I have to say, when AJ Styles first did his Mark Henry thing and faked his retirement in pursuit of a title match, I wasn’t super into it. A rehashed feud from April, leading to another (likely successful) international Cody Rhodes Undisputed WWE title defense? Meh. It was fine, I didn’t hate it, but I wasn’t really that interested.
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The “I Quit” stipulation changed all that. All of a sudden, Styles’ fake retirement isn’t just a reference to Something That Happened One Time In Wrestling. It plays into the stipulation. It represents Styles’ refusal to go quietly into that good night, to do a typical happy retirement announcement where we drop kayfabe and everybody cries. To hell with that, he doesn’t think he’s done yet, and moreover, he thinks he can still be a world champion. It’s hard to imagine someone in that position saying the words “I quit” — but it’s also hard to imagine Cody Rhodes saying it.
This is Cody’s first-ever “I quit” match, which is kind of crazy because they feel custom-made for his brand of wrestling storytelling. It’s a match that was born in the South, on a night that saw Cody’s father, Dusty Rhodes, main-event one half of Starrcade 1985 in Atlanta, Georgia (50 miles from Styles’ hometown of Gainesville) shortly after Magnum T.A. made Tully Blanchard say “I quit” for the very first time in the Greensboro Coliseum. This is, in short, Cody’s preferred genre of wrestling mythology, and it presents all kinds of dramatic opportunities. But just as Cody raised the stakes when he compared Styles’ fake retirement to the way he’s going to make Styles actually quit at Clash at the Castle, Styles raised the stakes on Friday’s episode by going full meta — by which I mean, Styles brought up the number of wrestling promotions Cody has quit working for, including the one he helped found, AEW. Those remarks clearly touched Cody’s pride and beefed up the feeling that “I quit” is something he’d rather die than say on Saturday.
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My favorite part of Friday’s promo segment, though, was the part where Styles said there were no limits to how far he would go to win the championship. I am literally the only person at WINC who picked Styles to win on Saturday, and I know it’s probably an insane fantasy, but this promo made me feel like it might actually happen. Like I said, “I quit” matches lend themselves to a certain kind of storytelling — wrestlers often quit on a loved one’s behalf, for example. And a certain someone did advertise that he’s bringing his mom to Glasglow …
No matter what happens in the actual match, the fact remains that I’m heavily invested in the outcome, which is not something I could say three weeks ago. All of a sudden, Rhodes vs. Styles has turned into an excellent wrestling story, and I can’t wait to see what they actually do with it.
Written by Miles Schneiderman