Dustin Rhodes, DDP, more discuss Dusty Rhodes, Rhodes Family legacy

[Chris]

Wrestling’s royal family? The Rhodes have become a last name of renaissance

A decade after the death of Dusty Rhodes, the dream lives on through the careers of those who came after him.

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It has been 10 years since the American Dream died.

And yet, if possible, the spirit lives on bigger than ever.

It lives on here at the Rhodes Wrestling Academy, a gym/auditorium wedged into a central Texas warehouse park, where the oldest son of the late wrestler Virgil Runnels, known to everybody as Dusty Rhodes and to most as “The American Dream,” trains a new generation of pro wrestlers a decade after his father passed away at 69 just a week before Father’s Day.

An enormous, larger-than-life banner featuring the likeness of the larger-than-life Dusty, who grew up in Austin famously as “the son of a plumber,” hangs in one corner of the building overlooking the workouts and training matches. It’s almost as if Dusty is still watching.

The other set of eyes on everything belong to 56-year-old Dustin. They seem weary, maybe from nearly 40 years in a business one WWE Hall of Famer calls “the most dysfunctional family there is.”

Wrestling is a family business and wants to consider itself family entertainment, but there are too many sad stories to consider it a truly harmonious family. Dustin himself went through an estrangement from his dad, a battle with alcohol and substance abuse and still lives in constant pain – an inevitable lasting legacy for every veteran wrestler.

The Oscar-nominated 2008 film “The Wrestler,” was melancholy fiction, but there is a lot of truth in it. “The Iron Claw,” the 2023 movie about Dallas’ Von Erich family, wasn’t as made up, but it’s an even sadder story.

This is where the Rhodes’ story differs. Maybe this one has a happy ending.

“You know, Dusty used to think of the wrestling business as making movies,” said his widow, Michelle. “Everything was a movie to him. What has happened with the Rhodes family – and to see him revered – is a dream come true.”

The Rhodes family, now three generations into the business, is having a renaissance, blossoming with its own members and touching many more throughout the business.

Dustin has found late-career happiness as a mentor, coach and occasional wrestler. He runs this operation often with a wrench in one hand, a phone in the other and his eyes on the young wrestlers in the ring. His wife, Ta-Rel, mans the office and occasionally plays an elderly interfering character in RWA’s shows. Beast, their champion English Mastiff, is her assistant.

Dustin still wrestles and will make appearances at this weekend’s All Elite Wrestling takeover of Dallas and Arlington, culminating in AEW’s biggest pay-per view of the year, “All In: Texas,” Saturday at Globe Life Field. Dustin’s is a tale of survival.

His brother, Cody, has found fame and fortune now as the rival WWE’s biggest star and recent world champion. Cody is a story of persistence, having left WWE almost a decade ago to remake himself as the star he envisioned only to come back and quarterback the show.

Their nephews, 21-year-old Dalton Ditto and 19-year-old Dylan Ditto, have a story, too. It is one full of promise. By day, they are students at the University of Texas. On the weekends, though, they are Wayne and Wyatt Rhodes, the newest iteration of the Texas Outlaws tag team that Dusty made famous in the 1960s. Their mother, Dustin’s younger sister Kristin Ditto, never wrestled, but did spend a couple of seasons as a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader and now does drop-ins as a ring announcer here.

And Dusty’s spirit lives on throughout the wrestling world. While “All In,” an event Cody helped birth even before the launch of AEW, is taking place, WWE will counter with a weekend full of events in Atlanta that will include a host of talent mentored by Dusty. Many of the company’s top stars such as Seth Rollins, Becky Lynch and Kevin Owens were mentored, coached or had their characters originated by Dusty in his creative role more than a decade ago.

“It was magical to be around Dusty,” said WWE Hall of Famer “Diamond” Dallas Page, who now primarily runs a yoga and wellness program and whose character was also created by Rhodes in the 1980s. “There is a little piece of Dusty in everyone.”

But it wasn’t always like this.

To quote Dusty’s most famous promo, delivered with his signature Texas twang and accented by a lisp: “They put hard times on Dusty Rhodes and his family.”

As the Hall of Famer Page puts it, “wrestling is the most dysfunctional family there is,” and it too often leads to a hard life.

The pop from the crowd is a drug nobody can quit. But it’s a nomadic life. Wrestlers are constantly on the road, which is hard on family life. They are often in pain, which is hard on sobriety. And the money can dry up as quickly as it flows.

Dusty, who separated from his first wife, Sandra, when Dustin and Kristin were just tots, never wanted his boys to go into wrestling. And he was savvy enough in the business not to want them to try to follow his act. There’s a bit of Dusty in everybody, but there was only one Dusty.

Still, the minute a 9-year-old Dustin peeked in his dad’s wardrobe on a summer visit and saw the National Wrestling Alliance championship belt hanging there, he was hooked. Dusty didn’t want it for his son, but, for Dustin, it was a way to be closer to the dad he rarely saw. He moved in with Dusty and Michelle as a teen, still rarely saw his dad, got his first apartment in McKinney and talked his way into wrestling. Wanted to be Dusty Rhodes, Jr., which was the one thing Dusty absolutely forbade.

“He told me there’s never been somebody billed as a junior make it in this business and you aren’t going to be the first,” Dustin said on a frosty morning while students worked through moves ahead of a RWA show later that evening. “He wanted something better for us. Maybe deep down, he didn’t want it for us because he wasn’t there for us.”

Still, like his dad, he bleached his hair blond, became “The Natural” and entered the business. Five years in, Dusty cut a promo with him that was all too real, leaving Dustin in tears mid-ring. In it, Dusty, in front of a capacity arena crowd, speaks of how he neglected his son, how he went off “to seek his fame and fortune and neglected you.” It ends with the father pleading to wrestle alongside his son.

“The Rhodes are blood,” he pleads. “I don’t need a handshake. What I need from you is a hug and a kiss to seal the deal.”

“It’s hard to watch that promo,” Dustin said. “But I do with the first session I have with the class. It’s true life.”

If he can make it to the end of the six-year deal he signed with AEW over the winter, in which he consults, coaches, occasionally wrestles and acts as an ambassador for the promotion, he’ll have six decades in the business. He’s endured 14 surgeries, still needs both knees replaced and his shoulders are a wreck. Still he shows up to run the school and his satellite wrestling operation, still paints his face, a tradition that started when Vince McMahon handed him a bizarre androgynous character named Goldust that was doomed to go nowhere. Dustin, with wrestling chops and comedic instincts, saw it as a way out from the shadow of his dad’s persona and made it work.

Still, he lost two marriages to divorce, fell into a spiral of substance abuse and perhaps, most painfully, became estranged from his father for five years. The estrangement ended just as the wrestling promo did, with the two men hugging. And when Dustin finally decided to get clean, Dusty was the call he made. Went outside into a rain storm to get enough reception to make the call. Like a scene from a movie.

“I’m crying,” Dustin said. “I said I want to go to rehab. He probably thought I was in prison or almost dead. They got me there, came to visit me and from that day forward, I didn’t turn back. We spoke every day. He’d say ‘keep stepping.’ It’s become my motto: Keep stepping. Everything came full circle.”

It’s been 17 years since he became sober. No, there hasn’t been the world champion title he always sought, but he’s found happiness and contentment in simply being Dustin Rhodes. Still paints half his face when he wrestles. The painted half looks like a skull. A man once left for dead, who has found rebirth.

So, he’ll run the wrestling school and maintain the building. He’ll mentor younger wrestlers. He’ll still get in the ring. And, yes, he still would love to win a world championship. But he doesn’t need it.

“He’s made his own path,” Kristin said. “That’s exactly what he’s done and he’s done it brilliantly. You look at him now and he doesn’t have to have all that [swirl] around him to be at peace. He’s done so much in his career. Dustin has seen it all, been through it all and doesn’t need it all anymore. But he’s got the passion for the business. Now it’s his chance to mentor. He loves that. But make no mistake: When he wants to entertain, he still does.”

Said the Hall of Famer Page, who has worked and counseled a number of older at-risk wrestlers and others: “There are not many guys who have stayed as relevant in the kind of role he’s had as long as he has. He’s a legend who has continued to reinvent himself and this cat can still be a main player when he wrestles. What he’s doing is absolutely remarkable.”

In hindsight, Kristin now believes it was inevitable that her boys would end up giving wrestling a try. Didn’t matter that neither she nor husband Don ever really got into the business.

When it’s in the blood, it’s in the blood.

“There was a part of me inside, I guess, that always felt like ‘it’s coming, it’s coming’,” she said as the boys prepared for their tag-team match at Rhodes Wrestling in January. “There’s always been an interest there for them, seeing their grandfather and both of their uncles. They’ve kind of grown up around it. I could dig my heels in, but it was always coming.”

They had been to various wrestling events to see their uncles wrestle. When uncle Dustin showed up at the house, he’d lock up with them in a wrestling stance just to play and occasionally give them a chop at the dinner table. They’d had a relationship with their grandfather, though he never talked about the business with them. Always thought it was “cool,” but, in their own words, went on about their lives.

The urge came during Dylan’s senior year in high school in Lago Vista. The more gregarious of the brothers, he opted to stop playing baseball and started bugging his older brother, already at UT, about the possibility. But, he told Dalton, he wasn’t going to pursue it without him. So, you know, no pressure or anything.

They consulted Dustin, who told them there would be no nepo babies at his school. But there are still some family privileges. Last winter, they spent a day with Cody on his bus around a show and watched him do appearances, promos, engage with fans and a Make-a-Wish patient. Earlier this summer, they spent a week at Cody’s school outside Atlanta.

Both kids are athletic. Dylan is a bit thicker and more barrel-chested. And, yes, last winter he went with the full-on Rhodes family blonde dye job, giving him a striking resemblance to a young Dusty. Especially when he and Dalton as Wayne and Wyatt Rhodes, put on their cowboy-themed wrestling boots, cowboy hats and become the Texas Outlaws. It’s the same name of the tag team with which Dusty and the late Dick Murdoch burst into the wrestling world in the 1960s.

It is clear that the boys have chemistry together in the ring and have a flair. Their wrestling careers are in infancy, but the boys expect to give it a chance to mature. As much as Kristin hoped this wouldn’t be the path, even she can’t deny what’s in their blood. As long as they finish school first.

And the boys definitely intend to give the Rhodes name a third generation in the business.

“Right now, we don’t want the spotlight, per se,” said Dylan who will be doing a meet-and-greet with his brother Saturday at Starrcast in Arlington.

“We want as much training as possible. But the family, as a whole, is maybe the most popular it’s ever been. When Dusty got in, it was just him. When Dustin got in, Dusty was kind of fading out of the spotlight. Well, now with both [Cody and Dustin] on top, it’s like all of them with some little additives around. The family is definitely moving in a good direction.”

“Cody winning the belt now being the champion, and Dustin continuing to wrestle at his age and just getting better, it puts a lot on us to want to get to their level,” Dalton said. “They’ve made a huge impact on the business and I hope, if we continue to do this, that me and my brother can both live up to the Rhodes name and make our own legacy.”

Teil Rhodes, Dusty’s youngest daughter and Cody’s older sister, is in charge of protecting Dusty’s legacy. And she has a unique take on her father’s presence.

“He didn’t cast a shadow,” she said recently from her home in Atlanta where she and her mother, Michelle, help run the Dusty Rhodes Family Foundation, which helps underserved youth athletics. “He shined a light.”

In the case of Cody, the light pointed a way out of the shadows of both his father and brother. It’s been a long journey, one that started with his father training him leading up to his WWE Raw debut at age 22. That was merely the first step. He was at one point part of “The Legacy,” a stable of second-generation wrestlers, then was “Dashing” Cody Rhodes before teaming with his brother as Stardust, as part of a tag team. The character went nowhere and left Cody frustrated enough that he bet on himself, leaving WWE, going the independent route and then through a run of other companies. Hard times, indeed.

But he ended up as a founding member of AEW, which allowed him the freedom to create his own identity. Along the way, he wrestled his brother in an epic and bloody match that helped the company establish itself. They’ve not wrestled each other since. Didn’t need to. You don’t make sequels to the classics.

“It was a great display of old school vs. new school,” Page said. “It had great moments, great energy. It had everything you could want.”

And then Cody went back to WWE to, as he has often said, finish his story. He returned in 2022 as The American Nightmare, an homage to his father’s legacy, but with a twist that made it his own. He has a neck tattoo of the American Nightmare insignia, which he’s said his father would not approve of. But he also has one over his heart. It reads simply: “Dream.”

Within a year of his return, he was in the main event at WrestleMania. He’s been in every once since, winning the undisputed WWE championship in 2024 before dropping it to John Cena, as part of the latter’s retirement tour in April. As champ or the top contender, he’s essentially the quarterback of the company, involved in multiple storylines, promoted heavily and counted on to produce ticket and merchandise sales.

Dustin was happy for his brother, but, at this stage, he’s also not going to lie. He was a little bit jealous, too. Cody had achieved what Dustin has sought for nearly 50 years: The championship belt.

“I hate to admit that, but I really was jealous,” Dustin said. “I was happy for him. I was super proud of him. But I was like: ‘Where’s mine?’ I felt like the lowly son in the middle. I know that’s not true, but that’s how it felt.

“I’m still proud of him and I love it for him, but hopefully, I’ll still get one. That’s still my dream.”
Keeping The Dream

It’s a lot just being Cody Rhodes these days. The WWE did not make Rhodes available for this story. Over the weekend, he will be in his hometown of Atlanta, where WWE has its own slew of events.

With both companies holding signature events, it may be as big a weekend in the pro wrestling world as any, save, perhaps for WrestleMania. And the Rhodes family will be well-represented.

“Dusty would be proud, but he wouldn’t be surprised,” Teil said. “Because he believed anything was possible. The legend of Dusty has only grown, but so has the ache in our hearts. It’s a comfort to know that his legacy is a lasting one. Ten years seems like a long time, but his presence is still felt.”

The Dream lives on.