Cody: “The Greatest Revenge You Can Have Is Success”

ROH Superstar Cody [Rhodes] was a guest on Edge & Christian’s Podcast of Awesomeness, where he discussed the All In event and his vindication after leaving WWE.

Cody first explains that he didn’t believe he and The Young Bucks would sell all the tickets to All In:

“I did not think it was going to sell out! I mean, like, the character, and I’m fairly confident, but this is also the first-time promoter. I understand the concept of, ‘let me lay out this card,’ and what I think would be cool, and what I think fans want to see, but the other stuff is really just wild in terms of the amount of things you have to cover and whatnot. And I projected low. I thought 4,000 for the first month. And then, after that, we’d roll matches out, we’d push our sponsors. We have a budget for advertising and we didn’t touch that budget, so now we can buy some fireworks or something! I am very excited that it did sell out in the time it did and everything. Really, I’m flattered by it. I’m motivated by it as well. You paid us. We want to make it something incredibly special. It may only be the one time. There may only be one All In, so we’ve got to make it good.”

At length, Cody explained how All In came about and possible locations for the show if ROH contract disputes came up:

“We did a small venue to start that [War Of The Worlds] tour last year and it was the beginning of four days of what we call, ‘Bullet Club Parties’ where it was a sea of Bullet Club fans and merchandise and the meet-and-greet lines were out the door. And then, at the end of the show, we would try to send them home happy and the sentiment was so… just strong. The feeling was so [strong]. I didn’t want to leave. And the whole year ended up being like that in terms of these events, that we seemed to have captured a fanbase. And then, [Dave] Meltzer said his thing about Ring Of Honor not being able to draw 10,000 people. “I walked in the locker room and I said to Matt [Jackson], I said, ‘I know that you’ve thought about doing this big show. Let’s just google it. How much does this building cost? Let’s look it up.’ And in the meantime, Gary Juster, who works with Ring Of Honor, who I’ve known since I was a little kid, I said, ‘let’s get his ass in here. Let’s get him on the phone. Let’s see how much these buildings cost and see if we have the resources for it and let’s do it. And if we’re not allowed to do it because we’re domestically exclusive to Ring Of Honor,’ I said, ‘whatever. Let’s look overseas’ and we did. We looked in Dublin [Ireland]. We looked at the west coast. We looked everywhere.”

The former ROH Champion had to reportedly convince The Young Bucks that he wasn’t using the All In project as a way to catapult himself back to WWE:

“The Bucks had the idea of doing this and I think that I came in with a little bit of motivation to do so. And also, I let them know right away, ‘I’m not going anywhere. I’m not looking for this to be my springboard back to WWE. I love WWE, but I want to try this. I want to try what we’re doing.’ And I think that they needed to hear that they had a real partner. And, man, since then, it [has] been fun.”

‘The American Nightmare’ explains how ROH has treated him:

“Everything they’ve done since [debuting for ROH], for me, they’ve been firing on all cylinders. They had a 30% growth increase in their company through the year in terms of houses and dollars. They had a great year. And the management they have, Greg [Gilleland] and Joe Koff, man, they’ve treated me incredibly, incredibly well. I definitely have a sense of loyalty to them because of how wonderfully they’ve treated me.”

Cody explains how he feels vindicated now on the independent circuit:

“Yeah, no, vindication is one of my biggest words. I think the greatest revenge you can have is success and it’s more honest than anything else too. I mean, I could tell you all of the great things about WWE, but there is also at the end of the day, WWE didn’t think I was top and I thought I was top. And, to me, these types of moments have made me feel vindication and you kind of get that, ‘look at me now – I told you so’ type [of reactions], but I’m wired to where I don’t know why when these things happen, I don’t know, the world is not enough. I keep wanting more.”

Triple H reportedly called Cody to congratulate him on his ROH Championship victory:

“The coolest feeling in the world is to have text messages from people in our industry who don’t have to text you. They don’t. And somebody like Triple H telling me, ‘congrats for winning the Ring Of Honor title.’ it makes what we do real. My dad told me, ‘the only real thing that we do is the world title.’ And there [are] lots of world titles, but that one validated it for me and I was really happy.”

With H/T to WrestlingInc for the transcription.

Cody unveils the ‘Ring of Honor’ in the video below:

Cody Unveils the Ring of Honor

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