During an earlier stop on the press tour for Peacock’s American Nightmare: Becoming Cody Rhodes documentary, Rhodes confirmed what many of us suspected about the tail-end of his time in AEW. Namely, that by refusing to turn heel when a large portion of the fanbase turned on him, Cody had essentially turned heel.
Though Rhodes now thinks that approach was “a bit too meta”, at the time he & AEW had discussed where the angle was going (something that was always a little tricky as Cody also vowed to stick by an earlier stipulation that said he could never challenge for the company’s World title). Had he not left for WWE in early 2022, Rhodes told ComicBook.com that eventually...
“I was going to wrestle Sting. I don’t think I’ve ever shared that with anybody and nothing was on paper or anything like that. But I can say I got a tremendous offer from AEW creatively, financially, the full package. You won’t hear me say anything bad about AEW or Tony [Khan] or my time there. It was a tremendous offer, but the offer wasn’t right for me. What I wanted to get back to was the first goal that I ever had [winning the WWE championship].
“But yeah, that probably would’ve been the endgame. That’s what had been discussed, was to get one [match] with one of my heroes, Sting. And it’s one of those things, you can wrestle one of your heroes or you can work with one of your heroes and he can be the head of creative [Paul “Triple H” Levesque], you can’t have it all.”
ComicBook.com’s Connor Casey points out that AEW actually planted a seed for a Rhodes/Sting match back in 2020 when the Stinger debuted...
But now, with Rhodes looking to finish the story in WWE and Sting talking about finishing his career when his AEW contract expires, it looks like that will always be a “what if?” scenario.
Wish we could have seen “meta heel” Cody Rhodes vs. The Icon Sting?
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