Undisputed WWE Champion “The American Nightmare” Cody Rhodes appeared on Insight with Chris Van Vliet to discuss various topics, including how he and 17-time World Champion John Cena organized their SummerSlam 2025 match.
Rhodes said, “Well, I never was one to get mad or get in my feelings over WrestleMania 41 because it was part of a larger story. That is a hard sell, though, for a WrestleMania, especially when the year before you had the completion of over several decades of a journey, and at a 10-year Mania, you’re involving luminaries and legends. It’s a feeling that’s good, a good feeling, as Shawn Michaels will say, the good stuff. So when you go into 41 and you’re doing 1/4 of your story, and you know your story goes all the way to SummerSlam, I never was not committed, and I never doubted John. I hope he knows that, because I know he talks about this match, so I feel comfortable talking about it, but I never doubted, hey, well, this is what we’re doing now, and this is what we’re going to do, then this is what we’re going to do when we get to SummerSlam. You asked though, how we put it together. I have a really great photo of how we put it together in the most old-school fashion ever. He wanted to have a cigar where he was staying in New York, and this was the night before. I figured I like cigars, it is one of my favorite things, maybe the most Cuban thing about me. I went there, and I realized after dinner and stuff, maybe an hour in, that we were talking about tomorrow. But we were just talking about it differently than you talk about it at the ringside area. We were talking about it, then we would talk about something else, and then we’d slip back into it, and it was the most I think I’ve ever focused in my mind. Because once we go past something, I don’t want to forget it. Remember that idea, I don’t want to forget it. So I ended up going to my hotel that night, and I had it all. I had everything, and I kept making sure. I think I was telling Brandi, and I was making sure I had it. I had what we had talked about. Because with an old school guy like him, you may actually go out there the next night without seeing each other, which is wild in 2025-26. But with John, that was a possibility. He could have just yelled his whole version of it, or I could have yelled my whole version. But that was a really special moment, because I got a lot of pictures from it, and I didn’t share any except maybe one of us signing at the tables. But I got to be with my friend at the end, and I got to not just be with my friend, but I got to have the responsibility that I think anyone in the business would want. I got the responsibility of being booed in Vegas. I got that responsibility of being the one who can survive. Hey, yeah, you may not be the hot thing right now, but if you’re going to be QB 1, you have to be able to survive, and I got to be able to be in there with the guy who survived more encounters than anybody in our business with split crowds, for him crowds and hostile crowds.”
On Cena using the Codyvator:
“I don’t want to tell you whose idea it was, but I can say this, there’s a guy backstage who runs Gorilla. Shout out to him, Temarrio. He does not like the Codyvator. I like that he calls it the Codyvator, because we could easily just call it a lift like it’s denoted in a production budget. But he doesn’t like the Codyvator, because the Codyvator is pretty expensive, and if we’re only going to use it for me to come up and I prefer it’s only me. But I joked with him a lot that, hey, look, dude, we’re getting bang for your buck here, two uses of the Codyvator, and it made him feel better about the use of it that night. So yeah, I’ll go ahead and credit Triple H for that one, easiest one to credit for it, but that was fun. Also, you can tell how strong a man really is when you’re going at a tiny, incremental pace and the floor is lifting you, and still had me, and I think wanted to carry me 70 yards, but didn’t need to. I can fall off your shoulders at a certain point. He’s still got it. John, certainly, all the functional strength, and you’ve seen all the hard knocks videos and all that, that’s never gonna go away.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
