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Cody Rhodes Recalls Meeting With Vince McMahon About WWE Return In 2022

By John Canton • Published 23rd July 2023
cody rhodes wrestlemania 38 return

Cody Rhodes has revealed some interesting details about the private meeting he had with Vince McMahon leading to Cody’s WWE return in 2022.

With adrenaline in his soul, Cody Rhodes made his triumphant return to WWE at WrestleMania 38 in 2022 as the surprise opponent of Seth “Freakin” Rollins. Cody won that match and gave wrestling fans one of the best moments of that year.

From 2006 to 2016, Cody Rhodes worked for WWE and decided to move on after frustrations over where he was at in his career. Moving on turned out to be the best move for him because Cody thrived away from WWE.

In 2019, Cody was one of the Executive Vice Presidents that formed All Elite Wrestling. After three years there, Cody’s contract expired in early 2022 and instead of re-signing with AEW, he chose to talk to WWE about possibly going back “home.” As Cody has said on WWE television many times, his goal is to become WWE World Champion (or WWE Champion or WWE Universal Champion – whatever the company is calling it), which is something his legendary father Dusty Rhodes did not get to do.

This past week, there was a trailer for a new Cody Rhodes documentary covering his life, career and return to WWE last year. In the documentary, Kevin Owens spoke about how Vince McMahon flew to Cody’s house to try to convince Cody to sign with WWE again.

As the story goes, it was actually WWE’s Executive Director Bruce Prichard, who reached out to Cody to see if there was interest. That led to Vince McMahon, who was still running WWE at the time as the Chairman & CEO, and Bruce flying to Cody’s house in Atlanta to meet with him.

Chris Van Vliet posted a clip from an interview with Cody Rhodes from the Atlanta premiere of the documentary. The clip features Chris asking Cody about that meeting with Vince and Bruce at Cody’s house with Cody saying he was surprised that they knew about his AEW career.

“I think he (Vince) laughed. He has that like hahahaha! I remember going in to talk to him. I wasn’t afraid of anything and I was over-compensating because both Vince and Bruce were so welcoming and so positive about what I had done. The fact that they knew what I had done and actually were citing different things. Like ‘I saw this, I saw this,’ I couldn’t believe it.”

Cody would go on to say that Vince spoke about being a father while also mentioning the Rollins match at WrestleMania as well.

“He’s talking to me about what it’s like to be a dad for a daughter and how special it is. It was just beautiful. And then like, in the last 20 seconds of the meeting: ‘Well, Seth Rollins at WrestleMania.’ That’s where the only business came up. It didn’t feel like a meeting until maybe the last 30 seconds.”

The documentary about Cody is called “Becoming Cody Rhodes” and it premieres on Peacock on Monday, July 31st.

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