How Did Cody’s ‘The List’ Pan Out For Everyone Else?

Cody Rhodes’ request for his release from WWE in May 2016 was a move that few thought would have much significance in the broader landscape of the wrestling business. However, had he not grown tired of his creative direction in WWE and asked to be let go, the “American Nightmare” gimmick would have never come about, All Elite Wrestling might never have been formed, and Rhodes himself probably wouldn’t be one of the biggest stars in the entire world at the time of writing.

On May 28, 2016, five days after he was granted his release, Cody took to his X (then known as Twitter) account to reveal his list. A personal set of goals he wanted to achieve in the immediate future, which ranged from certain people he wanted to wrestle to certain promotions he wanted to compete for, and once his 90-day non-compete clause was officially up on August 19, Rhodes began work on checking off everything that was on his list.

That famous list was written nearly a decade ago now, and a lot has changed since 2016, which is why we’re going to take a trip down memory lane and see how much of the list Rhodes actually managed to complete, and where the opponents he faced are almost ten years later.

Sitting at the top of the list was none other than the man who was one of Ring of Honor’s top stars at the time, Adam Cole (Bay Bay).

Cole was one of the most sought-after talents in the world by mid-2016, and after a short stint in Bullet Club, Cole’s stock soared so high that WWE couldn’t wait to sign him by 2017. It actually took a while for Cody and Cole to face each other one-on-one, as the former WWE Superstar would join Bullet Club himself at the beginning of 2017, leading to the two men spending more time as partners than opponents. However, before Cole made the jump to WWE, Rhodes finally got to wrestle Cole at a Northeast Wrestling event, with Rhodes getting the win and retaining the NEW Heavyweight Championship in the process.

Since then, Cole has been heavily featured in both “WWE NXT” and AEW, the latter of which he is still signed to, but his career is sadly on hold at the time of writing as he was forced to vacate the AEW TNT Championship at the company’s biggest show of 2025, All In Texas, due to serious concerns about his health. It’s still unclear if he will ever get back in the ring.

One of the most flamboyant wrestlers to ever lace up a pair of boots, Dalton Castle was another one of ROH’s top stars by the time Rhodes became a free agent, and they would cross paths in Ring of Honor’s main event scene. Rhodes would pick up the win in their initial meeting in February 2017, but Castle wasn’t going to let that slide, and after spending the entire year working his way up the ROH ladder, Castle picked up the biggest win of his career at ROH Final Battle in December 2017 as he defeated Rhodes to become the new ROH World Champion.

Castle would hold the title until June 2018 and would meet Rhodes in the ring a number of times during that reign before being dethroned by Jay Lethal. “The Peacock of Professional Wrestling” would stay with ROH right through to the company’s sale to AEW President Tony Khan in 2022, and Castle has featured many times on both AEW and ROH programming since. He recently spent over a year on the sidelines due to a torn bicep and a concussion, but returned to action in September 2025 and is hoping he can fly back to the top of either AEW or ROH very soon.

The first entrant on the list to not be a specific wrestler, but given how high it was on Cody’s famous sheet of paper, PWG’s Battle of Los Angeles tournament clearly meant a lot to him.

In the mid-2010s, PWG was the premier independent promotion to the point where some people claimed that it was home to the best wrestling in North America at the time. Out of all the events that PWG held, the annual Battle of Los Angeles tournament (or BOLA for short) was the biggest and most prestigious. It’s a tournament that has been won by the likes of Kenny Omega, Zack Sabre Jr., and Sami Zayn when he was still known as El Generico, and the 2016 tournament was right around the corner when Rhodes hit the indies.

Rhodes was one of 24 participants in the 2016 tournament, and it started off well for him as he defeated Sami Callihan in the first round. However, he was eliminated in the quarter-finals by the man who would go on to win the competition, Marty Scurll. PWG has been on hiatus since 2023 due to the founder of the promotion, Super Dragon, focusing on his personal life, with the most recent BOLA winner being current AEW star “Speedball” Mike Bailey.

A dream match that realistically needed to happen as soon as Rhodes was allowed to wrestle, as it was clear that Kurt Angle didn’t have a lot of time left in his career. After his decade-long run in TNA Wrestling came to an end, Angle also ended up on the independent scene and met Rhodes in the ring for a trilogy of matches. The first was in Northeast Wrestling on August 27, 2016, with Rhodes picking up the win, but Angle would get his win back in the now-defunct WCPW promotion in the United Kingdom in October. Their third and final match saw them return to NEW for a Steel Cage match in March 2017, with Rhodes getting the victory in what would be Angle’s final independent match before returning to WWE.

When he did return to WWE, Angle was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame over WrestleMania 33 weekend, and after serving as the General Manager of “WWE Raw,” Angle had one final in-ring run that came to an end at WrestleMania 35 in 2019 at the hands of Baron Corbin. Despite the match not being the classic retirement everyone hoped for Angle, he has remained retired ever since.

Cody Rhodes was free to wrestle anywhere on August 19, 2016, and on August 20, he immediately ticked off one of his dream opponents from his list as he met Chris Hero at EVOLVE 67. On that night, it was actually Hero who got the win as he was in the middle of one of the greatest individual years in independent wrestling history, but Rhodes would get his win back at a VIP Wrestling show a few weeks later. The two men would meet one more time in EVOLVE, this time in a tag team match, with Rhodes and Johnny Gargano defeating Hero and Drew Galloway (Drew McIntyre to WWE fans).

Hero would end up back in WWE as Kassius Ohno by the spring of 2017, but stayed on “WWE NXT” and eventually “WWE NXT UK,” the latter of which was a brand severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and Hero looked to have retired from wrestling because of the pandemic. However, he landed a role as a coach in AEW in 2023, with that role becoming his full-time job in the summer of 2025, but he still occasionally wrestles for West Coast Pro based out of San Francisco, California, with his most recent match coming in April 2024.

Younger fans might look at Rhodes’ list and think, “Who or what is The Miracle?” The answer to that question is none other than Mike Bennett, who used that nickname during his time with TNA in 2016. Rhodes only appeared in TNA a handful of times towards the end of 2016, with Bennett being one of the main reasons he was even brought in as the two men would have a brief TV feud that saw Rhodes pick up the win in a singles match, and both Cody and his wife Brandi Rhodes defeating Bennett and his wife Maria Kanellis in a tag team match. Rhodes would later dethrone Bennett for the NEW Heavyweight Championship before “The Miracle” also joined WWE in the summer of 2017.

Bennett’s run in WWE is best left forgotten, and both he and his wife were released during the COVID-19 pandemic, but that didn’t stop Bennett from remaining active. After reuniting with his partner in The Kingdom, Matt Taven, Bennett found his way to AEW in 2022, where he has remained ever since.

“Moosemania” was running wild across the independent scene during the mid-2010s as a number of companies were looking to acquire the big man’s services, with TNA (then known as Impact Wrestling) landing his signature. It was in Impact Wrestling where Rhodes wrestled Moose for the first time in what would be Rhodes’ return, and final match for the company on the same night as he unsuccessfully challenged Moose for the Impact Grand Championship in March 2017. It has never officially been confirmed why Rhodes never appeared in TNA/Impact after this match, but it has been speculated that his commitments to ROH and New Japan Pro Wrestling wouldn’t allow it.

As for Moose, he has been a staple of TNA since he signed with the company in 2016, and his hard work has resulted in two reigns with the TNA World Championship, as well as being one of the biggest athletes to hold the TNA X-Division Championship. He still wrestles for TNA at the time of writing, and has even made some appearances on “WWE NXT” in recent months, thanks to the working relationship between WWE and TNA that was established in 2024.

One of the only men who had the unique distinction of not only working with Rhodes in both WWE and on the independent scene, but Pat Buck actually wrestled Rhodes when he was still in the WWE developmental territory, Ohio Valley Wrestling, back in the mid-2000s. Rhodes and Buck had only ever wrestled one singles match before 2016, that being on an episode of “OWV TV” in 2007 that ended in a no contest, but there had to be a winner when they eventually had their rematch at a WrestlePro event in September 2016. 

Rhodes picked up the win on that night, which surprised some fans at the time, given that Buck owned WrestlePro, but that one loss hasn’t impacted Buck’s career at all, given what he has achieved. He opened the Create A Pro Wrestling school in New Jersey in 2012, with a sister school in New York run by former WWE Superstar Kurt Hawkins, which has produced stars like MJF and Kris Statlander. He also worked for WWE as a backstage producer between 2019 and 2022, and even though he occasionally laces up his boots for the odd match, he mainly focuses on his role in AEW as the company’s Vice-President of Talent Development.

Another goal that wasn’t just wrestling a specific opponent, “The Streamers Thing” is something that adds atmosphere to a big-time match and is rarely used in the United States these days.

Streamers have always been a major part of a wrestling show’s presentation in Japan, particularly for high-profile title matches, but Ring of Honor made streamers their own during the height of their popularity. Rhodes had been given the streamer treatment on a number of occasions, such as when he won the ROH World Championship in 2017 and his high-profile grudge match with Kenny Omega at Supercard of Honor 12 in 2018. Streamers never properly crossed over to AEW when Rhodes helped found that company, despite some sparing use of them at the company’s first pay-per-view, AEW Double or Nothing, in May 2019, and unless WWE makes more trips to Japan, you aren’t going to be seeing streamers at WrestleMania any time soon.

Far and away the most important entrant on the list, as it was the relationship between Rhodes and The Young Bucks that helped launch AEW in 2019, a company that has since changed the wrestling business in more ways than some fans would like to admit. With that said, Matt and Nick Jackson were only included on Rhodes’ list as opponents in 2016, and it would take a surprisingly long time before he ever got to wrestle them.

The main reason for this is that they were stablemates in both Bullet Club and The Elite from the moment they met. Even the Bullet Club civil war of 2018 in New Japan Pro Wrestling saw Rhodes and The Young Bucks be on the same side; the three men were inseparable. It wouldn’t be until they all boarded Chris Jericho’s “Rock N Rager” cruise in 2018 that Rhodes finally got to stand across from his friends in The Elite, and it wasn’t until 2019 that Rhodes had a straight two-on-two tag team match against the Jackson brothers as he teamed up with his own brother Dustin at AEW Fight For The Fallen 2019. 

As for The Young Bucks, they are still featured regularly in AEW as the only three-time AEW Tag Team Champions in history, but they have been struggling financially lately after losing their titles as Executive Vice-Presidents of AEW. If you see either of them on the street, spare a little change for them.

By the time 2016 rolled around, Trevor Lee was one of the most exciting talents to come out of the Carolinas in years as his work in CWF Mid-Atlantic had caught the eye of a lot of fans for both how good Lee was, and the fact that his main event matches often lasted anywhere from 30 minutes to a full hour. Rhodes wanted a piece of the action when he got let loose on the indies, and he got a taste during a tag team match for Big Time Wrestling in September 2016. However, the two men would have a pair of singles matches in 2017, with Lee beating Rhodes in the “American Nightmare’s” final match for PWG, before Rhodes got his win back at a Bulletproof Wrestling show in May 2017.

Lee would become better known to WWE fans as Cameron Grimes by 2018, and the Carolina native would achieve a lot of success in “WWE NXT,” but a main roster run never materialized for him, and he was surprisingly released in 2024. With that said, Lee has returned to his independent routes and has been a shining light for both Deadlock Pro Wrestling and AAW over the past 18 months.

Despite Rhodes spending a lot of time in Japan during his time away from WWE, Katsuyori Shibata was the only name on his list that was a full-time member of the NJPW roster. During the company’s boom period in the 2010s, Shibata had established himself as a no-nonsense wrestler who could kick you so hard that you would forget what your own birthday was, and Rhodes wanted to see if he was the real deal. He found out in February 2017 when they met in a tag team match during a joint NJPW/ROH event in Tokyo, with Shibata and Jay Lethal defeating Rhodes and Hangman Page.

It’s a good job Rhodes got that match in when he did because just over a month after the bout, it was discovered that Shibata had a subdural hematoma following a match with Kazuchika Okada in April 2017, and he was forced into retirement to protect his own health. After years of serving as a coach at the NJPW dojo in Los Angeles, California, Shibata gradually eased himself back into the ring and has thankfully made a full recovery. He now wrestles for AEW, where he is currently a member of The Opps with Samoa Joe and Powerhouse Hobbs, holding the AEW World Trios Championships in the process.

The final entry to not be a specific opponent, Rhodes wanted his own personal ring announcer for some of his more high-stakes matches, and he luckily had the perfect candidate for the job right by his side.

At various shows during his time away from WWE, his wife Brandi would act as Rhodes’ personal ring announcer, something she already had a lot of experience in, given that she was a ring announcer for WWE when she met the man she would go on to marry. However, the personal ring announcer gimmick was exclusively on the independent scene, and despite getting in the ring during her time in AEW, Brandi now focuses on her yoga studio, her children’s boutique store, and being a mother to her two children.

The one that got away.

For as much as Rhodes accomplished on his list, the one thing he couldn’t tick off was getting in the ring with Roderick Strong. This was due to Strong wrapping up his time in ROH and the independent scene before heading to WWE, while Rhodes was still sitting through his non-compete clause, and when Rhodes was free to do whatever he wanted, Strong was already under contract with WWE.

When Rhodes ended up returning to WWE in 2022, Strong was wrestling exclusively on the “WWE NXT” brand, but just a few months after returning, Rhodes famously tore his pectoral muscle off the bone before his Hell in a Cell match with Seth Rollins and sat out the rest of 2022 injured, while Strong wrestled his final WWE match during the time Rhodes was out injured, and even though he was still with WWE when Rhodes returned at the 2023 Royal Rumble event, Strong hadn’t been used in several months and would show up in AEW by May 2023. Strong is still with AEW to this day, where he is both a former AEW International Champion and one of the most consistent performers in the world in the eyes of the fans.