Dusty Rhodes: Farewell to the American Dream

By Jeffery X Martin

“If you don’t have an ego and you don’t have a goal, you ain’t worth a damn.”
—Dusty Rhodes

Dusty Rhodes had an ego the size of Pangaea and when people called him The American Dream, it wasn’t just some wrestling hyperbole nickname. The man lived the American Dream. He embodied it. And while it’s cute and ever so arch to talk about his passing as “the death of the American Dream,” in a lot of ways that’s absolutely accurate.

His real name was Virgil Runnells and as he told thousands of wrestling fans every week on television, he was the son of a plumber, raised in Austin, Texas. He was just a poor boy from a poor family, but he got into wrestling and he learned it, understood it for the game it was. He developed a persona that was both larger than life and true to it, and that was Dusty’s appeal.

You may not have wanted Dusty’s hair. That white afro he was rocking back in the Seventies and Eighties was a monstrosity. Dusty was a big guy, and for a while he was wearing a black singlet with huge yellow polka dots. It was not a good look for him. Dusty also had a speech impediment, a lisp he didn’t even try to hide. He was flawed. If you were looking for Superman, Hulk Hogan and his pythons were more your speed. Dusty was just a regular dude, with horrible fashion sense and a dream.

Graceful? Hell, no. But he was strong as an ox in his heyday, a wrecking ball with a body perm. Most of his matches ended up with him wearing the crimson mask. That means he bled until his face was totally covered. Wrestling may be pre-determined, but one look at the red mess that was Dusty’s face during a cage match let even a novice fan know that it’s not fake.

We make a weird differentiation in our minds between “TV people” and “real people.” When “real people” die, people we know personally and have interaction with, we’re sad. We grieve. When “TV people” die, we see it cross our newsfeeds and we say, “Oh, that sucks.” We go about our day.

Not so with Dusty Rhodes. Not for me.

You can bitch about how Dusty booked all of his own matches and made himself a main event draw. That’s a moot point. He used his position to tell stories wrestling fans still talk about today. Nobody gets pissed at John Grisham for writing about lawyers.

Dusty understood how to make people care about a rivalry between two men. He made you believe the only way for that dispute to be settled was in a wrestling ring. And when he won a match, literal blood, sweat, and tears dripping onto his massive chest, he didn’t win just for himself. He won for everybody who had a dream, everybody who was working hard, anyone who, dammit, just wanted to win one time, come out on top, and savor that feeling of victory. He was our gladiator, our proxy. Others may have served in that role, that Lord-loves-a-workin’-man hero, but no one ever did it better than Dusty Rhodes.

It’s a fair bet that no one ever will.