Earlier today, Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter reported that Cody Rhodes was once pitched for a heel turn to align with The Rock against John Cena leading up to WrestleMania. However, this idea was rejected, as confirmed by Fightful Select. The only confirmed part of the report is that Cody was pitched the idea and turned it down.
Cena was then pitched for the turn and agreed, while The Rock was fully on board with the storyline.
Despite some dramatic online reactions, the pitch was part of standard planning for WrestleMania to generate buzz. Many people close to Cody were unaware of the pitch.
Additionally, John Cena vs. Cody Rhodes has been planned for WrestleMania since November.
Triple H discussed WWE’s women’s division at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, praising the success of the top female stars. He noted that women athletes at WWE’s Performance Center tend to pick up the sport faster than men.
The Performance Center has been crucial in developing future WWE talent, especially with the introduction of the NIL program, which helps college athletes transition to WWE. The WWE CCO stated,
“I will say this, we have a performance center in Orlando, Florida. We have a 100 to 120 athletes at any given time training in there on a day-to-day basis. I’m not sure exactly what the mix is, but a large percentage of women, large percentage of men. We have an NIL program that recruits across college athletics on every level. So women are a big focus of what we’re doing leading to the future and how we’re training and getting them up. Across the board, the women pick this up way faster than men do [laughs]. It’s an amazing thing. Shawn Michaels runs that program for us, and I will it to Shawn all the time, it is amazing to me that we’re getting these women that come in, start training with us at ground zero, just like the men, and six months in, eight months in, nine months in, he’s putting those women on TV already live, and the guys are down here, and I’m not sure why that is. It may be just [they’re] smarter, whatever that is. But it resonates that way, and it’s incredible to see that sort of, ‘Here you go. Just go at it.’ It’s incredible to watch it happen.”
Sonya Deville made her return to WWE television on January 1, 2021, after her loss in a “Loser Leaves WWE” match to Mandy Rose at WWE SummerSlam 2020.
Shortly after returning, she was paired with Adam Pearce as an assistant General Manager.
While speaking with Ariel Helwani on “The Ariel Helwani Show,” the former WWE Superstar discussed how this new role came about. She said,
“When I came back, I went into Vince’s [Vince McMahon’s] office and we were chatting about ideas and what I could come back and do. I was like, ‘I just got this custom suit made. It’s back at the hotel. I can go get it. Maybe I can just be a boss.’ Not Sasha Banks, ‘The Boss,’ but something like that. He’s like, ‘Yeah, go get it.’ I go get the suit, I come back in his office in the suit and he’s like, ‘That’s it. You’re going to wear it tonight. You’re going to walk down the hallway and I’m gonna have people lined on both side and you’re just going to look at them.’ That’s all he told me. I didn’t know his plan was for me to be with Adam Pearce or be GM or any of that. He just said, ‘Walk down the hallway in a suit.’ I didn’t know anything else. So, I walked down the hallway in a suit that night. That was it.”
She continued, “As weeks went by, they were like, ‘I think we’re going to start having you do some stuff with Adam Pearce and you’re going to be like an assistant to him. ‘Okay, what’s the endgame?’ I always hoped the endgame was, obviously, me and Pearce aren’t going to have a WrestleMania match, but we would get into some sort of thing and he could run Raw and I could run SmackDown. It didn’t go that way. I just went with Adam Pearce for a while on Raw and SmackDown, super fun, and eventually got out of the role and into a story with Bianca [Belair].”
