Vince McMahon Offered Cody Rhodes New Logos Until He Saw That Tattoo
Cody Rhodes has shared an interesting story about his discussion with Vince McMahon regarding his WWE return and the tattoo on Cody’s neck.
It was just about one year ago today when it was announced that Cody Rhodes was planning on leaving All Elite Wrestling, which was the company that he helped launch in 2019. After three years in AEW, Cody was going back to WWE to try to achieve something his legendary father Dusty and brother Dustin were never able to do – become WWE Champion.
For his WWE return match, the company decided to bring him back to the company unannounced. Since Cody worked for WWE for about a decade before his 2016 departure, fans of the company were very familiar with him and many of them watched AEW as well.
As Seth “Freakin” Rollins stood in the ring awaiting his WrestleMania 38 opponent, Cody’s voice was heard: “Wrestling has more than one royal family.” From there, the catchy song “Kingdom” song played and Cody Rhodes made his return to a thunderous ovation from the crowd. Cody beat Seth in a great match to complete his triumphant WWE return.
During an interview with Peter Rosenberg of HOT 97. Cody shared some interesting details about his meeting with WWE’s Vince McMahon about his return to the company in 2022.
“There’s a fun moment (from the conversation I had with Vince McMahon before my return to WWE). I had such a great conversation with him. If I had not decided to come back, I still walked out of that meeting with him feeling really good.”
Cody Rhodes would go on to talk about how Vince said that the company would create some logos for him, but Cody pulled down his shirt collar to reveal the very prominent American Nightmare logo tattooed on the right side of his neck.
“I brought him the old WWWF Title to show him because I have it. Dan Lambert gave it to me for free, shockingly but, he just made a comment, he goes, you know, ‘We have the best artists and Creative Services Department in the world. We can come up with some new logos for you’ and I remember I just leaned in and kind of went like that and showed him (pulled his collar down so McMahon could see the neck tattoo) and he just kind of did one of those classic laughs like, ‘Ha! Never mind. That’s it, that’s it.’ So he knew we really can’t change it at this point.”
“This is what it is and he said something really great to me that day. I stood my ground. I said, ‘I don’t wanna change a thing about myself including my song. I wanna have my elevator, I want all this’ and he said something, he goes, ‘Well that’s what we’re buying. It’s not broke’ and I thought, that feels good, because I hadn’t figured it out when I was here the first time. Everything was broke and that was a nice feeling.”
Looking ahead, Cody Rhodes has the biggest match of his pro wrestling career on April 1st or April 2nd at WrestleMania 39 when he challenges for the Undisputed WWE Universal Championship against Roman Reigns…or Sami Zayn if he beats Reigns at Elimination Chamber.