Seth Rollins and Cody Rhodes have a long and healthy rivalry that featured surprise returns, WrestleMania matches, and a torn pectoral muscle.
Rhodes made his return to WWE in 2022 after a 5-year absence. His first opponent back was Rollins and on the WrestleMania stage. The comeback was an immediate triumph as he defeated Rollins, which kicked off a lengthy feud between the two.
They clashed again at WrestleMania Backlash and at Hell in a Cell, where Rhodes suffered a brutal injury that kept him out of action for several months. Prior to the injury, Rhodes made it clear he was back in WWE to win the title his father never did, a title that Rollins also desperately wanted. Then upon returning from injury, Rhodes won the Royal Rumble and challenged Roman Reigns for the Undisputed WWE Universal Championship at WrestleMania 39.
Was Seth Rollins Jealous Of Cody Rhodes?
In a recent interview on the Out Of Character podcast, Rollins discussed his feelings about watching his rival compete for the title and if there was any jealousy involved.
Jealously is not necessarily the right word. At the end of the day, it’s show business. That’s how it works sometimes. It’s not fair. Life is not fair, sorry. We want it to be fair all the time, but it’s not. It’s not always a meritocracy, as much as we’d love it to be.
You have to deal with that and figure out a way to make the best of it. For me, I took the Logan Paul story and ran with it. I knew we were going to have an absolute blast because the characters were so diametrically opposed in the audience’s eyes.
You have Logan Paul, who the audience detested, and I had just spun into a guy who everyone was happy to see every week. I knew we were going to butt heads in the best possible way and it was going going to be really good.
Anytime you put in the amount of work that I put in last year that I put in while somebody else gets the top spot, if you are competitive and you want to be the best, and there are a lot of us here in WWE who compete at this level, you’re just going to have resentment. It’s going to be there. It’s healthy. It’s an iron sharpens iron situation where you have people who are at the top of their game, across the board, and only one of them, or two in this case with Roman, is going to get that spot.
You have to be prepared to not be that person, it doesn’t matter how hard you work or how much effort you put in. If it’s not your time, it’s not your time. We’ll put it behind us, move forward, do the best I can to get myself in that spot next year and the year after that and the year after that. I’d lying if I said there was no resentment. Jealousy, nah.
For his part, Cody Rhodes has praised Seth Rollins’ work as a babyface, saying that fan favourites like them had been on the verge of becoming an “endangered species” until recently.
H/T Fightful