Cody Rhodes Says Returning To WWE Is The Ultimate Vindication

Cody Rhodes is back to his rightful place. At least, that’s the way how he sees it. The former AEW star returned to WWE at WrestleMania 38. Cody turned out to be Seth Rollins’ mystery opponent and together they put on a clinic for fans in attendance and at home

Click here for our full coverage of WrestleMania 38 Night One.

Before his triumphant return, even before landing in Dallas for Mania 38, the American Nightmare sat down with Variety for an exclusive interview. The former TNT champion talked about his nervousness heading back to the company and its biggest PPV of the year.

“Everyone who knows has asked me how I’m feeling, if I’m really excited. The answer I kind of keep giving everybody is it’s just a really heavy feeling. When I first got into wrestling, I was solely in the WWE system, and I had that dream of getting to the top.

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“Then dreams are like rivers, as the Garth Brooks song says, and it veered and it changed. Then we were able to do what we were able to do with AEW and that’s something that I’m very proud of, but to be able to revisit the thing that I set out to do in the first place when I didn’t think I would get that chance is just heavy.

“Even now, thinking about it is heavy. So yeah, all the feelings — happy, excited, pressure, responsibility, all of it. But I don’t know how I will feel until I’m out there. It just seems like kind of a culmination of my whole career, but I don’t want to jinx it.

“I don’t want to put any hyperbole there, but it’s the biggest crowd in wrestling. It’s returning as me in something that I built and nobody else built. And that’s the ultimate vindication.”

Cody returning to WWE is a clear-cut example of life coming full circle or squared circle, as we say in wrestling terminology. We’ll have to wait till the next RAW or SmackDown to find out what’s next for Cody.

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