Arik Cannon called out a 19-year-old for not setting up chairs before an indie wrestling show, and now Cody Rhodes is personally vouching for the kid’s work ethic on X, which means the dumbest wrestling story of the year somehow turned into the most wonderful one.
Avery Styles, AJ Styles’ 19-year-old son, lost to Marcus Mathers in 18 minutes and 32 seconds at GCW’s “Rude Awakening” show in Minneapolis on August 1st, and that loss isn’t the story. The real one broke after, when Cannon, an indie veteran and producer, went public with the claim that Avery didn’t help set up chairs before the show, backing it up with old photos of guys like Cody Rhodes and Jimmy Hart doing ring and chair duty at indie shows earlier in their careers. The implication: this is how you’re supposed to come up in this business, and Avery skipped the line. Underneath the joke is a real question about what a legacy kid owes the indies when his last name already opens doors most 19-year-olds spend a decade trying to knock down.
AJ Styles pushed back fast, saying his son was hired to wrestle at that show, not to work crew. GCW owner Brett Lauderdale tried to stay above the fray, saying Avery “is a kid and he deserves the same grace that would be afforded to any other teenager being thrown in to the deep end at this early stage in his career (and LIFE),” which is a diplomatic way of telling everybody to relax.
Cody’s summer already had enough drama without a chairs beef attached to it, but he showed up anyway and ended the discourse in one tweet.
https://twitter.com/CodyRhodes/status/2087311053109510352
That “he already set up the fn’ chairs” line might be the best sentence a wrestler has posted on Twitter all year. Cody’s argument isn’t that manual labor doesn’t matter — it’s that AJ Styles spent Avery’s entire childhood on the road, grinding through the exact indie circuit Cannon is nostalgic for, so the debt got paid before the kid could even walk. That’s a genuinely good point, and only someone who actually lived the paying-dues grind could say it with a straight face.
Except Cannon isn’t wrong either, and that’s what makes this the best beef in wrestling right now instead of just an ugly one. In his response to Rhodes, Cannon said he respects both Rhodes and AJ, but he’s still asking a fair question: if the son of a WWE legend gets a pass on setup because of his dad’s resume, what happens to the next 19-year-old on that card whose last name doesn’t open the same doors? That’s a fair worry, not sour grapes.
I don’t think there’s a clean winner here, and I don’t think there’s supposed to be one. Avery’s actual GCW debut happened the night before, on July 31 at the Admiral Theater in Omaha, when he walked out to his dad’s old “Demi Gods” entrance music and beat Alex Lev with the Spiral Tap. That’s a teenager trying to build something real under a spotlight he didn’t ask for, one night before he lost to Mathers and got dragged online for it. Cannon’s just making sure nobody hands him the rest of it for free. Both things can be true, and somehow a stack of folding chairs is where wrestling had that conversation out loud.
