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Cody Rhodes Talks Making New Stars in AEW

With all the talk of signing new wrestlers to the AEW roster, it's easy to get swept up the moment of hoping for someone like Brock Lesnar to make their AEW debut. But it's also worth considering the words of CM Punk, who said: "I think they should focus on who they have." During a conference call Wednesday ahead of the AEW Revolution PPV, Cody Rhodes discussed the need to make new stars in professional wrestling.

Cody Rhodes appears on AEW Dynamite - Credit: All Elite Wrestling
Cody Rhodes appears on AEW Dynamite – Credit: All Elite Wrestling

"I have heard in wrestling companies and the ones that I've been in how important it is to make new stars, and then I've seen people not make new stars," Rhodes said on the call. "Or I've seen people not push down on the gas when the right moment occurred. And here, there's such an open mind and Tony [Khan] runs such a different business that we are seeding. You don't want to have a top of your roster and then nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, and then a bottom of the roster. You do have to fill out the middle of the card, the preliminary matches, and then you're able to pluck from there and bring them up to the top, and then they might swing back down. But then the interest will be risen to the top."

"It's a whole formula, and I think we're the best at doing it because we had to do it," Rhodes continued. "We started with a lot of unknown people or a lot of people who had like a punk rock following where everyone told you about how great they were, but you really never heard of them or seen them. So we had to do it quickly. And if you look at, I mentioned Britt [Baker], I mentioned Ricky Starks, MJF, Sammy Guevara, and then you can look at somebody like Anna Jay, then you look at somebody like Jade [Cargill] and Red Velvet. That is our job. That is our job to make them so wanted and needed and seen that you have to have an action figure of them, that they have to get media requests. And to me, that's the thing. It's the most gratifying thing as a wrestler, other than when you win the title yourself, or win a title yourself, to hear the reaction for somebody who you just made."

"And I know we were talking inside baseball here" said Rhodes. "And I am by no means the salty old veteran. But I have been doing this since I was 15 years old. I've heard what that sounds like, and it's an absolute high that no drug on earth can give you. It's a very real thing. And I just hope we can continue to do it. And that will take not only looking at our own dressing room, our own locker room, it's gonna take looking out in the world and finding people. Bill Watts was the master at finding men and women from other walks of life, whether they're from basketball, baseball, gymnasts, things of that nature. You're going to have to look beyond just wrestling schools. And we do that at the nightmare factory. It's one of my favorite things to get a look at people. I'll tell you, one of the people we took a look at was Wardlow, and that guy's money in the bank. If I mean, that guy is absolute money in the bank, and he's young, and he's hungry. He just borrowed my Bret Hart book. Yeah, I hope we can continue to make stars."

Keep checking back, as Bleeding Cool is attempting to break the Guinness World Record for most clickbait articles churned out of the transcript of a pro wrestling media call, so we'll have lots more on the way from Cody Rhodes and AEW in the coming days.


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Jude TerrorAbout Jude Terror

A prophecy claims that in the comic book industry's darkest days, a hero would come to lead the people through a plague of overpriced floppies, incentive variant covers, #1 issue reboots, and super-mega-crossover events. Unfortunately, nobody can tell when the comics industry has reached its "darkest days" because it somehow keeps finding new lows to sink to. No matter! Jude Terror stands vigilant, bringing the snarkiest of comic book and pro wrestling clickbait to the undeserving readers of Bleeding Cool.
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