Vince McMahon forced Cody Rhodes to have a gimmick based on his mustache, just minutes after seeing him return to the company with a small mustache he grew as a joke. Rhodes suffered a concussion before Survivor Series 2012, which kept him out of the ring for three weeks.
During his time out of the ring, Cody Rhodes had an idea. He decided to grow a mustache to impress the other wrestlers, and hopefully get a laugh out of them. The Rhodes family famously struggled to grow facial hair, and Cody’s attempt was not impressive in the slightest – it was a small, thin and unimpressive smear above his upper lip.
Dying and grooming his facial hair, he returned to the WWE after three weeks to complete his concussion test, so that he could be cleared to wrestle again alongside Damien Sandow in “Team Rhodes Scholars”. He has joked that the test was so hard to pass that “Rosa Mendes failed three times, and she wasn’t even concussed!”.
He showed all the wrestlers his new mustache, which garnered big laughs in the locker room. Big Show (AEW’s Paul Wight) encouraged Cody Rhodes to show Vince McMahon his mustache, claiming that he would find it hilarious. Upon seeing it, Vince McMahon first made a joke out of the mustache (which you can read about below), before immediately getting a t-shirt made featuring the mustache, and quickly based Cody Rhodes entire gimmick on it.
Cody Rhodes On Vince McMahon Seeing His Mustache For The First Time
During a 2016 interview with Inside The Ropes, Cody Rhodes told the hilarious story about how Vince McMahon turned his mustache into a gimmick for his on-screen character the moment he first saw it. He also made a hilarious joke about the mustache the first time he saw it, which popped the wrestlers in the back hugely.
“I was hurt for three weeks and I made a judgment call. I’m going to grow a mustache because they’re cool, and uh, wrestlers reinvent themselves, right?” Cody Rhodes said during a ITR live interview. “Punk’s got these mutton chops, and Taker always has a slight differential. I’m gonna grow a mustache so my family can’t grow facial hair, so this is really hard. I try super hard and I grow it and I dye it so that you can see it. It’s very small, and I come back to TV to take my impact test because they take concussions really seriously.”
“I’m walking down the hall, and Big Show is just like, I had a khaki suit on too, so I just looked like a Cuban drug dealer. And uh, Big Show’s like, ‘You gotta show everybody,’ and everyone’s like in the boys in the locker room are literally cheering for it. Vince’s office is right across, and Vince just kicks open his door.”
“He’s just staring at us, not joking, but just menacingly looking in the locker room. And I come up to him because I haven’t seen him, and I’m the closest physically to him, so I should shake his hand, and I shake his hand. He literally gets like this, ‘I can tell it’s you under there.'”
“And then he says, ‘Great job,’ and I’m thinking, ‘No, bro, no, no, no, it’s not what I was thinking.’ And the next thing I know, he goes, ‘Go talk to Joe Hickey,’ which means go talk to the T-shirt guy because we’re making a T-shirt of this mustache.”
Cody Rhodes mustache did not last long. The following year, he would team with his brother, Goldust, in a match against The Shield to save all three of their jobs, which was the last time Dusty Rhodes was ever involved in a wrestling match (Dusty Rhodes’ last match actually took place years prior).
Mustache Cody Rhodes was not the worst gimmick that The American Nightmare was stuck with. Cody Rhodes’ Stardust was the worst character he had to portray in the WWE, and you can click the link to read more about how much he hated portraying the character.