So, sometimes, this’ll be a space where I explain more in-depth some of the graphs and charts that I’ve used for a piece. And for some weeks — like this one — I will be including all of the charts/graphs that were cut for “time”.
Let’s start with this one:
This chart tracks the accumulated “title prestige” — basically a way to weight the length and importance of title reigns across eras for a given performer — by age and, as you can tell, poor Dom has had a rough go of it relative to his second-and-third-generation counterparts.
While Dom (as I mentioned in the piece) started out relatively young with winning titles, his career has largely stagnated in this area as he’s not managed to advance much in the ring — hopefully in a Meg White kind of way — and still hasn’t had a single singles title match in his entire career. Dominik will need to show a lot more than he has in the ring (and maybe a little bit on the mic) before he has a chance of catching up to anyone on this list, including the surprisingly lackluster accomplishments of Cody Rhodes (at least in terms of championships).
The other thing holding back Dominik is that, as a general rule, successful second-generation wrestlers are Ken Griffey, not Vlad Guerrero, Juniors. (In this case, Charlotte doesn’t have an analog and Cody is Bret Boone if Bob Boone had won an MVP and then managed a few World Series champions.)
While Rey isn’t the most dominant “first” generation performer, he’s done considerably better than the parents of most of Dominik’s counterparts.
Essentially Dom would need to accomplish more than not just Cody but Dusty Rhodes to reach his father’s place on WWE/WCW-ish’s Mount Olympus. At least in terms of the kind of stuff WWE might care to use to promote someone — no one cares that Dusty won the Texas Brass Knuckles championship, but they might care that Rey won 8 cruiserweight championships (and not ignore five of them simply because they happened before they owned the company where it happened).
But even taking that into account, this isn’t as hard as you might assume. Dusty’s pretty good in-ring legacy of long chases followed by short title reigns has been interwoven with his revolutionary time as booker to make us feel like Dream’s in-ring runs were on the level of Harley and Ric’s, which is just not true. Having said that, Dom would have to really jump a couple of levels before you’d bet on him to win a PPV match, let alone seem like a real contender for at least a mid-card championship. Neither was ever something that would have surprised someone watching a Dusty Rhodes match, even when he was wearing polka dots.
It’s also not necessarily anything Dom’s shown the ability or, maybe more importantly, desire to achieve. Not everyone wants to be the greatest wrestler of all time. And sometimes “The Story” is just understanding that your papi was always proud of you.