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As the professional wrestling world continues to comb through the fallout of the biggest paid gate in history and all of the craziness that came out of it – including a very good All Out in Chicago – Cody Rhodes had his mind on another show, the original, non-AEW All In, which helped to re-launch his career and make him the sort of man who can broker a trade between RAW and SmackDown five years later.
Sitting down for a conversation with noted wrestling fan Dale Earnhardt Jr. on his Dale Download podcast, Rhodes reflected on how the show came together and why it really meant everything to get it right.
“Here's what people don't know, or here is what people suspect. We told everybody, it's all us, it's all me, Matt, and Nick.' We presented it as ‘we're doing this, we're breaking all the rules, we're bringing all the companies together, we're literally going All In.' We did have help from a company, Ring of Honor was the company that helped produce it. People think Ring of Honor footed the whole bill, or we footed the whole bill,” Cody Rhodes said via Fightful. “The truth is somewhere in the middle. We, literally, did have to go All In. We were going All In on our name alone in the sense that we had to get over 10,000 people. The comments on social were that we couldn't put 10,000 in an arena, and I, all pre-workout up at the gym, ‘I'll take that bet.' Now, we're stuck. We can't sell 5,000 tickets. We have to sell 10,000 tickets.”
Fortunately for Rhodes, All In actually overperformed his goal, hitting 11,263 fans in paid attendance for the first time ever by an indie show. The fallout from the show, however, continues to evolve to this day, as it helped to inspire almost 80,000 more fans to show up in London five years later and re-launched Rhodes' career to where it is today.
Cody Rhodes wishes he still had the rights to the All In name.
Continuing to discuss with Dale Earnhardt Jr. about the original All In, Cody Rhodes let fans into the intricacies of how the show came together a little further, including the one regret he had about the aftermath of the show.
“We did everything we possibly could, we broke every rule. I never use PayPal, but I laugh when I look back at my PayPal, and all the paydays are still there from these different little things that I had to pay for to get, like Road Warrior Animal to come over to ride his motorcycle. My buddy Conrad [Conrad Thompson] did a convention because he said, ‘I bet if this sells out, people will piggyback off it; you should let us piggyback. We'll do a whole convention, and you can steal some legends and assets.' It was like Woodstock for wrestling,” Cody Rhodes explained.
“I walked into the hotel, and the energy was through the roof. The lobby was filled to the brim with fans. It was mind-blowing. That day, before any of this had happened, we were riding back from the press conference where I couldn't get the mic to work — here he is, putting on a show, and the mic wasn't working — we come back from the press conference, there was a fan driving us to the show. We were trying to go on the site to buy tickets, and I'm thinking, ‘If the site is frozen, we're screwed' or ‘is it blowing up? Can it crash?' It crashed immediately. It was 11,236 in 28 minutes. I said, ‘We need this,' that welcome to the Indies letter. ‘It can be bigger.' I like to think big. It was all in front of us, and we had to execute and make it happen. A wonderful memory. I have trouble with the fact that I no longer own the name to it. I kind of look at it in the sense of, it's not mine, it's the fans'. Let them have a good time with it.”
Would it have been cool if Rhodes had kept the rights to the All In name? Sure, as it would have allowed AEW to use the name for the past five years and even could have put a few pretty pennies in Rhodes' pocket when he left the promotion as part of his exit. Still, as Rhodes noted, in a way, All In belongs to the non-WWE fans who helped to make it special, and in a way, the name still belongs to them.
