In this week’s latest Road to Double or Nothing, Cody Rhodes spent the entire episode delivering a promo in response to Dustin Rhodes‘ promo from the previous week, that set up the Cody vs Dustin match at All Elite Wrestling (AEW)‘s Double or Nothing on May 25. It was a powerful promo, easily Cody’s best promo to date, and arguably the best promo of the year so far (with honorable mention to David Starr).
Here’s the transcript of the entire promo:
I love my brother.
I have always loved my brother.
When you’re a little kid, going to the Omni in Atlanta, Georgia, and here he comes, tall and blonde, every woman in the place going absolutely nuts for him. I’d say at one point, he was my hero.
You know, there’s this regular jilted lazy trope commentators in wrestling will use, you’ll hear them say “The Prodigal Son”! And I have to wonder, I’m curious, who out there listening actually understands the morals and the implications in Luke 15:11 and that parable.
There’s two brothers.
One does everything right. One works very hard. Tries to keep his family whole. The other goes abroad, whores about, and makes every conceivable wrong choice you could possibly make. But it’s the first brother who is equally in the wrong because he has an expectancy from the father for all of his good deeds, but none of it matters. The father loved them the same.
I’ve sat on enough couches, telling my story, to know which brother I am, I’m good with it. And this notion of brother versus brother, of Natural versus Nightmare, it’s all very marketable, it’s all very romantic, albeit not very accurate. What’s accurate, is that this match is generation versus generation.
I am not here to kill Dustin Rhodes. I’m here to kill the Attitude Era.
My entire lot, my entire class of peers, has been compared to these gilded late 90s/early 2000s for over a decade and it’s an utter sham. Sure, you paved the roads for us, but gosh, you set the speed markers at 35 because you were terrified of any of us putting our f**king foot down on the pedal.
You mean to tell me, some pissant bodybuilder, making every match a No-DQ, meandering around the crowd, throwing the jib camera at his opponent, compares with a Kenny-Okada match?
Or some bra and panties SPECTACULAR can match up with what the women did last September 1st?
Or even Dwayne. As electric as it was, rhyming, raising…was it really better than what Punk said sitting on that stage?
Listen…I am the least Rhodes of the Rhodes. But they gave me a pair of boots, I’ve got the basics. When you do something to death, when you ride something to death, that’s literally what happens.
When that animal can’t go anymore, and it falls out on the trail, and you can feel the tension in its eyes, and it’s fluttered breaths of panic, and it knows it’s going to die, and it wants to die.
You don’t just leave it.
Because you love it.
You pull from the hip, you roll your fingers on the steel of the chamber, you pull the hammer back, you do not anticipate the recoil, and you blow it away.
Like I said…
I love my brother.
But as powerful as the words are, it’s definitely worth watching for Cody’s masterful delivery, that has set a new tone for the Rhodes brothers’ match on May 25.
