Carmelo Hayes: Cody Rhodes wanted to train with me

• WWE

In an interview with Cheap Heat with Peter Rosenberg, Carmelo Hayes talked about various current topics of the wrestling scene. At one point, Hayes was paired with Trick Williams. Carmelo recalled that moment and the conversation he had then with Trick.

“I had just won the breakout tournament and that whole 2.0 thing was getting ready to start. We had about four or five guys that came in the same class that were not ready to get on TV just yet, but they had to find something for them.

I remember Trick came up to me. Me and him weren’t really super cool. I was kind of still just doing my own thing. He came up to me and said, ‘Hey man. I think they are going to put us together as a team or something.’ I was like, ‘Oh cool.

Let me know.’ It was as simple as that and we ended up on TV with him coming in as my heater in a way because they were getting ready to turn me heel. We formed our chemistry as we went. I don’t think they knew what to do with us.

We had to figure out like, let’s bring in pop culture. I told him straight up, ‘I’m not going to be funny. I’m trying to be serious and different. I’m not trying to be silly. You do funny and I’ll do serious and we’ll balance it.’ That was our idea to make it work together”.

- he said, as quoted by pwmania.com

Carmelo Hayes and Cody Rhodes

What is interesting is that Cody Rhodes chose Hayes as his training partner after his pec injury. That says enough about how good a wrestler Hayes is and how much his colleagues respect him.

Hayes revealed that he had previously had certain conversations with Rhodes. “They mentioned to me, ‘Hey, Cody requested to train with you and Joe Gacy.’ I was like, ‘Yea, cool.’ Cody had reached out to me like two or three times before just giving me critique on my work and stuff like that, so I already had a back-and-forth relationship with him and I had met Cody in the past.

I thought it was like, wow, out of all the people that he knows and he’s picking me and Joe Gacy. I was like, okay, let’s go. A lot of people are like, we helped Cody, but I learned a lot from Cody in that time working with him.

It was fun. I think he just needed clearance from medical to go through, so we had worked for like three or four days. We did matches on the fly. We were working and we were just having fun”.