Cody Rhodes makes some curious comments about press conference slander in AEW

As the new WWE Champion, Cody Rhodes has been doing a ton of media to promote his spot at the promotion’s top star, especially as he gears up for his first Premium Live Event title defense at Backlash this weekend against AJ Styles.

In one such interview, with WWE’s Peter Rosenberg on Cheap Heat, the “American Nightmare” was asked about his current fandom for AEW and whether he still loves the promotion he helped found as an original EVP. While Rhodes still wants to see AEW succeed for more reasons than one, he did present some pretty interesting opinions in his response that could have fans scratching their heads across the IWC.

“The narrative changed a lot about my contributions to AEW. That was very disappointing. There were some people, I’m not going to say their names, they know who they were, who kind of tried to put some propaganda out when I left. There’s a quote in the Young Bucks book about how I was last to the signing. Me, Matt, and Nick are as close as ever. So glad I had them in my career and my life. If we are being honest, AEW does not happen without me. It doesn’t. With that in mind, I could never root against them. It’s like having a kid, and they go off to college, and they get a DUI, or they get in trouble. I’ll always have that in my heart for them,” Cody Rhodes told Cheap Heat via Fightful.

“It was certainly a wound that is more gaping and painful than people realize because now they look at the situation, ‘Oh man, you’re on top of the world, you have everything.’ They don’t understand that I really gave everything I could. I did. I could never see a day where I was rooting against them. From a completely outside-of-me perspective, my relationship to AEW, my friends, the kids I signed, and the people from my school. From outside of that, it’s very important that they hang in there because if that were to go away, I don’t think anybody in the locker room has any clue of the financial repercussions that would have on the wrestling business. The trickle-down effect that would have on independent wrestling. We’ve created a really comfortable environment in sports entertainment for men and women to feed their families and to do well, and be treated on a level that their global penetration asks for. I would hate to see that bubble burst. That’s a random fear I have when they’re down or if they’re up or whatever it may be. I would never root against them, in any case. That’s not always easy because random things said about you at press conferences, and that’s a big no no, you should never say me or my wife’s name, Tony should have told you that. I’ll never root against them, I really won’t.”

Alright, so there are two trains of thought in regards to Rhodes’ comments; either he’s playing into the storyline that the new Elite are bad boy heels who have changed AEW for the worst, as they did lay out Tony Khan and force him to wear a neck brace to the NFL Draft, or he took particular offense to… something someone said in AEW as of late, be that Toni Storm’s AEW Dynasty press conference or maybe Swerve Strickland’s first promo on AEW Collision with the AEW World Championship. Either way, very interesting indeed.