Cody Rhodes post-WWE career got off to a pretty good start last weekend with Evolve. Time will tell if the grandson of a plumber (h/t ReverendKain) made the right call, but he has a ton of independent dates and dream matches on his calendar, so... things look alright thus far.
He might have gotten started a lot sooner if he’d listened to his old man, the late Dusty Rhodes. According to a new interview Cody gave to the Wrestledelphia podcast, his Hall of Fame father was frustrated with how WWE was treating him and told him to ask for his release four years ago.
Asked if he thinks the American Dream would have supported his decision to leave WWE, Cody replied:
I know he would have supported it because he told me to ask for my release after WrestleMania 28. I waited until WrestleMania 32 to take his advice.
At 28, I recalled particularly, he was unhappy with the direction things were going with me and Big Show, and he just thought that I was so close to the keys to the kingdom, and they were slipping away, that maybe leaving would wake them to the idea that this is somebody who wanted to captain your ship and the way you guys are treating him has pushed him out. But it seemed at the time like kind of a leopard’s play, so it just didn’t interest me.
I wanted to stick it out, and I always tried to not take Pop’s advice, because he’s my dad, so the advice always came from that part of his heart, not the businessman part of his mind, but his heart, and actually at the end of my WWE career, he was right that I should have made that decision maybe a little sooner.
Check out the whole interview here for more from Rhodes, including how his half-brother Goldust took the news he was leaving WWE.