All day I've been
trying to think what I can possibly write about Dusty Rhodes.
Dusty Rhodes is dead.
That still doesn't feel quite right. He was the American Dream. He
was always just...there. Always Dusty. But he wasn't immortal, of
course. Isn't that what he told us along? He was just a hard-working
son of a plumber, he was just one of us. He was mortal.
I was too young to see
Dusty's prime as it happened. I even missed the polkadot leotard in
the WWF. For years my only real exposure to Dusty was as one of the
voices of WCW, and I was very much a WWF kid. Even then, I had a
fondness for the old guy that has persisted to this day – who
doesn't enjoy imitating that lisping, jive-talking voice,
“clubberin'”, “hitting him with a bicycle”, and “if you
weeeell”? The first time I remember seeing Dusty Rhodes the
wrestler was in ECW, during his feud with Steve Corino. A fan was
born. Finally, I saw what millions had seen before me – Dusty
Rhodes was a bad-ass, a fighter, and you wanted him to win.
I've often said that
the biggest stars in wrestling are those that make themselves the
most believable – the wrestlers who make people say, “I know
wrestling's fake, but this guy,
he's the real deal”. You believe Steve Austin was the toughest man
in the WWF because he stared down Mike Tyson and didn't even blink.
You believed CM Punk was an anti-establishment rebel because
everything he did and said, in and out of the ring, suggested exactly
that. You believed Goldberg could effortlessly beat anyone and
everyone because he carried himself like he was capable of exactly
that. You believed Ric Flair was the best wrestler in the world
because, quite frankly, he told you so.
And Dusty? You really believed that Dusty Rhodes was the working man,
the son of a plumber, the working class hero fighting injustice, and
fighting on the side of every single one of us. Something in Dusty
spoke to the disenfranchised, the downtrodden and the dejected –
for millions of people looking for a hero, he created one for them in
himself.
If
Dusty Rhodes' run in Jim Crockett Promotions, later WCW, or even just
his groundbreaking feud with Ric Flair and the Four Horsemen, was his
only legacy then we would still talk about him today as a bonafide
legend of the sport. If Dusty Rhodes' legacy was only the “Hard
Times” promo – undeniably one of the greatest promos in wrestling
history – we would still talk about him as one of the most
charismatic wrestlers the world has ever seen. Any wrestler in the
world could be proud to leave those memories in their wake. But
Rhodes' legacy was bigger. He influenced the wrestling business in
ways that are still felt today, some that are so commonplace you can
hardly imagine how we ever managed without them. He was talking
people into buildings when for most wrestlers an interview was little
more than a formality. As a booker, Dusty Rhodes coined concepts,
pushed boundaries and presented the product in ways that have
absolutely shaped wrestling as we know it.
If
the measure of a man's legacy is in the effects he had on the lives
of others, you only need to look to the tributes that have poured
from the wrestling industries biggest and brightest stars these past
two days. Dusty has been called a mentor, teacher and inspiration by
everyone from Ric Flair to Triple H to Steve Austin to Paul Heyman to
Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn. Across four decades, he taught, inspired
and influenced some of the greatest wrestlers, greatest bookers,
greatest talkers and greatest minds in the industry, and through his
work with NXT and WWE's development system, that never stopped.
Dusty
wasn't the biggest, wasn't the best looking and wasn't the best
athlete. He was a mortal man, a working man, and he was one of us. He
was ordinary. And we believed all that. And that's why we loved him.
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