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Article courtesy of IGN.com:   June 21, 2004 - When I think Dusty Rhodes, I think blood. I think about his cut-up forehead covered in crimson as The Four Horsemen beat him down in the middle of the ring. Maybe it's the indelible impression left on a kid flipping the station and watching one of his heroes taking a beating. The American Dream fought for what was right, but what was happening to him was wrong. Worse than wrong, it was straight-up evil. The thing is, I couldn't flip the channel, I had to see what would happen next. In fact, I didn't change the channel on wrestling for the next twenty years and still find it hard to watch something else when I hear the bell ring. And it's men like Dusty Rhodes that keep me hooked. Men who know how to entertain with their words, excite by their actions, and electrify a crowd with the hardest set of elbows the world has ever seen. IGN Sports caught up with The American Dream to talk about everything from the new Legends of Wrestling game he's featured in to his work in TNA. Here's what the man who I still see bleeding in my mind had to say: IGN Sports: The game Showdown: Legends of Wrestling that you're featured in basically has a who's who of pro wrestling, from Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage to Andre the Giant and Ricky Steamboat. Who were some of your favorite wrestlers to work with back in the day? Dusty Rhodes: Terry Funk. Any time I got to wrestle with him, it was cool. Superstar Billy Graham was another one. Nikita Koloff was a partner of mine I loved working with. When you look at it, I've crossed paths with most of the guys in this game at one time or another. That's what makes the game cool. They've done a lot with the mechanics of the game, the look of the game, trying to capture what wrestling is all about, so I think it's going to be good. It's a great blend of the old and the new. They have Eddie Guerrero and Andre The Giant. Bret Hart and Ricky Steamboat. The combination of old and new is what every wrestling organization should be like. That way you have a chance to match up the legends in dream main events. How about me and Hogan against Eddie Guerrero and Bret Hart? What a match. You've got it all. There's only one match everybody is waiting for, though. Every kid in America, every dad in America who buys the game will have the championship match with me and Hogan. Once Warrior and Savage and all of the other guys who were cool and great step up and are eliminated, the one match everyone will want to see is me against Hogan. Who are you going to play as? And don't mention somebody other than me or I'm going to be mad at you. IGN Sports: I've always preferred Ricky Steamboat, myself. Dusty Rhodes: He was cool. Ricky is a good man, I can see that. But he would be beaten early in this game by me. Really early. He'd be out in the same round as guys like Animal or Hawk. The ultimate would be me beating Hogan in the finals. It's just logical. The American Dream is the dream. The kids are waiting to see me against Hogan. It's simple because they've never seen that match. We've never had that match. The two biggest superstars in our industry who ruled the 70's and mid-80's and Hogan went on to rule up to now. The two biggest stars in our industry are in this game. My Lord. People would be standing around the block for hours to see that match, and now you can play it in this game. I just wish they would change the box cover for this game. Every year it comes out and Hogan is on the cover. It doesn't make sense when you have The American Dream Dusty Rhodes ready to unload on everybody. I guess you save money on the box, but it's what's inside that counts. IGN Sports: Why didn't that match ever take place? Dusty Rhodes: He was scared. He was always scared of me, he was scared of the Bionic Elbow. Jimmy Hart would always tell him, "Don't take this match. You'll lose all of your money and your teeth." [laughs] IGN Sports: You must have the hardest elbows of all time. Dusty Rhodes: Of all time. Still now at my age, they're hard. Hard as my head. [laughs] IGN Sports: How did you come up with the Bionic Elbow as your finisher? Dusty Rhodes: At the time when I started, coming out of football, I always used a forearm or an elbow. When it became Bionic is when I said it was Bionic. I went to some secret doctor in Istanbul who put some Bionic stuff in there. A lot of people don't know that but that's the kind of stuff you're going to learn in my book, being published by Sports Publishing. IGN Sports: There are so many different match types in the game. Did you have a favorite gimmick match? Dusty Rhodes: The Bull Rope match was my favorite along with the Texas Death match. Did you ever see that picture of Abdullah sticking that fork in my eye? I ought to find out what restaurant gave him the fork and sue them too. I invented the Bull Rope match. It had a cow bell in the middle of the ring and you had to knock the guy out and either get the 1-2-3 or knock him out to where he can't get up by 10. There was this big 10-pound cow bell in the ring that would always come into play. IGN Sports: Throughout your career, you've seen some of the best stables in wrestling history, from the NWO to the Four Horsemen. Who do you consider the best stable in the history of wrestling? Dusty Rhodes: Without a doubt it's The Four Horsemen. There's not even a comparison. It's like Hogan and Dream and Andre and Flair can go anywhere in the world and you can mention those names and whether they're wrestling fans or not, people know those names. The other cats that we know as stars, are stars in our business, but it's not the same as the guys who can walk into a room and everyone knows their names. Who is that guy? That's Dusty Rhodes, that's Hulk Hogan. I think the NWO was a made for television reality series with a lot of drama and a lot of great TV, but they couldn't compare to the feuds and the times that we battled The Four Horsemen. The only thing that was close to that was Kevin Sullivan, the devil himself down in Florida in the mid-70's when we were battling down there. But as far as a stable, there's nothing like The Four Horsemen. I go on a lot of sports talk shows and they ask me who I think is the greatest team ever. I'm a big Yankee fan, so they always expect me to say the Yankees, but I say The Four Horsemen. They laugh, but they know who they are.   IGN Sports: When you look at all of the legends in the business, who do you consider as the greatest wrestler of all time? Dusty Rhodes: That's a hard call because there are so many. You almost have to break them up into what they did in terms of entertainment value, what they did, and what they meant to the industry. As far as just a match and technique, it would be very hard to keep Ricky Steamboat out of that group. This is in their prime that we're talking about, I would group Jose Lothario in with that group. Lethario to me was the best. And as far as being a good guy or baby faces, at his prime, when he was against The Sheik, and The Sheik was the greatest bad guy in this business, period, not anyone close to the real Sheik from Detroit, those were some of the greatest matches I've ever seen. I have an older view of it. Watching Johnny Valentine and Jose Lothario in Houston for an hour, I was 19-years-old when I watched it and that's the match that made me a fan, a mark, made me want to get into the industry. Then we all changed it, me and Hogan changed the business and the way you look at it. These days, my favorite is Eddie Guerrero. I like Benoit a lot and Kurt Angle when he was healthy, but Eddie Guerrero to me, he's turned it up and has taken things up to another notch. All of these guys are old school. What I mean by that is, even though these guys have modernized themselves, you look at them and these are guys who could've made it in any era. Just like this new TNA Impact show we're doing for Fox Sports Net at 3PM on Fridays, it's so neat, and not just because I'm on it, it's neat to see some of the old, some of the new, and how there's a need for somebody else to step up to the plate. The country is ready for it. There are so many guys out there, 700, 800 guys and there might be 60 of them who could be the next Ric Flair, the next Ricky Steamboat. TNA, Total Nonstop Action, gives them that opportunity to be a star. IGN Sports: What do you think it's going to take for TNA to compete with WWE? Dusty Rhodes: I think we need to get some of these young kids who are tremendous like AJ Styles, guys who are really, really good and need to show what they've got, plus we have guys like Raven, Jeff Jarrett is the champion, Ron "The Truth" Killings, and the pay-per-views have been balls out for a couple of years now, and now it's become nationally televised, but Fox needs to move it to a primetime slot. It would be my choice, and anybody who knows me knows that I would love to go head-up on Monday nights. A one-hour show on Monday nights. If we're going to do it, let's throw it out there and do it. Then we can talk and say what will it take. But until this thing is proven, to walk before you crawl, is a bit early. I think if they moved it to primetime, you'd see a big difference. There's a lot of people really committed to making Impact a success and I'm glad to be a part of it, even at my age. IGN Sports: One of your roles traditionally has been not only as a wrestler, but as a booker. What exactly is the role of a booker backstage? Dusty Rhodes: It's a head coach, it's an executive producer of television, it's all of those things wrapped into one. Now, though, it's done more by committee where they have all of these writers writing the pay-per-views like Survivor Series, and that works, but I'm from that school where it's my ball and if we're going to play with my ball, I'll pick the music, I'll tell them when to play it, I'll pick what interviews to do, I'll write the show, I'll be the executive producer, and I'll be the star of that son of a bitch. That's the way it was. That was the role of a booker. There are no more bookers any more. That term is gone. I was probably the last of what you'd call bookers. It's the head coach, the head guy. The whole deal. I talk about it in my book coming out, along with how the wrestling business was, how it was a throwback to the blueprint of how the mafia existed and how it was split up into the different territories. I tell that story and it's going to be cool. IGN Sports: How did you get started in this crazy business? Dusty Rhodes: I played football and was at camp with the Patriots, was also signed by the Mets and had a Mets rookie contract, led the nation in RBI's in baseball, so I was a good all-around athlete. But from the time my dad brought me to my first match when I was a kid in Austin, Texas, I loved that one-on-one, that good versus evil, that crowd reaction. From there I trained, pulled the ring, ate bologna sandwiches, and ran out of gas on numerous occasions. But through it all, I knew I was going to be the man, I just knew it. God gave me the gift of gab and charisma and then Hogan followed suit, learned what he learned from me and went on about his business and took things to a different level. Everybody else was playing catch-up. IGN Sports: Where did you get the name The American Dream? Dusty Rhodes: The original American Dream thing came from this guy TC Lee who dug the ditches for the plumbing company my dad used to work for. From the time I was eight years old, my dad used to send me out to dig ditches with TC Lee and I just made a big deal in football and baseball and was offered different scholarships to different universities, and we were out digging a ditch that summer and he turned to me and said, "Man, there is an American Dream standing right here next to me." I'll never forget that. So one night in 1974, I made the comment "Here I am, this fat kid, the son of a plumber, I don't look like a body builder, fist fight in a parking lot, it doesn't matter. I'm getting ready to sell out this building, I'm going to sell out Madison Square Garden one day. This is the American Dream, I'm living it." I just said it on TV and it stuck like you through it against the wall and had super glue on it. It stuck with me and that's how it came about. Check for Dusty Rhodes later this week when Showdown: Legends of Wrestling is released into stores.