It's time for Stardust

Dusty Rhodes' loss was a shocking blow to wrestling fans around the world last week. Few personalities are as engrained in the history of the sport as he was. Over four decades, he main evented, scripted, trained and held pretty much every backstage job imaginable in the squared circle.

He also gave the world two more great wrestlers in the forms of his sons Dustin and Cody. Dustin spent decades in the business working both as Dustin Rhodes and Goldust. He cemented a legacy of his own right with his great in-ring presence and unique style beneath his gold paint. But he also is an aging figure in a young man's business. At forty-six, he probably wrestled his last match back in February against his own brother at Fastlane. Now he's following in his father's footsteps as a trainer at the WWE Performance Center, a position that will do him well over the next several years or even decades.

That leaves only one man to carry on the legacy of Dusty Rhodes in WWE and it is a man that has been long deserving of a stronger place on the main roster.

With his new cape, he should also go after the DNA of any future X-Men film franchise guest star.

Cody Rhodes came into WWE as a young brash upstart and almost immediately became a tag team specialist alongside folks like Hardcore Holly, Ted DiBiase, Drew McIntyre and his brother. But Cody has also bounced up and down the card endlessly in that time. He flirted with the main event a few times in his career, but every push to the top always seemed to derail before he could main event a pay-per-view.

Back in mid-2014, he debuted his current look, that of Stardust. A more cosmically weird version of Goldust, Stardust quickly took the tag team division by storm alongside his brother, but over the months under the makeup, he grew more and more strange. Eventually he turned on his brother and his father with a newer crazier attitude, all the time hating the name Cody Rhodes.

Since Goldust left the company, he has mostly floundered on the undercard with little or no direction. Now it seems the perfect time to end that.

The advantage of a character as weird as Stardust is he needs very little motivation to enter a feud. His own craziness can turn the smallest slight into a major war in his mind. He could easily enter battles with anyone on the roster at a drop of a hat.

But I think the best way for him to come back is to acknowledge his father's passing. Let him embrace his family legacy alongside his own perceptions of reality. In doing so, he could free himself to truly live up to the Stardust personality. He could take his own odd streak somewhere Goldust never quite achieved: into a main event match.

We all know that Cody has all the talent in the world. He's show his fire with The Legacy, as the mustachioed Dashing One and now as Stardust. It's time for WWE to give him a chance to do it on a bigger stage than ever before.