Though he refused to acknowledge it at the time, except, of course, in the most subtle, meta way possible, Cody Rhodes has slowly but surely trickled out information about what brought him from AEW to WWE back in 2022 and what his heel run could have been had he stuck it out in the promotion he helped to found alongside Kenny Omega and the Young Bucks in 2019.

One such development, as Rhodes noted in conversation with Connor Casey of Comicbook.com, was the potential for a feud with, an eventual match against, his childhood idol Sting.

“I was going to wrestle Sting. I don't think I've ever shared that with anybody, and nothing was on paper or anything like that. But I can say I got a tremendous offer from AEW creatively, financially, the full package. You won't hear me say anything bad about AEW or Tony (Khan) or my time there. It was a tremendous offer, but the offer wasn't right for me. What I wanted to get back to was the first goal that I ever had (winning the WWE Championship). But yeah, that probably would've been the endgame. That's what had been discussed, was to get one (match) with one of my heroes, Sting,” Cody Rhodes said.

“And it's one of those things, you can wrestle one of your heroes, or you can work with one of your heroes, and he can be the head of creative (Paul Levesque), you can't have it all. And I think one thing I do pride myself on as a wrestler is I will make a decision. It might be a left turn, it might be exactly where you think I'm going, but I will make a decision. I will not get stuck because I felt like I'd been stuck early in my career and never want to be that way again.”

Now, as Rhodes noted in another recent interview, working with Triple H has long been one of his dreams, too, with an actual in-ring match now replaced with either an on-screen angle or even just a creative relationship following the WWE Hall of Famer's retirement from the ring due to a heart condition. While Rhodes could have likely wrestled Sting before his AEW run came to an end had he fully embraced working heel, at the time, he didn't want to accept that his feelings and those of the fans weren't completely aligned. Now that match, for better or worse, will be just as much of a “what if” as a modern-day Rhodes-Levesque throwdown.

Cody Rhodes discussed wrestling Sting a year before he left for WWE.

Now, for fans who have been following the “American Nightmare” for years now, this wasn't the first he mentioned his love of and eventual desire to get in the ring with Sting.

In January of 2021, Rhodes sat down for an interview with Daniel Trainor for his Substack and noted that, as a kid, as in adulthood, he was always a fan of the former WCW World Heavyweight Champion.

“It’s no secret that Sting was my favorite wrestler,” Rhodes said. “I had Sting in WCW and Shawn [Michaels] in WWF. But really I wasn’t supposed to watch WWF. So, Sting was everything. I got to see him live so often and I got to see the connection he had. I honestly am scared to answer that. Obviously, as a wrestler, to stand across the ring from your hero is everyone’s dream, to share that field. So, yes, I would love and envision that.”

Asked if he would like to get in the ring with the former surfer, Rhodes said that such a match would hold a lot of weight to both his past and then-present self.

“When you put yourself in that position, you’re no longer a fan,” Rhodes said. “You’re now out to outperform them, out to beat them, however you look at wrestling. You are opposite of them. You are their dance partner, their competition. You’re all these things. That is a big responsibility and that is also just scary, especially if you’re somebody like me who loves the memory and the legacy of wrestlers. I never want them to feel like they have to carry on. Their memories carry on enough as they get older.”

Would 2021 Cody Rhodes have been thinking about working a match as a heel against “The Man Called Sting?” No, probably not; at the time, Rhodes had just lost the TNT Title to Darby Allin at Full Gear and wasn't yet into his next big feud, with Shaq and a then-debuting Jade Cargill. Still, fast forward a year into the future, and Rhodes was working matches against everyone from Andrade to Sammy Guevara and Malakai Black and getting booed more than the actual heels he shared the ring with, signifying that maybe a match against Sting would have drawn serious money after all.