Ring Of Honor (ROH) has a new interview up with Brandi Rhodes to talk about several professional wrestling topics. Here are the highlights:
Having more to prove inside of the ring than her husband Cody Rhodes: “I absolutely have more to prove than anybody who steps foot in that ring. I’ve had a target on my back since the second I opened my mouth and said that I want to do more. People these days don’t really like that. It’s kind of ‘stay in your role.’ I don’t have a role. I’m not very good at staying in my lane, and I’m not confined to any role or by any rules. So, naturally, there’s always going to be a target on my back.
“Everybody’s going to look for any mistake they can find whether it’s in the ring or outside the ring. My job is to stay focused on what I’m trying to do. There will be haters along the way and there will be fans along the way. I am definitely very aware that I’m somebody who’s always got a target on them.”
Cody’s initial reaction to her wanting to be a wrestler: “His reaction was, ‘I think you should absolutely go for it if this is what you want to do.’ He said I just need to put 100 percent into it because wrestling is one of those things that you can’t do 50 percent. He’s very much been focused on making sure I put forth the same effort I did at the beginning all the way through, making sure there’s no point at which I get lazy or overconfident or don’t want to go in and train. I doubt that will ever happen with me because I’ve always been a student of whatever sport I’m in, but it’s nice to have him there to keep me fully focused.”
Her first attempt at training to be a wrester and ring announcing in WWE: “I was at first, but then I wasn’t. Part of the reason I left the first time is because I was a little down-hearted that I wasn’t getting to wrestle, and I wasn’t getting to announce in a very big role either. After Cody and I got married, that’s when I decided I wanted to go back and I only want to do the wrestling. We tried, and that worked for a while, but then it ended up being a situation where it made the most sense to take the path they were familiar with first to ty to get to the path they were unfamiliar with.
“So I went back on the road to announce and get in front of them again so that they could think, ‘Oh, yeah, we remember Brandi, we like Brandi. Let’s think about her in these other roles.’ But it turned into, ‘We really like her in this role. We can’t see her in any other role. We don’t even want to hear it.’ So then it was like, ‘We don’t want her training because we can’t have her hurt herself and miss shows.
“And we don’t want her to mess her face up.’ But sometimes you just have to listen to your heart, and my heart was saying that I need to do more, I’m not happy with this. Life is short. I can’t just do a job I’m not happy with. I’m happy that I made the choice to branch out and take a bit of a risk.”
You can check out Rhodes’ full interview with Ring Of Honor by clicking here.
