Dust to Dust

It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon in Tennessee and Cody Rhodes is telling a story.

Like many of the ones he tells best, it concerns his father, Virgil Runnels, better known as “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes, among the greatest professional wrestlers who ever lived.

It happened nearly a decade and a half ago, when Cody was 19. He and Dusty were driving home from breakfast at the local Waffle House in Marietta, Georgia, when Cody worked up the nerve to tell him that he wanted to join the family business. That he, too, would become a professional wrestler.

Cody was home visiting from Los Angeles, where, as he puts it, he’d “blown a lot of [his parents’] money” trying to become an actor. Before that, it was amateur wrestling, during which he won two state titles and earned a full scholarship offer to Penn State. Deep down, all of it was a distraction. He had dreamed of becoming a pro wrestler since he was a child, living vicariously through his father and his older half brother, Dustin, who has wrestled for the better part of 25 years under the name Goldust.

He knew he couldn’t begin his own career without Dusty’s blessing, and it would not come easy. It would not be enough to merely inform his father he wanted to wrestle.

So he announced, “I don’t want to do anything but wrestle.”

Dusty frowned. He looked, Cody remembers now, as though his son had just informed him that he’d gotten his girlfriend pregnant. He sat there silently behind the wheel of his champagne Ford F-250, mulling over how to tell the youngest of his four children that he did not want this for him — that Cody should, in fact, be an actor. Or go to college, or work a desk job, or do anything at all besides subject himself to a life of endless comparisons to his father, the kind that are impossible to live up to.

Except that wouldn’t be a very Dusty Rhodes thing to say.

“If Dusty was speaking to a homeless man and asked him, ‘What do you want to do?’ and the man said, ‘I want to be an astronaut,’ he would sit there with that man and create a plan about to get him to be an astronaut,” says Cody’s wife, Brandi. “He just believed in people, and he wanted to see them through.”

Which is why, after a few minutes that felt more like hours, Dusty Rhodes relented — on one condition.

“If you’re going to do it,” Dusty decided, “then be the best.”

Cody has told this story many times before. He has recounted it to an audience of thousands, at a national television taping, and to an audience of one — World Wrestling Entertainment chairman Vince McMahon, in McMahon’s office. At the time, he believed the latter telling to be a seminal moment in his young life, the prologue of a journey that would one day culminate in Cody winning the WWE Championship, the one title of significance his father never held. That, to him, entailed being the best.

Today, he tells it at a National Guard armory in Newport, Tennessee, population 6,833. The armory sits atop a hill at the epicenter of a trailer park whose homes rest on unpaved turnoffs off an unlit main drag. Clouds curl off the Great Smoky Mountains in the distance. In just over an hour, a few hundred people and a large mutt will filter in to watch him main-event Next Generation Wrestling’s “Round 2.” That same evening, roughly 600 miles away, WWE will host its Backlash pay-per-view event at the Allstate Arena in Rosemont, Illinois. The announced attendance is 9,800.

Dusty Rhodes has been dead for more than two years, a fact that has nothing and everything to do with why Cody, now 32, is the only man in Newport who could claim with a straight face that he’d rather be here, hawking his own merchandise from a plastic folding table jammed against a wall of bleachers, instead of performing for the biggest wrestling promotion on earth. There’s every chance he’d be on the same path were his father still alive. His career had stalled out, and he tumbled far enough down the card to convince himself he’d never measure up as a main eventer in the WWE’s eyes. In the final months of Dusty’s life, they’d privately discussed the possibility of Cody leaving the company to strike out on his own.

“If you don’t think they’re taking you to the top, then you need to coordinate with them. ‘Hey, are we going this direction?’ And if not, you need to get out,” Cody recalls Dusty telling him.

But it was only after Dusty’s death in June 2015 that Cody channeled his frustration into a course of action. If he couldn’t honor his father by achieving what Dusty couldn’t, then he would do it by emulating what Dusty had. Cody walked out on WWE and a guaranteed six-figure paycheck in May 2016 to barnstorm the country, crisscrossing small venues and independent promotions the way Dusty had decades earlier in wrestling’s territorial era. He became “The American Nightmare,” a sneering twist on his father’s sobriquet, one befitting a world where the United States is better suited to play the bad guy. He wanted to prove his worth.

Courtesy Chris Hall / Ring of Honor

That still doesn’t explain why Cody is here, of all places. Business is booming: Over the past year, he’d been a regular for every major non-WWE promotion in the country as well as New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW), arguably the most respected wrestling company in the world. Several organizations approached him about a long-term deal. He refused, continuing to stuff his calendar with smaller dates like the one in Newport, oftentimes several in the same weekend.

He isn’t traveling so much as searching. Closure has proved elusive. He sat alongside his mother, Michelle, in a hospital room for nearly 30 hours uninterrupted, as they watched Dusty wither away in front of them. She urges her only son to forget what they saw, but Cody cannot. Sometimes, he’s not sure he even wants to. The hospital represents their final memories together. “Pain is my last connection to him,” he says.

Cody has never been diagnosed with depression, but his family believes he weathered some form of it, especially in the first year after Dusty died. Cody lashed out on Twitter and cried at shows. He loves the history of the sport and so he’ll routinely turn on the WWE Network, where his former employer broadcasts decades’ worth of old matches, with the intent of burrowing into some unfamiliar corner of the past. Somewhere along the way, he always finds himself watching his father’s work instead.

The closest he comes to catharsis is inside a wrestling ring, but never the ones in big arenas or at television tapings. It’s in places like Sacramento and Seattle and Spartanburg, South Carolina — small buildings and loud crowds. Those were the types of venues Dusty liked best. Cody isn’t much for religion and he’s unsure of what awaits in the afterlife, but he knows in the very depths of his soul that in the right building, on the right night, he’ll feel his father’s presence more than if he stood by his tombstone.

Which is why, later that night, Cody Rhodes is steeling himself for more than a professional wrestling match as he vamps behind the curtain in black tights, white boots, and a black leather jacket with an American flag plastered on the back.

His theme music, a snarling rock anthem called “Kingdom,” hits and he bursts through to the crowd. He makes it to the ring apron in time for the pre-chorus.

And my father said
When I was younger
Hard times breed better men

He’s here to see Dusty.

Dusty Rhodes was a legend. In the South, he was a cultural icon.

He was born in Austin, Texas, but cultivated his name throughout the Southeast in the 1970s and ’80s as one of the most charismatic performers wrestling had ever seen. He radiated authenticity through his years at the top of the National Wrestling Alliance, and when he arrived in WWE (then still the WWF) at the twilight of his career in 1989, they saddled him with a “Common Man” gimmick that was too on the nose only because he never needed shtick to seem relatable.

In a sport that prizes physique, he was a headline draw with a paunch, jowls, and an unruly mop of blond hair. He proudly billed himself as “The Son of a Plumber,” and the most famous promo of his career was a love letter to unemployed workers who lost their jobs to automation and outsourcing. His death was among the select few in professional wrestling that became a national event — TMZ even ran the 911 call — in part because arguably no wrestler in history succeeded in becoming so roundly beloved.

“I had somebody reach out to me [after his death]. Growing up, he didn’t have a father, but he knew at 6:05 on Saturday, Dusty would be there,” says Teil Gergel, Cody’s older sister. “He thought of him as a dad. We heard that a lot.”

He got married in 1965 at 20 years old and had two children, Kristin and Dustin. He spent the first part of his career as an absentee father and husband, the worst sort of wrestling cliché. He paid for it, first with a divorce, then later with a five-year estrangement from Dustin at the height of Dustin’s own wrestling career.

His second chance came in 1978, when he remarried Michelle Rubio. This time, he got things right. He had two more children, Teil and Cody, and became, as Teil puts it, “aggressively supportive.” Dusty retired from in-ring competition in 1991. He transitioned full time into a career behind the scenes, creating events and story lines as a booker for the now-defunct World Championship Wrestling. The family settled in Marietta, Georgia, a short drive from his new office in the CNN Center in downtown Atlanta. He became a fixture at school plays. He coached football.

Cody was the fourth child. He sees himself as his mother’s son. Dustin profiles as a lankier, less fleshy version of their father, but thanks to Michelle’s genes, Cody looks the part of a matinee idol, with a tight jawline, abs and, until a recent dye job, dark brown hair. His personality bore even less resemblance to his father. Dusty was hard-charging and irrepressible, a raconteur whose borderline-unbelievable stories made barrooms revolve around his orbit. Like Michelle, Cody is serious and introspective, the star athlete who also wrote poetry for his high school literary magazine. Dusty wore denim and flannel. Cody favors suits and pocket squares. Dusty hunted and watched baseball. Cody reads comic books, plays Zelda, and binges sci-fi.

Before his first tour with New Japan, Cody had a conversation with Tiger Hattori, a company staple who had known Dusty for decades. It reaffirmed every suspicion he had about his father, at once his idol and his opposite.

“You’re nothing like him,” Hattori said. “You’re like a businessman. He was a cowboy.”

Nevertheless, father and son were inseparable. They didn’t need common interests. Instead, Cody says, “we bonded over his efforts.”

Dusty didn’t understand Star Wars, certainly not like Cody did, but that didn’t stop him from driving to the local video store one day when Cody was in school to pick up the original trilogy box set on VHS because it contained a glow-in-the-dark Yoda action figure his son pined for. And when, somehow, the Yoda was nowhere to be found in that box, Dusty Rhodes drove back to the same store and laced into the clerk so badly that, a week later, it arrived in the mail directly from that man’s home address.

Dusty knew nothing about amateur wrestling when Cody took up the sport in high school. It didn’t stop him from attending every match and wearing the same outfit — jeans, flannel, and a Cleveland Browns T-shirt sent to him by a team equipment manager; Cody says he went undefeated in his junior year, and Dusty thought his outfit brought his son luck.

Even then, Cody understood how the world saw him. Marietta can feel smaller than it is — smaller, still, when your father is the most famous man in town. Cody’s opponents on the mat stared him down as though they were wrestling Dusty Rhodes instead of Cody Runnels. A victory meant a story to tell. Cody rarely surrendered one, but that never stopped them all from trying, from eying him the way they did.

He loved pro wrestling so much that, years later, he convinced himself he could withstand it forever. He had just turned 21 when he debuted in Ohio Valley Wrestling, WWE’s developmental territory at the time. By then, he was neck deep in what would become the defining conflict of his life: How much is he Dusty Rhodes’s son and how much is he his own man?

He introduced himself that way in wrestling only once, in his very first tryout. “I’m Dusty’s son,” he said, and it felt so unnatural that he never did it again. For a while, he tried to conceal his heritage at all costs. He even denied it to Brandi shortly after they first met, when she was working as a WWE ring announcer under the name Eden Stiles.

“My canvas, if it’s a big piece I’m putting together, it has so many links to the history of my family, whether I want to publicly place them in there or I don’t,” he says. “You’ll never have a clean slate.”

Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images

There was no more hiding when he was called up to the main roster, but it helped that he played characters as far removed from Dusty as possible. His breakout angle came alongside Randy Orton and Ted DiBiase Jr., two other descendants of prominent wrestling families. The trio, dubbed the Legacy, traded on a sense of entitlement their famous fathers never had. That begat “Dashing” Cody Rhodes, in which he claimed to be the most handsome man in WWE. When he broke his nose in a match, he paid out of pocket for a clear protective mask he’d seen former Detroit Pistons star Richard Hamilton model in the NBA. He was now “Undashing” Cody Rhodes. He listened to “The Music of the Night” from The Phantom of the Opera to ease into character before each show.

He won his first Intercontinental Championship in 2011, shortly after his 26th birthday. It was the company’s traditional dividing line for upcoming talent, a chance to catapult himself into the main-event picture or forever moor himself to the midcard. Every week, he pitched segments to creative. More often than not, they’d bite. He could feel himself inching closer to his dream.

“It was the most happy I ever was,” he says.

Still, the insecurity never faded. Eight months later, he was in a hotel ballroom in Miami, plotting out the biggest match of his life. It was WrestleMania XXVIII and he was scheduled to drop the title to the Big Show, a gargantuan who had known Dusty since the WCW days. The two wrestlers holed up in one corner of the room. In another, the Rock and John Cena were talking strategy ahead of the biggest main event the company had put on in years.

There was a loud banging on the door. It swung open and Dusty came swaggering into the room, to the delight of everyone but his son.

“What’s the finish?” he razzed Big Show, knowing full well the answer. “You guys should rethink the finish!”

Cody was mortified. Don’t be, Big Show told him later, after Cody practically shoved Dusty back into the hallway. “I would have killed for my dad to have come in the room just then,” he said.

“And I felt like an asshole in that moment,” Cody says. “But I didn’t get it until [later].”

Nor did he get it when, a year and a half after that in 2013, he stood backstage at WWE Battleground in Buffalo with his father and his older brother, preparing to wrestle with Goldust — Dustin’s bizarro WWE persona — as a tag team for the first time, with Dusty in their corner. It was the final reconciliation of the Rhodes family: the famous patriarch, the prodigal son, and the crown prince. All Cody could think about was how they’d be coming out to Dusty’s music — trapped forever in his shadow. “Being a prick,” he says now.

They won that night and Dusty stole the show. His knees were shot and he spent most of the match stationed near the ringpost in boots and a cowboy hat, observing the action. The crowd reactions ebbed and flowed; nothing the four men in the ring did held their attention. But the audience rose to its feet when it saw Dusty amble toward Dean Ambrose, the other team’s cornerman. He chucked his hat in Ambrose’s face, pulled off his belt and whipped it wildly. Then, the coup de grace: a Bionic Elbow, Dusty’s signature move. The building came unglued.

Dusty loved Westerns, and when Cody watches it back, he sees an aging gunslinger limping into battle one last time. He had no way of knowing that it would never get better in WWE than that night, with three of them hugging and crying and hollering in celebration, true emotion bleeding into the ring.

He began to team with his brother regularly, which worked until it didn’t. Cody and Dustin were 16 years apart. They grew up in different homes, became different men, and had wildly different relationships with their father during adolescence. The partnership was fraught with tension.

“[Dusty] didn’t want them to tag … just because of their personalities and the pressure,” Teil says. “While they love each other and they’re brothers, Dad thought that was not going to end well.”

WWE

He was right. Eight months later, creative asked Cody to become Stardust, a takeoff on Dustin’s character. Goldust wore face paint and a leather bodysuit, so Cody did, too. Dustin shaved his head and now Cody would, too. Teil had gotten wind of it before Dusty, and she braced herself when he called one afternoon while she was driving.

“Have you seen what they’re going to do with Cody?” he asked, according to Teil. The break in her father’s voice told her everything she needed to know about his opinion.

Cody was skeptical, too, but he threw himself into the assignment. WWE gradually gave him more leeway with the role and Cody sold himself on interpreting it as a comic-book villain. He turned off the Andrew Lloyd Webber soundtrack and found a new muse in Jim Carrey’s interpretation of the Riddler in Batman Forever. Every night, he painted his face while watching Carrey blow up the Batcave. He created a lexicon for the character, and before long Stardust babbled on about “the Cosmic Key” and “the Fifth Dimension.” All of it worked better than it had any right to. Still, Dusty was wary.

“This is not going to go the way you think,” he warned Cody.

Things fell apart in the spring of 2015. Creative finally split up Stardust and Goldust, only to pit them against each other, with Dusty playing the father caught in between. In the story line, Stardust had consumed Cody Rhodes, poisoned him against his family. “Cody Rhodes is dead,” he hissed at Dusty during the climactic promo, “and as far as I am concerned, so is my father.”

His family hated it. Soon enough, Cody did, too. The angle never paid off in the climactic match the family expected, and once the feud ran its course, WWE was out of ideas for the Stardust character.

He and Dusty spoke every day, be it over the phone or in person, smoking cigars. Cody’s future became a regular talking point. Now more than ever, he needed to find his place in this world his father helped build.

“You’re 29 years old,” Dusty told him. “You can stay there and continue on the path there. You can take the money or you can do something else. Only you can decide what you want to do.”

He was nowhere close to the answer. And then, in the middle of those deliberations, Dusty died.

For years, it was accepted fact that Dusty Rhodes had battled stomach cancer, but his family has no idea how that story took hold. They say that it isn’t true. After his passing on June 11, 2015, it was widely reported that the events that led to his death began with a fall in his Orlando home a day earlier, which isn’t quite true, either. According to Cody and Michelle, Dusty Rhodes died of septic shock, and to this day, Michelle believes her husband might have died where she found him, slumped in a rocking chair in their bedroom, had she not awoken in the middle of the night.

She spent 20 years as an operating room technician, and for months her medical training had told her something was very wrong with him. In fact, something already was: Dusty had been diagnosed with hepatitis C about eight months earlier. But he was responding well to treatment, and Michelle says she had weaned him off sodium to ease the strain on his body. His blood work was consistently strong. He’d even showed up to work at his latest job, as a creative writer, trainer, and de facto father figure for WWE’s developmental brand, NXT, on June 9, the day before he collapsed.

The hepatitis C diagnosis didn’t explain the fatigue. Or the weight loss. Or the encroaching feebleness that led Dusty to read Teil’s two children a bedtime story in their mother’s room the last time he saw them, because he couldn’t make it up the stairs to their bedrooms. Those were on top of various other ailments his body accrued from decades of wrestling and hard living, like the smattering of keloid scars and the lower legs that had long turned black from fluid accumulation. He was 69 and slowing down, but this was something more.

“You’re not that old,” Cody would admonish.

Cody got the call at Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport. He and Brandi had moved into a house in nearby Denton only a couple of weeks earlier. It was long in the making — a dream delayed by dread.

“It was literally one of my biggest fears, us moving to Texas and him dying,” Cody says.

Now he was confronting it on the airport tarmac just after his flight home from that week’s WWE shows had landed. “I think this is it,” Michelle told him. He opened an app on his phone and booked a flight to Florida before he’d even deplaned.

WWE

Dusty was awake when Cody arrived. Friends and family had trickled in throughout the morning, much to the old man’s chagrin. He hated hospitals and doctors and, besides, this was all ridiculous anyhow. “Why are you here? Y’all need to go,” he grumbled. His back was killing him; maybe it was the hospital bed. Otherwise, he felt fine.

It was lunchtime when the doctors confirmed he wasn’t. His heart rate was irregular. They decided to intubate him shortly before dinner. While he was under, a medication would stabilize his heartbeat. He motioned to Michelle. “My angel,” he called her. A few final words were spoken between husband and wife. Then Dusty closed his eyes.

No one in the family remembers when, exactly, his vitals began to crash. There were eight of them in the room by then, but instead of kicking them out of the ICU, the hospital staff simply ushered everyone into the hallway. Everyone, that is, except Michelle Runnels. There was no point in subterfuge: She knew the medical codes.

“They treated us differently than they treated other families,” Cody says. “Sometimes, I wish they had treated us like other families.”

Which is why no one stopped Cody from walking back in a few minutes later. Over the final 30 hours of Dusty Rhodes’s life, almost everyone in his world had left the hospital at some point, either to shower or sleep or change clothes. His youngest child did none of those things. Apart from those few minutes in the hallway and a quick walk to grab coffee, Cody sat wide awake at his father’s bedside in the same blue Hugo Boss polo and Armani Exchange jeans, clothes he would later ask Brandi to throw away because he could no longer stand the sight of them.

He was there when Dusty’s organs began to shut down, and when they hooked him up to a dialysis machine to boost his flagging kidneys, and when Michelle agreed to let the attending physician paddle Dusty’s heart in an attempt to correct its rhythm, which in turn could reset his organs into proper function. He heard the music blaring from the dialysis technician’s headphones as he pierced Dusty’s arm with a needle — too loud for 2 a.m., Cody thought, and was the tech even paying attention? He watched a throng of medical students observe his father getting electroshocked, trying to reconcile his inner turmoil with their pedagogical detachment.

He talked to Dusty, encouraged him, which was stupid because his father couldn’t hear him, or could he? In which case he’d be foolish to stop now, so he kept going, even though he couldn’t think of much to say. Why couldn’t he? Why did he allow himself to succumb to the notion that he was watching his father’s last moments on earth, to wonder what happens when he’s gone? “That’s a terrible way to think,” Cody told himself. “Stay on message. Stay positive.”

Mostly he just stared up at the left corner of the room, where a small monitor displayed Dusty’s blood pressure. Dusty stood a chance if those two numbers dipped just a little bit, so Cody fixated on the monitor’s pixels, willing them in the right direction for so long that the hours seemed to melt together. “Almost long enough to drive yourself crazy,” he says now.

It was nearly dawn when Dusty lost oxygen to his brain. His eyesight was gone and he faced a lifetime of physical and mental incapacitation, presuming he’d awaken. The back pain, the family says, was a harbinger of an infection his doctors didn’t uncover until it was too late. Michelle decided against an autopsy, but she says that she thinks it originated in his kidneys as a side effect of his hepatitis C medication.

Living that way would have been the worst fate imaginable to Dusty Rhodes. Years earlier, he and Michelle tended to his mother and her father after age rendered them incapable of caring for themselves. “Living death,” Dusty and Michelle called it. Long before Dusty ever stepped foot in that hospital, Michelle says that he provided his wife with a directive that superseded all others. “Don’t ever let me get like that,” he told her.

And so, nearly a day after he first arrived, Cody Rhodes was moved to pray — not for his father’s survival, but for an easy, painless death.

“I don’t know what I believe in — heaven, hell, I really don’t know — but I do think there’s more to this than this,” he says. “Whatever that was, I felt he would be better there than laying in a hospital bed for months or however long.”

Michelle directed Dusty’s doctors to discontinue medical care, surrounded by his family. By then, he was so bloated from the medication that he barely resembled himself. “This isn’t my husband,” Michelle would say each time someone new entered the room, whereupon she’d reveal a photograph of them together as proof. Then she made a request. Out went their children and spouses, the nieces and nephews — including, finally, Cody himself. The medical staff helped her detach the IVs and tubes from Dusty’s body, and then everyone but a single nurse left, too.

There, nearly alone in that room, Michelle Runnels washed the body of her husband of almost 37 years.

“I’m an old Southern woman,” she says. “We bathe our dead.”

When it was over, Cody had been awake for two days straight. Brandi begged him to go to sleep. He knew she was right, but he couldn’t see the point. “It didn’t matter to me. It just didn’t matter,” he says, slowly, piecing the words together like he’s processing a betrayal. In a sense, it was. The life he knew wasn’t supposed to evaporate so unexpectedly.

“Maybe that’s why I sat there the whole time, because I was so shocked by it all,” he says. “I thought I would be shocked again and he would wake up. Or I’d be shocked and there’d be something about science and medicine I don’t know, and he could kick out. But he didn’t.”

No one needed to ask who would do the eulogy. Cody invited all of his siblings to talk, but he was hell-bent on going last. The father of a close friend told him to speak from the heart, which amounted to well-intentioned bullshit — the heart alone could never convey all the things Dusty Rhodes did and meant. Cody spent two days writing his remarks, then paced the theater room of his new home memorizing every word and inflection. “I didn’t want to look at that paper once,” he says.

Cody told Dusty’s mourners about the love notes his father wrote Michelle and his penchant for mentoring wrestlers no one else would bet on. How he promised Cody his prized gold Rolex whenever his son did win that WWE Championship, never letting on that he’d pawned it years earlier to finance Cody’s acting lessons. Cody referenced Big Fish, a Tim Burton film about a son and a dying father and the father’s lifetime of stories, all of which — implausibly enough — had some element of truth to them.

“Big Fish is my life,” he says now.

He closed with a request. Don’t just dream, he implored, because Dusty Rhodes had done so much more than that.

“Have an American Dream,” he told them.

Photo by Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images

Professional wrestling has a complicated relationship with death. The sport trades on nostalgia, and few mediums are more adept at paying homage to fallen idols — largely because few are better equipped to profit. Entire careers have been made by it. In a single story line, WWE once leveraged the abrupt death of former world champion Eddie Guerrero to make an onscreen character out of his widow and elevate his friend Rey Mysterio to a run with the world title.

So when Cody returned to work a month after his father’s death, it was a reasonable assumption that, sooner or later, he’d revert to being Cody Rhodes. The WWE audience clamored for it. His friends and family did, too. He couldn’t carry on Dusty Rhodes’s legacy playing a character who disavowed every shred of it.

Cody himself was less certain. Dusty was on WWE’s writing staff at the time of the Rey Mysterio angle, and he had bristled whenever someone suggested Eddie would have loved it.

“His thought was, ‘How do you know? You really can’t know,’” Cody says. “I never forgot that.”

It felt cheap to use this as the fulcrum for a long-awaited fresh start — to effectively be rewarded for his father’s death. Not that anyone had approached him to do so in the first place, which was its own bizarre indignity. In the coming months, WWE peppered NXT with tributes to Dusty. It established an annual tournament called the Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic. Many of the wrestlers wore yellow polka dots, a staple of Dusty’s “Common Man” character. The company championed them as “Dusty’s NXT kids.” Meanwhile, his own son was stuck in a gimmick long past its sell-by date, no endgame in sight.

“Yeah, ‘Dusty’s kids’ are cool but his actual kids actually work there, too,” Teil would grouse.

Cody soon found himself in a tug-of-war between what was easiest and what he wanted. On the one hand, he was crumbling. He’d returned to work too soon, which was already a week later than planned. He was supposed to show up on television in Chicago, which got derailed when he was confronted in the airport by collectors beseeching him to sign pictures of Dusty. “I landed, flipped out, and flew back home,” he says.

Stardust became his armor. All those old story lines Cody once hated came in handy now. No one could ask Stardust about his father, because he had none. Cody could show up for work and go home, and paint on a blank canvas in between. He felt safe.

“I’d rather be Stardust because I don’t have to be me,” he’d think.

But underneath, he was still the same man who aspired to be World Champion. That dream felt more urgent than ever with Dusty gone, and Cody knew he’d never get there on Jim Carrey histrionics. He began to politic to become Cody Rhodes again, mapping out story lines and character arcs. He even had new gear made.

Creative nixed it. He tried harder — more angles, different avenues. If they listened to him once, they could do it again. He grew more discouraged, which in turn made him more depressed. But he kept at it. All it would take is the right idea.

It went on that way for more than six months. In one pitch meeting, the writer across from him didn’t even power his laptop on, but he pantomimed typing to humor Cody. Cody wanted to choke him. He found Brian “Road Dogg” James, a retired wrestler now working as a WWE producer, and seethed. “I would have knocked him out,” James told him. Dusty wouldn’t have sat through the indignity in the first place. Cody, ever the businessman, did nothing.

“I kind of wish I had a little of that in me,” he says.

The nadir came on a tour of the United Kingdom that lasted nearly two weeks. The company traveled by charter, and every night before the plane took off, he’d stop into a duty-free shop to pick up a bottle of Southern Comfort — he swears it tastes better overseas — and some Diet Coke. He’d sit next to Cesaro, a Swiss wrestler who’d become a good friend, and get stone drunk while they watched old matches of Kurt Angle, a prolific talent who nearly destroyed himself through substance abuse.

“Nothing felt cool about it,” he says. “It felt more like, ‘This is legit pain reduction.’ … I wasn’t a big party guy and yet here I am downing half a bottle of Southern Comfort every night.”

Around the end of the year, he began to contemplate life outside the company in earnest. He calls it his “escape,” and he spent six months making preparations. He chatted up Kevin Owens, a protégé of Dusty’s who had worked the independent circuit for a decade before WWE. What could he make? Cody wondered. Where should he work? How much should he charge promoters? Who should he talk to about merchandise?

WWE

Yet the WWE cocoon was all he’d ever known. More than that, leaving would definitely close the door on that world title, possibly forever. He wasn’t ready for that yet, so he tried some more. The conversations with creative became less about offering ideas than seeking explanations. He just wanted answers.

“What am I not doing?” he begged them. “Because if you tell me what I’m not doing, I’ll try to do it right. If you think I should gain weight, if you think what I’m doing in the ring is not up to par — tell me how to fix it.”

But in their eyes, he was fully realized. Not everyone can be world champion, after all. “The WWE is a play,” Paul “Triple H” Levesque, a semi-retired former world champion and the company’s executive vice president of talent, live events and creative, told him. “Everybody has their role and needs to act it their best.”

“The best actors don’t want lesser roles,” Cody shot back.

NXT was Levesque’s brainchild. That made him Dusty’s boss. The two men, however, enjoyed a relationship that went far beyond employer-employee. They knew each other for more than 20 years, ever since Rhodes gave Triple H his first big break as a wrestler by hiring him in WCW. Levesque was the first person in the company Cody notified after Dusty died. He helped ensure that WWE paid Dusty’s medical bills and handled security at his funeral. Levesque was the one who pushed for Dusty’s memory to remain omnipresent in NXT. He fought back tears before a 10-bell salute on the first show after Dusty’s death.

It made Levesque and Cody’s relationship a complicated one. Dusty was both their greatest connection and their greatest disconnect. On one side, a man who loved Dusty like a parent, who resolved to do right by his family after his death. How could Cody be unhappy after all he’d done? On the other, Dusty’s son, who’d spent his whole life trying to figure out who he is outside his father’s shadow. Why couldn’t Levesque understand that doing right by Dusty and doing right by Cody were two different things?

At last, Cody reached his breaking point. He made an ultimatum.

“I’m not putting on that fucking suit again unless I’m doing it to tell the story of me coming back as Cody Rhodes,” Cody told Levesque.

“And I thought he’d understand that,” he says now. “He did not. It wasn’t his dad. And at the end of the day, he does so much for Dusty. But I’m not Dusty. Dusty is not here.”

Two weeks later, on May 16, 2016, Cody was backstage at Raw in North Carolina’s Greensboro Coliseum. Dusty loved that building. It was the site of his first great triumph as booker, Starrcade ’83, in which Ric Flair defeated Harley Race for the NWA title, and where he himself won the title from Flair two years later. Cody was bumped off television that night, a healthy scratch. He stared at his locker. On one side sat the Stardust suit and makeup. On the other, the test gear he had made up to return as Cody Rhodes. He thought about the legends who’d dressed in that room three decades before him — about Flair and Race and Ricky Steamboat and, of course, his father.

“What would any of those guys have done if they thought they had a brand, if they thought they had value?” he says he asked himself. “And I knew it was not, ‘You’ve got to be coming back to work.’ I knew.”

He called Mark Carrano, WWE’s vice president of talent relations, to request his release. Carrano couldn’t believe it: Wrestlers rarely walk out of their own volition, and Cody was practically family. He had grown up in WWE, came from wrestling royalty; he’d have a job for life if he wanted one. “Don’t do anything rash,” Carrano told him.

Cody had his mind made up. He told Carrano he would release his own statement by Saturday, a move designed to back himself into a corner. “I knew if I tried to keep this contained within me, I wouldn’t do it,” he says. On Sunday, he was officially a free agent.

That afternoon, he tweeted a two-page statement detailing what precipitated his departure from WWE. It made headlines for being unsparing — three former members of WWE’s creative team declined comment for this story — but ultimately it resonated as a message of hope. “I do believe the cream rises to the top and hard work prevails,” he wrote. “My work just needs to be elsewhere.”

(When reached for comment, WWE offered the following statement: “Creative differences aside, Cody has always handled himself in a very professional manner. His future is clearly bright, and we continue to wish him nothing but the best in everything he does.”)

He got right to work. He jotted down a checklist of dream opponents and must-have experiences, then asked Brandi to copy it in cleaner penmanship. He tweeted a snapshot of hers, which went viral. Before long, he was living those experiences. He showed up in early September at Pro Wrestling Guerrilla’s Battle of Los Angeles, the one event on his list, with his wife in tow as his personal ring announcer. She introduced him as, among other things, “The Grandson of a Plumber” and “The Star That Left Them in the Dust.”

A year after watching his matches in a drunken haze, Cody wrestled Kurt Angle three times on two continents. The only tag team on his list, the Young Bucks, instead became stablemates that December when Cody joined the Bullet Club, New Japan’s most prolific faction and arguably the most recognizable faction in professional wrestling today.

Courtesy Chris Hall / Ring of Honor

He felt rejuvenated, but it came at a price. The barriers were down. There are hundreds of Newports in independent wrestling, each with their own crowd eager to interact with someone that national television made so familiar but always kept at arm’s length. Mostly, they want to talk — and, in the first year especially, talk about Dusty.

He has to remind himself sometimes that Dusty was theirs, too. Cody has his own memories of his father, loving a man they’ll never know, but the character on television, shimmying and elbowing and booming on the microphone? Cody has no more right to that than anyone else did. Dusty’s fans had mourned, too.

He was now the public face of the Rhodes family, which made him the conduit for their grief. It was touching. It was exhausting. Several times a week, in venues around the world, he felt like a one-man receiving line at his father’s ongoing wake. Some shared stories. Others offered gifts. One fan even brought him a pair of Dusty’s ring-worn boots.

“I loved your dad,” they’d tell him.

“I loved him, too,” he’d respond.

“He was my favorite wrestler.”

“He was my favorite, too.”

He was still fragile. His new life was a firehose of warring emotions, one that could overwhelm him without warning. He found himself in tears at appearances and after matches. One particular Raw segment devastated him. In it, one of Dusty’s favorite pupils, a female wrestler named Bayley, gave Goldust a small Dusty-themed teddy bear as a gift, only for two other wrestlers to snatch it away and tear it to shreds.

“Whoever produced that, I hope they never know what this feels like,” he tweeted. The internet pounced, as it is wont to do, and he added a follow-up. “I’m not perfect,” he said. “I just miss him.”

Now more than ever, Cody embraces the implications of being Dusty Rhodes’s son. He worked his heritage into multiple story lines at Ring of Honor, arguably the country’s second-largest promotion after WWE. He became their world champion on June 23, 2017, making him and Dusty only the second known father-son duo in United States history to hold major world titles. Three days later, he tweeted a picture of his new belt. A small action figure of Dusty rested atop one of its gold plates.

“I think everything he does in wrestling is somehow tied into, ‘Would Dusty like this?’” says Matt Jackson, one half of the Young Bucks. “‘Would Dusty approve of this? Would Dusty respect this? Is this something Dusty would do?’”

A week and a half week later, Cody sits in a back booth of a restaurant in a hotel near Los Angeles International Airport. He had just worked two nights in Long Beach for New Japan’s first shows on United States soil. He headlined the first show, against the company’s wildly popular champion, Kazuchika Okada. But he couldn’t stop talking about what had happened the second night.

He was on the undercard, working a multi-man tag match with fellow Bullet Club members. Among them were the Guerrillas of Destiny, two Tongan American half brothers whose father, Haku, is among the more revered tough guys to ever wrestle. Haku led his sons to the ring that night in a Bullet Club T-shirt tucked into dad jeans, his belly gently stretching the group’s trademark skull-and-bones logo. Cody was thrilled.

“The toughest man in the history of the business is just playing dad,” he says, a smile creasing his face. He took in the scene, careful not to interject the feelings it stirred inside him. Finally, the full weight of Big Show’s words from five years earlier sunk in.

“I wanted to tell [his sons], ‘Hey, I would kill for Dusty and Haku to be in this photo together,’” he says. “‘I would kill if the old man could have a Bullet Club shirt on. Just enjoy it.’”

Ten minutes pass. He breaks down the Okada match. He knew he’d get booed out of the building, so he turned himself into a billboard for American dystopia, marching out in red, white, and blue behind four men in masks commemorating some of the most controversial presidents in United States history — Clinton, Nixon, Reagan, and Obama. He smoked a Fuente 858, the unofficial Rhodes family cigar, on his way to the ring. Dusty would have relished the pageantry of it all. “I think he would have understood me as a performer more than he ever [had],” he says.

And then, abruptly, he circles back to Haku.

“That was so cool. Haku in the Bullet Club. Wearing his son’s shirt,” he says, but softer now. He’s stretched out longways across the booth, staring out the window into Los Angeles traffic.

“That guy, man. It made my day.”

Courtesy Chris Hall / Ring of Honor

Three months after Long Beach, Cody signed an exclusive contract with Ring of Honor. He is free to work wherever he’d like overseas, but it marked the end of his vagabonding in the United States. He would get paid more to work less and do so only for larger houses. He won’t be visiting his father in those small venues anytime soon.

Cody doesn’t need it the way he used to. Dusty will be gone three years this June and he’s found a way to miss his father without it crippling him. Plus, like always, his career needs to be about more than just his heritage. “I can’t spend the rest of my life being the ambassador for Dusty,” he says.

Except it’s different now. The old insecurities are gone, perhaps because, for the first time, he suspects there’s more of Dusty in him than he realized. Brandi finds it hilarious. Maybe her husband is finally getting in on the joke.

“He has no idea. It’s annoying that he doesn’t realize it,” Brandi says with a roll of her eyes. “Those two were two of the same person, just with a little bit of a generational gap.”

No one in the family — certainly not Michelle — ever bought that Cody was so much more her child than Dusty’s. He’s a born storyteller, just like Dusty, and he’s become so good at embellishing that even Brandi struggles to ascertain the truth within his more fanciful tales. Dusty was always shit with money, something Cody — whose tongue-in-cheek life motto is “Spend it now, make more later” — definitely inherited. And Teil has no doubt that, were Dusty in Cody’s position at the end of his WWE days, their father would have walked out, too. “[Dusty’s] own brother once told told my mom, ‘He was the king of movin’ on,’” Teil says.

Most of all, Cody has his father’s mind for the wrestling business. There’s a little bit of Dusty in each character tweak and gimmick update, in Cody’s eternal hunger to keep his character fresh. This year, he’s set his sights on producing a signature event of his own. It’s called All In, and it was born out of a Twitter bet with wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer. It’s been nearly two decades since a non-WWE wrestling company packed a 10,000-seat arena in the United States. Last May, a random Twitter user asked Meltzer if ROH would break the cycle. “Not any time soon,” he replied.

So Cody partnered up with the Young Bucks and set out to prove Meltzer wrong. On September 1, they’ll hold All In at the Sears Centre in Chicago. It’s still half a year away from fruition, but Cody has had versions of the full card drilled into his head for months. Maybe this can be his Starrcade. “Maybe,” he says, “it’s a gift to my dad.”

Apart from permission to use contracted talent and some help with logistics, they’ve asked nothing from Ring of Honor. They’ve turned down bulk sponsorships, and plan to fund it largely with their own money.

“Some people think it’s the dumbest thing ever and some people think it’s the smartest thing ever,” Cody deadpans.

There’s no real reason for it, other than they want to try it and they believe they can pull it off. Which, for Cody, might be the very best part. It offers a window into the man he’s still becoming — his father’s son. For once in his life, he isn’t making a business decision. It’s a cowboy move.

Mike Piellucci is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. He is a former staff writer at Vice Sports, and his freelance work has been featured in Sports Illustrated, Los Angeles Magazine, and Deadspin.