Cody Rhodes says Matt Cardona is one of the stiffest wrestlers who has ever worked, and that Chelsea Green did not find out until well into their relationship.
Rhodes brought it up on What Do You Wanna Talk About, and traced it back to where Cardona learned.
“Cardona is one of the stiffest wrestlers of all time, and it’s from his Deep South training, where that was a thing,” Rhodes said. “Lay it in, but not just lay it in, just hit him.”
The part he found funniest was that Green, Cardona’s wife, was not aware of it.
“I think Chelsea didn’t know till deep into their relationship,” Rhodes said. “She worked him maybe to get ready for something, but really was shocked. Like, what are we doing?”
His verdict on Cardona was blunt and delivered with some affection.
“He is a real potato factory,” Rhodes said. “A total potato factory. But then he’s sensitive too. You know how stiff people are.”
A potato in wrestling is a strike that lands for real rather than being pulled, and a potato factory is somebody who does it habitually. It is not usually meant as a compliment, though Rhodes was not delivering it as an insult.
Cardona has heard the charge before and has generally taken it the way Rhodes meant it. The reputation followed him out of developmental and through a WWE run that started in 2007, and it is part of what made the Zack Ryder character work when it did, because the wrestling underneath the comedy was harder than the presentation suggested.
He was complimentary about Green’s own work in the same exchange, saying her strikes are good.
The compliment inside the criticism is the part worth pulling out. A wrestler described as stiff is being told he is dangerous to work with, but the reason Rhodes is telling the story at all is that Cardona is somebody he came up alongside and has worked with for twenty years. Nobody accumulates that record by being genuinely unsafe.
Deep South Wrestling was WWE’s developmental territory in Georgia in the mid-2000s, run by Bill DeMott, and had a reputation for a hard-hitting style. Cardona was there before debuting on the main roster as Zack Ryder.
Cardona and Rhodes came up together in that era and have worked together since across WWE, AEW and the independents, including a run of matches on the independent circuit during the period both were out of WWE. Rhodes has spoken before about Cardona rebuilding himself on the indies after his 2020 release, which is the run that got him back.
Cardona re-signed with WWE on the January 2 episode of SmackDown and tore his triceps last month in a match with Kit Wilson taped for Main Event before SmackDown in Toronto. He had surgery on August 25 and said in a video afterwards that he intends to be back before his surgeon’s timeline and still plans to win the WWE Championship. He is 41, and had not settled into a defined role since re-signing.
Green is the Interim WWE Women’s Champion, having won the title in a ladder match at SummerSlam and broken an orbital bone five days later. She has been defending it through the injury, most recently against Nia Jax on the September 11 SmackDown in Mexico City.
Deep South’s reputation outlasted the territory. WWE closed it in 2007, and the training methods there and at the other developmental camps of that era have been publicly criticised by a number of wrestlers who went through them. What Rhodes is describing is a style that was taught rather than one Cardona arrived with.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2G9kyjyCPS1Pwr4MBuFp1R?si=f126ff3b92d24a77
