Rhodes also went into detail about a pep talk he got from Nick Khan.
On April 2nd, 2023, it’ll be a full year since Cody Rhodes made his on-screen return to WWE. He scored a win over Seth Rollins in his return match and fast forward one-year later, on April 2nd, he’ll be challenging Roman Reigns for the Undisputed WWE Universal Title.
Rhodes reflected on his comeback as he was speaking to James H. Williams of the Southern California News Group. He stated that his first meeting with WWE in 2022 was not about a job or contract. Rhodes was seeking closure and looking forward to seeing familiar faces.
Well I think it’s one thing if you’re gone for a few months or a year and you come back and then you kind of yo-yo around and do it again. I’m not knocking that trajectory, but mine was different in the sense because it had been seven years (between stints with WWE) and we were past the point of no return or at least I thought. We were past the thought of, oh, I’m going back. Even the first meeting that I went to have (with WWE), it wasn’t about getting a job or contract. That first meeting was about having some closure and see some faces I haven’t seen in a while and I left that meeting strongly considering WrestleMania and then of course when I come back at WrestleMania, it was like obvious to me and I even said it on Raw that, ‘You find your destiny on the path you take to avoid it.’ When I say ‘outsider,’ I just don’t know everybody in the locker room. I’ve been doing a media tour with people I just haven’t done a media tour with before and I felt like I knew everybody here. So I just try to learn the team and there are a lot of unsung heroes that help make WrestleMania weekend happen… I’m just trying to reconnect with them or connect with them for the first time because I say I’m an outsider but you also want to be the quarterback and lead the team so you have to know everybody and what they do.
Elsewhere in the conversation, Cody recounted receiving a ‘pep talk’ from WWE CEO Nick Khan. It was an audio message that Cody described as ‘fiery’ and college football coach level.
I’ll share one and I hope he doesn’t mind me sharing… but I got a really nice message from Nick Khan that I thought would just be a really nice message and then I listened to it further and it was a full-blown fiery almost college football coach level pep talk. It went from some standard pleasantries to a legit pep talk and I thought it was one of the coolest things to receive. I had to learn how to figure out how to save an audio note on my phone because I didn’t know how to do it. That was something that really made me feel good. I don’t want to feel alone because I’m still a little bit of an outsider here but they certainly don’t treat me like one and that was a nice moment.
POST Wrestling’s review of the WrestleMania 39 go-home edition of SmackDown includes a recap of the WWE Hall of Fame ceremony and ROH Supercard of Honor.
