the Rhodes brothers were setting up for a WrestleMania match as they began feuding as Goldust and Stardust. However the feud was dropped after a brief match at Fastlane just a few weeks before the big show.
“They gave us Fastlane _ and it was a stinker,” Dustin said in an interview with Sports Illustrated this week. “You always want to have your WrestleMania moment, but we were denied that. We were told it wasn’t good enough to be on a WrestleMania.”
Later in the same interview he described wrestling at Double or Nothing, AEW’s first pay-per-view event, as his “WrestleMania moment.”
“These past two months have been very inspirational to me, and this Double or Nothing match feels like a WrestleMania moment for me,” he said. “I’m working my tail off in the gym, I’ve dropped weight, and I’m going to show Cody some things that Goldust has never done.”
In promos leading up to the match Cody has described the match as a battle between eras of wrestling rather than one between brothers.
“And this notion of brother vs. brother, of ‘Natural’ versus ‘Nightmare,’ it’s all very marketable, it’s all very romantic, albeit not very accurate,” he said. “What’s accurate is that this match is generation versus generation. I am not here to kill Dustin Rhodes, I am here to kill The Attitude Era. My entire lot, my whole class of peers has been compared to these gilded late 90s to early 2000s [wrestlers] for over a decade, and it’s an utter sham. Sure, you paved the roads for us, but gosh you set the speed markers at 35 because you are terrified of any of us putting our f–ing foot down on the pedal.”
