All eyes were on independent wrestling on September 1st, 2018. Just over one year after a prominent wrestling journalist dismissed the idea of Ring of Honor running a 10,000 seat arena, Cody Rhodes and the Young Bucks co-produced ALL IN, the biggest independent wrestling show in history. Emanating from Chicago’s Sears Centre Arena, ALL IN was the event that helped inspire the launch of All Elite Wrestling and sent the indie wrestling revolution into full gear. While the show was very much a celebration of the greater squared circle world, ALL IN was far from three hours of patting each other on the back.
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ALL IN featured a number of instant classics that are still talked about to this day, none more so than Cody Rhodes vs. Nick Aldis. The American Nightmare challenged the National Treasure for his NWA Worlds Heavyweight Championship and emerged victorious, winning the ten pounds of gold with the same pinning predicament his father, the late Dusty Rhodes, used to win that very title.
Cody Rhodes vs. Nick Aldis 3 in WWE?
Five years later, Cody Rhodes and Nick Aldis find themselves in the same company once more.
Aldis made his official WWE debut earlier this month, being revealed as the WWE SmackDown general manager. Aldis’s on-screen responsibilities are strictly in a managerial capacity for now, but the 36-year-old still has plenty of prime in-ring years ahead of himself.
When it was suggested to him that Rhodes should give Aldis a title match should he win the WWE Championship one day, Aldis told Busted Open Radio that there is an “undeniable” story there.
“I will say, Cody and I, [our] rivalry, chemistry, story is sort of undeniable,” Aldis said. “He knows where I am., and I know where he is, and never say never.”
After Rhodes won at ALL IN, Aldis reclaimed the NWA Worlds Championship at NWA 70th Anniversary Show.
“That minute in Chicago with Cody when the bell rang,” Aldis reminisced about ALL IN in an interview with ComicBook.com in 2022. “That one minute where it was just sort of like, ‘All right, this is it.’ There’s very few opportunities that I’ve had, having never had an opportunity with WWE, that I could really genuinely feel like all the eyes of the wrestling world are on me and this match right now. But I did feel that way in Chicago.”
