Top WWE star “The American Nightmare” Cody Rhodes recently spoke with Ariel Helwani on The MMA Hour on a number of topics including The Rock making his return to the company and initially giving up his WrestleMania 40 main event spot to The Final Boss.
Rhodes said, “After I had conceded the main event to The Rock, I still thought, ‘I’m going to find my way there.’ I still thought that. It’s one of the reasons I stayed dead silent. I didn’t want to put an opinion on it. I don’t want to get into the backstage details. What was out there is what was out there. I just felt like I was still going to make it. Then, thankfully, literally millions of people made it so that I did get back.”
On what the Rock said to him after he gave up the spot:
“I would rather him tell you. It was something…this is the best answer I can give you. It was something that was extremely touching, but what was being taken away from me was weighing on my mind, that I felt a negative about what was a positive thing being said to me. The Rock can tell you what he said. I’ll leave that for him.”
On how he felt after the fans didn’t want to see Rock vs. Reigns:
“I just wanted to be quiet. In all the noise, I wanted to be quiet. It might be arrogance, and it might be me being naive; at that point, I felt like, ‘No, I’ve done everything.’ I kept thinking something good is going to happen from this terrible situation. Something good is going to come of it. I talked to Diamond Dallas Page, and he said, ‘No matter what happens, it will be the best thing that has happened to you.’ When you’re a pessimistic like I am, and he’s the most positive human being on the planet, you kind of want to be like, ‘Stop.’ He wasn’t wrong. Imagine had I not been in the WrestleMania 40 main event. The fire would still be burning. It would be completely out of control at this point. We didn’t have to do that because Hunter heard it. He heard what was going on. That was something that was so loud, he had to hear it, and I was lucky to be in that spot.”
You can check out Rhodes’ comments in the video below.
(H/T to Fightful for transcribing the above quotes)
