How Cody Rhodes Feels About Dusty Rhodes Getting Brought Up in His WrestleMania 39 Program

Cody Rhodes' Road to WrestleMania took a personal turn last week when, while trading promos on Monday Night Raw with Paul Heyman, the subject of "The American Dream" Dusty Rhodes was brought up. Rhodes stated he would always respect Heyman for the role he played in helping the Rhodes family get back on its feet more than 20 years ago when Heyman booked Rhodes on a number of ECW events in 2000. Heyman started to well up, but then turned the topic on its head when he brought up how Dusty had trained and molded so many of WWE's current stars when he was the creative director and trainer down in NXT in the final years before his death. 

One of those wrestlers was none other than Roman Reigns, the reigning Undisputed WWE Universal Championship. Heyman then claimed Dusty told him just before he died that Reigns was the son he always wanted, infuriating Cody. He said that all he wanted to do was win a wrestling championship, but everybody wants to make it personal. So now, thanks to Heyman, he'll personally take the titles away from Reigns at WrestleMania. Rhodes then appeared on The MMA Hour on Monday and was asked how he felt about Dusty being a key figure in this storyline even though he passed away in 2015.

"One thing that is burned into my brain...I was watching WWE with my dad, he told me, 'When people say 'he (Dusty) would've loved this,' don't ever let them anyone ever say that about me.' There's a rule, it's my rule, not a big, serious rule, if you don't know Dusty — if you didn't train at NXT, if he didn't work with you, if you're just going for some cheap heat, you can't use him. Because he's not coming out here making the Bionic Elbow, he's not with us," Rhodes explained. 

"But in the case of right now, I'm playing on the a team and my dad is the head coach of the other. Because Bayley, Kevin (Owens), Sami (Zayn), Seth (Rollins), Roman, all these people he helped. And he didn't train me. Paul's not lying, he didn't train me. I know there's this (notion), 'Cody's always crying, he's always talking about his dad.' There's probably going to be a lot of that because I think about him so much heading into this situation solely because I think he's one of the very few people who thought this could happen for me. But he would lose it if he know I was wrestling Roman, one of his guys, in Hollywood, a place where he wanted me to be in the first place... The idea of all of this, I think my dad would be stunned by it."