Dustin Rhodes ditched the Goldust getup to pay tribute to his father, the late great Dusty Rhodes, when WWE hit the Greensboro Coliseum in North Carolina last night (Nov. 25, 2017) for Starrcade:
After, he got emotional talking about it:
"It was pretty special. When me and Cody fought The Shield, it was special, every time I've been with him in the ring it's been special. Tonight, he wasn't there, which was, you know... it was very emotional for me. Standing behind the video wall listening to the package that they put out of dad and knowing all of those promos by heart and just listening to it was like 'wow, this is so surreal.' It just brought it back. It's almost been three years since he's been gone. It was just incredible, and incredible feeling.
"My nerves, I was shaking. It was just like 'oh god, I don't want to let anybody down. Here I am over -- thank you, Daniel Bryan, for letting me come over here to SmackDown to do this Starrcade show, I really appreciate it.' It was an incredible experience to come out in my Goldust outfit but then it bust into the old Natural Dustin Rhodes theme song, which is just hideous. It's awful, it's an awful piece of music. But it's what I used to come to the ring to a long time ago and the people responded to it when I took off the robe and I had Dustin Rhodes stuff on, which was very cool.
"Standing in that ring, which I've done in Greensboro so many times, but standing right there as Dustin Rhodes where they had more than one Starrcade, I believe, where I've been in attendance watching from the upper deck with my friends -- you can't beat that. I mean, it was... I can't explain the feeling. Very, very emotional. It's like the whole match that I had, which wasn't very long, thank god, cause I'm starting to get old, I don't remember, really. I just remember crowd reactions, and faces, and smiles. People lit up because Ric Flair, Arn Anderson, Ricky Steamboat, Dusty Rhodes they ran the Carolinas. People came and they bought tickets to see them. They're household names here and they're household names around the world. I'm very lucky, very blessed to be in the family that I'm in. The Rhodes family has a pretty damn serious pedigree and legacy and I'll do my very, very best to uphold it as long as I can, my brother Cody to uphold it as long as we can. And to make everybody proud and love the Rhodes family.
"It was very special to me tonight. Right now, as it stands, it can't be topped."
That’s pretty damn cool.