If Not Now Then When? - Thoughts on Roman Reigns & Cody Rhodes

While work continues apace on what is likely to be a bumper installment of my new “Bunkum & Bullshit” series, once again treading down the dark corridors of ignorance behind the door marked “Pseudohistory”, and in the hinterland between putting proverbial pen to paper on the final draft of my upcoming book and its far-off publication, as I ponder how the worst thing about history is how it just keeps on happening (Fukuyama in the mud), I realise that it’s been a little while since I wrote anything about wrestling on this here blog, and it was January the last time I put down my thoughts on anything contemporary.

I had intended some sort of Wrestlemania recap, but between the passage of time and, frankly, not having an awful lot to say about the show as a whole (it was typical of modern day WWE - the in-ring product was crisp and well-executed, but left me cold, and feeling that this genre of professional wrestling is simply not for me), I never did.

But while I didn’t have many thoughts on the show as a whole, I did, of course, have my feelings on the main event, and the main event picture in WWE as a whole. That’s what I’m going to explore, in a kind of stream of consciousness style, here. If you don’t want to know the results of a wrestling pay-per-view that took place ten days ago, look away…now.

That is to say, Wrestlemania is done, Roman Reigns won, Cody Rhodes lost, and we’re firmly on the road to Backlash in Puerto Rico.

Wrestlemania has, historically, been seen as the Season Finale of WWE, and with good reason. While Triple H claimed in a post-show press conference that WWE’s stories “never end” (though you wish some of them would), Wrestlemania has long been the logical stopping points - if not the end of the story, at the very least a new chapter, often a fresh book in the series, if I can stretch the analogy any further without causing lasting damage. Indeed, when a major win or title change takes place anywhere else, it can feel like a missed opportunity, or a diminished affair, something less of a ringing endorsement than if the same events had transpired in the main event of Wrestlemania. It’s particularly egregious in this case, when Cody Rhodes’ promos and interviews leading up to Wrestlemania were entirely about “ending the story”. If the story doesn’t end at Wrestlemania, then when, and where, and why?

That, really, is the question. If not now, then when? And if not Cody Rhodes, then who? I’m no great fan of Cody Rhodes’ in-ring work, and often find him a frustrating wrestler to watch when indulging his worst instincts, but it’s fair to say that in his return to WWE he has been doing some of the best work of his career. If not now, then when?

Cody Rhodes’ return to WWE at last year’s Wrestlemania was the sort of surreal and incredible image that makes people look fondly on the Attitude Era, despite much of the televised output of either major wrestling company at the time being utter dross. We could sit through unsatisfying two minute matches, illogical booking, and over-egged DQ finishes to punch-kick main events, because there was a genuine feeling of chaos, that anything could happen and, just as importantly, that anybody could show up. With two major promotions at war, and ECW nipping at their heels, there was a pervading sense in the days before 90 day no compete clauses and before most of us knew the ins and outs of every wrestler’s contract, that if a big name from one company had been off TV for a couple of weeks, they might be due to show up on the other channel. That’s what gave us the New World Order in WCW, and the electrifying debuts of Chris Jericho and Tazz in the WWF, and it’s what gave every playground’s token gossip and wannabe insider the confidence to claim, week after week, that Ken Shamrock was definitely coming back to the WWF next week.

Aspects of that have become toxic and poisoned wrestling ever since - a push for unpredictability above all else, for the “swerves” of Vince Russo, has missed the point, and drastically missed the appeal. Not knowing who might show up or what might happen next made for exciting television because the audience were along for the ride, but the worst excesses of the era are typified by swerves and shocks for their own sake, tripping up audience expectations until there were no expectations left but disappointment. To a certain class of wrestling fan, “predictable” remains a four-letter word (because they can’t spell), when predictability in storytelling is no bad thing - I could bang on about Christopher Booker’s Seven Basic Plots, or Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, but suffice to say that it’s predictable that Luke Skywalker defeats Darth Vader, or that Superman saves the world and gets the girl. Most stories are predictable, because the obvious conclusion is the correct one - you can throw in twists and turns along the way, so long as you nail the ending. But what is the ending, in a world where stories never end?

That brings us neatly back to Cody Rhodes. Since the closure of WCW, and the slow drip feed of its former big name talent into the WWE, major league debuts have been thin on the ground - Sting at the 2014 Survivor Series, or AJ Styles at the 2016 Royal Rumble come to mind, but most fresh signings lack the TV and big match experience that WWE look for in a top-flight talent, and have to work their way up the ranks through NXT and the undercard of RAW or Smackdown before troubling the main event picture. The days of Chris Jericho debuting by interrupting a promo by The Rock, or The Big Show making his first appearance by attacking Stone Cold Steve Austin in a pay-per-view main event, are long gone, and WWE’s dwindling supply of veterans and part-timers have struggled to fill the gap.

In that light, AEW was a godsend. Its early days were peppered with a sense that anybody could show up, from indie stand-outs to international talent and ex-WWE lifers, even Sting again. When it was announced that Cody Rhodes wasn’t renewing his contract with the promotion he helped found, and was instead on his way back to WWE, it was the first time that the direction of travel was reversed, and we all wanted to know what that would look like.

While Cody Rhodes had started his career in WWE, and spent the better part of a decade working there, his appearance at Wrestlemania 38 felt as much a debut as a return - this wasn’t Stardust, or the awkward young heel that fans had pegged as the inferior partner in a team with Ted DiBiase Jr., but the confident superstar founding father of AEW, the American Nightmare. WWE has, in the past, been averse to acknowledging wrestlers’ careers elsewhere, preferring to pretend that only what they did under the WWE banner (or, at a stretch, for other promotions whose video libraries they have acquired) ever mattered - Jeff Jarrett, returning in from the cold in 2018, was presented on television as the smooth-talking country singer of 1993, not the grizzled veteran he had long since become. By contrast, Cody Rhodes, with bleach-blonde hair, sideways glance and piercing stare, walked into WWE with the entrance music and routine he’d honed to micro-managed perfection in AEW, sporting the entrance jacket, ring attire, nickname and questionable tattoo (admittedly, not much you can do about that) that had come to define his persona outside of WWE. This wasn’t just the prodigal son returning, it was a message to any disgruntled AEW wrestler - if you’re unhappy over there, look how green the grass is growing in New York. This could be us, but you playing.

In his last days in AEW, Cody Rhodes had become an albatross hung around the company’s collective neck. While at first he was universally loved as the man who made AEW possible, a symbol of rejecting the corporate dollar to tread his own path, by late 2021 his tendencies towards melodrama, grand gestures, and convoluted matches had seen him gradually rejected by the audience. In WWE, he was welcomed as a hero - and, ironically, in part, it’s those self-same qualities that made him thus. Cody Rhodes was a product of the WWE system, and in AEW his measured promos and polished, stage-managed persona, as ripe for reality TV as for TV wrestling, made him an anachronism. In WWE, it made him seem right at home - his slightly odd verbiage, hammy over-acting and well orchestrated entrances, that all added up to make him seem somewhat artificial in AEW, in the cold, plastic world of WWE television made him feel like one of the only flesh and blood human beings in the building. While some of the founders of AEW were likely genuine in their desire to explore new possibilities, and to create an alternative to WWE, where wrestlers could earn a living and work free from some of the older promotion’s diktat, for Cody Rhodes it was only ever an exercise in proving his worth to the one promotion that truly mattered in his eyes - AEW, and everything that came before it, was, for Cody Rhodes, an exercise in forging himself into a WWE Superstar™ through sheer force of will alone. And it worked.

It’s strange to say that a horrific injury could ever be a sign of good luck, but when, just three months after his Wrestlemania return, Cody Rhodes suffered a pectoral muscle tear, it might have been the best thing to happen to his WWE run, particularly after he made the insane decision to wrestle still showing the visually horrific bruising caused by said injury. The enforced time off meant that Cody Rhodes was a natural fit for the classic babyface return narrative - overcoming injury to go on and win the Royal Rumble, main event Wrestlemania, and take home the gold. Not only that, but the time off allowed him to effectively do the big triumphant return all over again, and to avoid the vagaries of week-to-week WWE TV booking, never becoming just another face in the crowd, or the audience once again growing tired of seeing him.

Come Wrestlemania season, WWE managed an impressive balancing act of keeping Cody Rhodes a popular babyface even while the eyes of the world were on Sami Zayn - an exercise that WWE, historically, have failed to pull off, with the supposedly “organic” rise of one babyface often seen as diametrically opposed to another hand-picked, corporate option. We all remember Daniel Bryan, Batista, and Wrestlemania 30.

After twenty years of publicly treating their audience with contempt (and probably another twenty of privately doing the same), WWE Inc. are the biggest heel on WWE television - WWE managed are portrayed as anywhere on the spectrum between corrupt to incompetent, and sometimes downright evil, and the easiest way to curry favour with the audience is to insult the promotion, and to suggest that their television programming, or their booking, is terrible. It’s an unusual, and one would think undesirable, position to find your promotion in, and it’s stood in the way of WWE attempting to build new babyface stars ever since John Cena first Five Knuckle Shuffled on to the scene. Indeed, the meta-narrative behind Roman Reigns’ current record-setting heel run is that it would never had happened were it not for that failure, or for the paradoxical security offered by a global pandemic that meant that live audiences were no longer a factor in WWE decision making. It’s been the case for so long that it’s easy to forget it wasn’t always thus - one thing that stands out when watching Chris Jericho’s aforementioned WWE debut is that, when he criticises WWE programming and calls it boring, he is roundly booed by the audience; in a couple of years’ time, that same criticism would elicit a chorus of cheers.

With Cody Rhodes seemingly the new anointed one, and getting the same golden boy treatment that saw AEW fans turn on him - “a major announcement from Cody Rhodes” as an advertised television segment - WWE ran a risk of falling at the first hurdle again, at making Rhodes the Batista to Sami Zayn’s Daniel Bryan, yet they managed to thread that needle expertly, helped along no doubt by a sense of ill-earned goodwill towards Triple H’s booking that would not have been extended to the previous (and future) Vince McMahon regime. So happy were the wider audience with Cody Rhodes as the heir apparent to WWE Title superstardom, that fans who had been chomping at the bit to see Sami Zayn dethrone Roman Reigns were content to, in the words of cantankerous wrestling types everywhere, “let it play out”. “It’s okay that Sami lost here, because it’s setting up for Cody at Wrestlemania”, they seemed to say.

Wrestlemania

And that’s where our story finds us. Wrestlemania. Night One saw Roman Reigns’ Bloodline take their first major hit in months, with The Usos losing the unified Tag Team Titles to long-term rival Kevin Owens, and former Bloodline honourary member Sami Zayn. The dominoes were falling in place for Roman Reigns’ world to crumble around him.

But we all know now that it didn’t happen. After a great match, and one that fell into fewer of the narrative and structural traps of other recent Roman Reigns matches - that being, in short, that he’s been doing this for long enough that we’ve seen all of his tricks - Cody Rhodes lost. Despite being ejected from ringside, Solo Sikoa returned to cost Cody the match, and the referee seemingly saw nothing suspicious in Solo then celebrating in the ring with his cousin to end the show. I may be banging an unusual drum in arguing for the credibility of the referee here, but given the number of ref bumps, distractions, and nonsense that went into this match, why bother with the ejection at all if it didn’t amount to any consequence? It may have served to give the audience false hope, which is no small reason to do something in the game of rising tension that is structuring a wrestling match, but coming as it did after multiple other run-ins and interference spots, it wasn’t warranted.

There’s an odd truth to WWE wrestling, that I think - beyond the overly polished and micro-managed veneer of big money corporate wrestling - gets to the meat of why the company increasingly doesn’t feel like it makes wrestling I want to watch. Their heels don’t cheat. When was the last time you saw an eye rake, a choke behind the referee’s back, or illegal use of the ropes in a WWE match, unless it was the finish? Even when it is the finish, a low blow or a grab of the tights on a roll-up is as likely to come from a babyface as a heel, while the announcers talk about how “turnabout is fair play”, or how “it’s all legal”. I have taught at referee and match structure/psychology seminars where I have repeatedly stated one simple truth - breaking the rules isn’t what makes the audience hate a wrestler, it’s the sense that they’re getting away with it that really incenses people. It’s transgression that people hate. When heels aren’t cheating, are they really heels? When babyfaces are as likely to cheat as heels, is it really cheating? When cheating is either overlooked or celebrated by the commentators that serve as the voice of the product, does it even matter?

And that’s where we are with Roman Reigns. He’s a dominant heel, who sort of cheats in that he has running buddies who get involved on his behalf, but there’s no consequence or admonition from authority figures when they do so. In this instance, there was admonition, but it was ultimately undermined. That’s fine if there’s a pay-off, but everything indicates that there won’t be, at least not any time soon.

What’s worse is that the neutral voice of the promotion - whether that be the announce team, or highlight reels and video packages - doesn’t present Roman Reigns as an insecure champion clinging to his title like Thorin Oakenshield driven mad with gold sickness, increasingly dependent on his family to do his dirty work and help him win matches. No, he’s talked of with awe as an all-time great, a record-setting reign that puts him in the conversation with the likes of Hogan and Sammartino. He is an all-conquering titan. The narrator is telling a different story to the text, and that’s a problem.

Post-Wrestlemania

Cody Rhodes, too, has fallen victim to the “conquering titan” narrative. In promos on RAW, he talks not of being robbed of the victory that was within his grasp, or of Roman Reigns needing to cheat and rely on outside interference to win, instead he talks as if he were defeated fairly and squarely by the better man. These are not the words of a babyface in the Dusty Rhodes mold, but most of all they’re not the words of someone who remembers the story so far, despite having been a key part of it.

After ending Wrestlemania flat on his back, tears pooling in his eyes, the triumphant returning babyface left the RAW after Wrestlemania once again bested and defeated, turned on by Brock Lesnar, who he inexplicably trusted would become his tag team partner. Some, like Sting, can weather the storm of looking like a too-trusting gullible idiot, but most babyfaces struggle to come back from being made to look like a loser one night, then a stupid loser the next. Cody Rhodes is moving forward into the next chapter of his story, in which he battles Brock Lesnar, presumably at Backlash, a show that Roman Reigns looks all but certain to be skipping.

Paul Heyman is likely to remain a supporting player in this story, meaning that a Roman Reigns rematch is waiting for Cody Rhodes later on down the line, but I can’t help but go back to the same question - if not now then when? Any rematch between Cody Rhodes and Roman Reigns is no longer a first-time ever match for the Cody Rhodes who triumphantly returned to WWE a bigger star than he left, who won the Royal Rumble, and challenged Roman Reigns in the main event at Wrestlemania at the height of his powers, it will be a match between Roman Reigns and one of the countless men Roman Reigns has already beaten.

One school of thought, repeated by the usual talking heads and wrestling commentariat after Wrestlemania, was that Cody Rhodes was too perfectly positioned, that it would feel too easy, that he needed a “struggle” before winning the championship. It’s a take so lacking in media literacy that I question if it understood the text of the story, let alone the subtext - and wrestling is a genre that wears its subtext so brightly and vividly on its sleeve that its unfair to call it “sub” at all. Cody’s entire narrative has been one of struggle - his struggle to make WWE see him as star material, his loss of his father, his efforts to find himself outside of WWE and return to prove himself, the horrific injury he suffered and wrestled through, and ultimately the Royal Rumble match and Wrestlemania itself. It was all a struggle, and a hero’s journey, and one that felt as real as real gets in professional wrestling. Can anyone honestly argue that a match with Brock Lesnar, and a couple of months trading wins on RAW with the likes of Austin Theory and Elias, would constitute a more compelling “struggle” for Cody Rhodes than what he’s already been through, or that he would come out the other side of this a better choice of champion than the Cody Rhodes that walked into Wrestlemania? Stranger things have happened, but I doubt it.

If Not Now Then When, If Not Him Then Who?

So Cody Rhodes wasn’t the man to end Roman Reigns’ title reign at Wrestlemania - might he be the man to end it elsewhere? Would a victory at Money In The Bank, at Summerslam, or in Saudi Arabia, carry anything like the same gravitas or emotional pay-off? Not a chance. After this long, would WWE even want to see Roman Reigns drop the title anywhere but at Wrestlemania? I doubt it.

So if not Cody Rhodes, then who?

The last man to pin Roman Reigns was Baron Corbin, way back in 2019. Since winning the Universal Title in 2020, Roman Reigns has defeated Braun Strowman, Jey Uso, Kevin Owens, Daniel Bryan, Edge, Cesaro, Rey Mysterio, John Cena, Finn Balor, Big E, Bobby Lashley, Montez Ford, Shinsuke Nakamura, Brock Lesnar, Sami Zayn, Seth Rollins, Goldberg, Drew McIntyre, Matt Riddle, Sheamus, AJ Styles, Logan Paul, and now Cody Rhodes.

It’s a litany of top draw talent for WWE today, in its recent past, and in some cases arguably its future. There is nobody meaningfully left to beat. Perhaps somebody who he has already beaten can be heated up enough for a rematch, but would a win there be better placed, more logical, or more narratively and emotionally satisfying than it would have been the first or second time around? Would it more satisfying than Cody Rhodes at Wrestlemania, or than Sami Zayn in Montreal after a year of build-up? And if someone was to be built up who isn’t already on the long list, they’d need time to get there, so how long are we talking? Until next year’s Wrestlemania? Perhaps Solo Sikoa would be the man to end it, breaking away from The Bloodline to go it alone, perhaps with Paul Heyman by his side against a newly babyface Roman Reigns? It seems plausible, and has the ring of truth to it, but it’s not happening any time soon. And as far as “Bloodline member vs. Roman Reigns” goes, is it better than Jey Uso? Or Sami Zayn? And if a Heyman-managed Solo were to win the belt, it would surely only be as an obstacle for a newly babyface Roman Reigns to conquer - and then we’re right back where we started, with the belt around Roman Reigns’ waist, and nobody in a position to beat him.

That’s one option. The next, prompted by a typical bit of social media self-publicity, is The Rock. Long-rumoured opponent for Roman Reigns, his own cousin, and a dangling carrot that has likely been half the justification for the “Head Of The Table” story and for the length of Reigns’ run so far. Could the big match between Roman Reigns and The Rock finally be on the cards for Wrestlemania 40 next year? Perhaps, but I wouldn’t put money on it. Even if it is, then what? The Rock isn’t sticking around to defend the title, and it would be a huge misstep to have Reigns lose in what would by rights be a generational passing of the torch. So then what? Roman beats The Rock, and we’re still in the position of having nobody to beat him, only with another year of vanquished opponents to add to the list, and no far-off possibility of a major dream match to justify it. And if there is someone ready to beat Roman - who knows, maybe Cody Rhodes will have sufficiently struggled by then, and he hasn’t lost the goodwill of the audience - would WWE have that title change take place on a secondary pay-per-view, or would something so momentous once again have to be saved for Wrestlemania?

That’s right. It’s a title reign I don’t foresee ending until Wrestlemania 41, in 2025, barring injury or accident, at the earliest. And even in two years time, I doubt we’ll be able to look back and think that there was any better time to end it than to Cody Rhodes at Wrestlemania, or to Sami Zayn at Elimination Chamber in Montreal. Wrestling is all about timing, and I’m convinced they’ve got it wrong this time.

If not now, then when? If not now, then who?