Cody Rhodes Admits Keeping Himself From the AEW World Championship Was a Mistake

Cody Rhodes added a stipulation to his AEW World Championship match with Chris Jericho at the 2019 Full Gear event — if he lost the match, he’d never challenge for All Elite Wrestling’s top prize again. He lost due to MJF turning heel and stuck to that self-imposed stipulation for the rest of his career, explaining on-camera that he never wanted to be accused of booking himself to become a world champion like how his father was. “The American Nightmare” went on to win the TNT Championship three times and help build up that title’s prominence, but in a new interview with Ryan Satin’s Out of Character podcast he admitted it was a mistake. 

“We wanted a wrestling company brought to you by wrestlers, for sure, that’s a huge part of the mission. But maybe it would have been better served for me at age 45 than it did at age, you know, 33, or whatever it was, I am just now entering the prime of my career. So to make political decisions, like boxing myself out of winning a world championship, those decisions, in hindsight, were not the correct decisions and what I should have been doing,” Rhodes said (h/t WrestlingNews.co). “I’m the best wrestler in the world. I can tell you that without it sounding braggadocious and it’s simply because this is all I do. I trained to do it. I live and breathe it, I have a school here with four rings. I treat this like an athlete in the NFL would treat a game.”

“But with that in mind, I would need to go and be that. I wanted to be both and it was just too difficult, and that’s where I did not have the maturity to balance it. It wasn’t a matter of being one of the boys versus not because I’m no longer just one of the boys. I love it and wish I could be one, but I’ve been in this position before. I’ve been on the other side. I’ve been in these production meetings and things of that nature and I’ve been part of the technical production. But I just think it would have served me better a little later in my life when I could look at a show and say I don’t want to be in the top spot,” he continued. “You need that good competition in your locker room, that positive real competition, and if I can’t be the best wrestler in the world on television because I’m afraid I’m going to offend colleagues, because I am also their boss, that was the situation we were in and I just played it in the middle. There was only so much playing in the middle I could do.”

He concluded by mentioning his goal of becoming world champion now that he’s back in WWE — “Now I’m not in charge of anything other than me and being a pro wrestler. I say to you, I’m the best wrestler in the world, and I felt like it for years. But now we’re in a situation where I do have to be careful of how I say it because I’m not carrying the belt. Brock and Roman combined these championships and you have your undisputed WWE Universal Championship. That’s the big one. I don’t have it. So that may be the main difference between me and the other best wrestler in the world is that one of them is wearing the title and one isn’t.”