Dustin Rhodes Recalls His Father Dusty Not Liking Goldust Character
Dustin Rhodes is the son of wrestling legend Dusty Rhodes, but there were times when his father didn’t like what Dustin was doing with his career.
During his 30+ year wrestling career, Dustin Rhodes has worked for many major wrestling promotions including WWE, WCW, TNA and he has worked for AEW since the company started in 2019. Dustin is still actively wrestling even at the age of 53 although he is definitely slowing down.
When he started in WWE in 1995, he went away from using the famous Rhodes name (his real name is Dustin Runnels) and became one of the most unique characters in wrestling history: Goldust. That character pushed the boundaries in terms of how he acted in the ring and out of it. There were several wrestlers like Razor Ramon and Ahmed Johnson even had moments in their careers where they didn’t want to Goldust because of how weird he was.
It is also well-known that Dusty didn’t like what Dustin was doing as the Goldust character, but it was a case of Dustin wanting to do his own thing to establish himself as a pro wrestler and not just the son of Dusty Rhodes.
Dustin was recently on fellow AEW roster member Chris Jericho’s “Talk Is Jericho” podcast and he spoke about how his relationship with his father wasn’t in a good place when he agreed to portray Goldust.
“I had that in the back of my head, like, is he ribbing me for this? But at that point, I had been trying to follow in my dad’s footsteps for so long and it was like, ‘it’s not working man, I have to do something else.’ We had a falling out, which was the worst thing, the worst decision of my life ever –- you’ve got one dad, one mom, so it’s good to work things out, right? But we were in that downtime where we weren’t speaking to each other and Vince (McMahon) had just called me and he presented that and I just said yes.”
The good news is that Dustin and Dusty ended up repairing that relationship later. Dustin had some issues during his career that led to him leaving and re-joining WWE several times, but by the early 2000s came around, he had transformed Goldust into a more comedic character while still maintaining the ability to wrestle great matches.
As he continued, Dustin Rhodes mentioned his younger brother Cody Rhodes recalling how Dusty reacted to Goldust.
“[Cody] looked back at dad’s face, and dad’s face was like, ‘What … ?’ He didn’t know, and now his son is dressed up like this and he said ruining the Rhodes name or the legacy. I don’t look at it that way. I just look at it as me stepping into my own shoes and trying to do something on my own, and did it.”
Dusty Rhodes was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2007 with Dustin and Cody there to induct their father. In 2013, Dusty was on WWE TV with his sons when they became Tag Team Champions together, which was likely one of Dusty’s proudest moments. Sadly, Dusty passed away in 2015.