SPOTLIGHTED PODCAST ALERT (YOUR ARTICLE BEGINS A FEW INCHES DOWN)...
If one or two years ago, you said ESPN would be streaming its first-ever WWE PLE as part of a five-year partnership, you likely would have thought Cody Rhodes would be a centerpiece of the hype. Instead, he’s become a forgotten man.
Cody Rhodes, who is scheduled to defend WWE’s top men’s singles title on Saturday against Drew McIntyre, is but a footnote on the road to Wrestlepalooza. Cody, who seemed to be the final influence to sway John Cena to abandon his heel persona, beat John Cena to end Cena’s title reign. Storyline-wise, Cody saved the WWE Title from being retired with Cena, who threatened to break the lineage and thus be the “last real World Champion.”
Cody is arguably WWE’s top babyface star, especially if you take into account his available dates and his current place in his career arc. The only competition to that classification is Roman Reigns, but his dates are so limited that when he returns to TV, you can flip an hourglass and before the sand runs out, WWE will have executed an angle to write him off of TV for several months again.
On today’s ESPN Media Call touting their new relationship with WWE, they billed John Cena vs. Brock Lesnar as the main event. It was the only match mentioned on the line-up.
ESPN exec Matt Kenny said that before the call started, he and his colleagues were sharing stories of their WWE fandom. He reminisced during the call about watching WrestleMania 1 and 2, so he goes way back.
What concerns me about ESPN’s executives who are giddy about their association with WWE is that they are casual fans who are out of step with the ticket-buying public. In our PWTorch.com poll asking which match you – a website-visiting pro wrestling fan – are most looking forward to, Cena-Lesnar is in second-to-last place behind the tag team title match. It sits in fourth place with 9 percent of votes so far.
Now, Cody vs. Drew is in third place with 10 percent, so hardly a big gap there. Number one is C.M. Punk & A.J. Lee vs. Seth Rollins & Becky Lynch with 51 percent. This poll isn’t scientific nor necessarily representative of the mainstream casual audience ESPN is hoping to add to their viewership, but it still says something worth noting, which is Cena vs. Lesnar is not the runaway most appealing match to WWE fans. I’d argue that if you conducted a scientific poll, Cody Rhodes would be regarded as WWE’s centerpiece lead babyface and main wrestler they’re paying to see. (Although, without question, C.M. Punk, Rhea Ripley, A.J. Lee, Roman Reigns, and others would get a lot of votes, too.) It’s time WWE and its partners start treating him that way.
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John Cena’s lack of graciousness this year toward Cody Rhodes feels deliberate and even malicious or, if not, inexcusably negligent. Cena didn’t even mention Cody’s name in his initial promos building up his match against Cody Rhodes at WrestleMania (it got to the point that I texted WWE personnel and asked, tongue-in-cheek, if Cena even knew who Cody was). When Cena finally got around to talking about him, it was without reverence for how, since Cena stepped away, Cody represented the WWE brand that Cena professes to love.
Is it jealously because – unlike Cena – Cody has been largely universally cheered during his journey to the title and after winning it, and that Cody has been WWE’s top star along with Roman Reigns during a boom period that towers over Cena’s peak stretches by most relevant fan-interest-based metrics? I don’t know. But it’s peculiar.
When Cena has acknowledge Cody, he’s treated him like his “little buddy,” offering the 40-year-old established top star and big draw, “mentorship” whispers in his ear that feel inappropriate and condescending. Cody is not a 25 year old rising star eager for Cena’s endorsement and words of wisdom. Cena treats him that way, though.
Cena, after Cody carried him to the best match of Cena’s retirement tour at Summerslam, failed to show any appreciation for Cody’s performance or, storyline-wise, his grit and determination to take back the WWE Title. Cena couldn’t even muster a sense of disappointment in losing the title that, in the prior weeks, he professed was the defining aspect of his retirement tour.
Even worse, Cena has carried on with the term born out of a heel threat to ruin pro wrestling, calling himself “the last real champion” even after losing the WWE Title to Cody. He’s essentially downgrading Cody’s reign as something “less-than-real” while largely ignoring his existence. This is hurting Cody’s stature and all future WWE Champions. Cena’s words carry a lot of weight. This should be Cody’s time and his title reign shouldn’t be undermined by Cena, no matter how Cena tries to redefine and finesse this show of disrespect into something else.
When you launch Roku, the home screen features a poster ad for Wrestlepalooza featuring Cena and Lesnar, not Cody. The display ads populating websites are focused on Cena vs. Lesnar. Launch ESPN’s website, and the Wrestlepalooza background video features Cena and Lesnar.
Like with the Raw debut on Netflix, WWE is conveying to fans that the top stars in WWE are part-time, semi-retired or nearly-retired wrestlers from years ago. Once those top stars went away, viewership cratered, not unrelated to WWE treating the weekly centerpiece stars as secondary to the “guest stars” from past eras.
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I want to be clear, I’m not saying there isn’t value in past stars being featured. There is. But it should be done in the context of them being special attractions, not the top stars of the moment. WWE should be dictating to ESPN that Cody defending the WWE Title against Drew McIntyre is the main event and should be a focus of marketing. The marketing materials should, at the very least, feature Cody and McIntyre equally to Cena and Lesnar. The message sent to casual fans should be that there’s a new centerpiece champion worth checking out in addition to the nostalgia of a Cena-Lesnar match. That will carry on with benefits long past the buzz of Cena-Lesnar clips drawing big numbers on social media.
WWE should be using the ESPN platform to emphasize what weekly viewers already know – that most of all they’re paying to see today’s stars in the midst of their primes, not yesterday’s stars. Yesterday’s stars might bring some “lapsed fan” or “forever-casual fans” to the screen and ephemeral waves of social media metric peaks now and then, but WWE’s stretch of recent success pre-dates Cena’s retirement tour and exists entirely separate from any Brock Lesnar contributions. Cody, Drew, and Seth Rollins have slipped in references along those lines during promos on TV over the past couple of years during Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s disruptive meddling in WWE’s storylines that had a lot of momentum.
WWE’s current hot drawing period and expansion to two-night stadium-show events was during a time when Roman Reigns, Sami Zayn, Jey Uso, Rhea Ripley, and Cody Rhodes have been weekly fixtures of TV shows for long stretches.
When Cena is done at the end of this year and Lesnar isn’t around, WWE will be trying to convince fans that Cody and Rhea really are a big deal. But lately, they feel like undercard wrestlers based on the deliberate choices of WWE and ESPN in terms of who to market and mention. It’s misguided and unfair to Cody and out of step with the fans that brought WWE’s popularity to the point that ESPN “enthusiastically put pen to paper” to sign a deal with WWE for their PLEs.
This is Cody’s prime. He is the current champion. He has been successful at every thing WWE has asked of him. He should be the recipient of all the exposure of display ads, home screen video montages, and ESPN promotion. Instead, he’s feeling like a taken-for-granted upper-mid-card workhorse who is there to fill TV time but isn’t really the true top star.
(Wade Keller is the editor, publisher, and founder of Pro Wrestling Torch. He has covered pro wrestling since 1987. He studied journalism and economics in college, interned at a major market broadcast news station (KMSP in Minneapolis/St. Paul), worked at KFAN radio for two years in the 1990s, hosted the “Ultimate Insiders” DVD series with international distribution, hosted the “Wade Keller Pro Wrestling Podcast” on Podcast One and now on Spreaker, and has been a guest on the Steve Austin Podcast dozens of times as an analyst (nobody has been a guest with Austin more times). He has broken major pro wrestling stories in five separate decades and has interviewed some of pro wrestling’s most influential names in their longest insider interviews including Hulk Hogan, Scott Hall, Lou Thesz, Jesse Ventura, Jon Moxley, Jim Ross, Eric Bischoff, Bill Watts, Paul Heyman, Jim Cornette, Goldberg, Steve Austin, Vince McMahon, The Rock, Kevin Nash, and over 100 others including more than a dozen ex-WWE creative team members. He was inducted into the Tragos/Thesz Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame’s Class of 2015 for “Excellence in Writing on Professional Wrestling” in a class with Beth Phoenix, B.Brian Blair, Greg Wojciechowski, Jim Londos, and Matt Lindland. He continues to cover pro wrestling here at PWTorch.com and on the Wade Keller Pro Wrestling Podcast and appears regularly in pro wrestling documentaries. His email is kellerwade@gmail.com.)
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