Cody Rhodes, Santino Marella and Sheamus once survived a terrifying bus crash on the road with WWE, and for a few horrifying seconds, Cody genuinely believed they were about to die. Then he climbed out of his bunk, saw blood covering a shattered windshield and thought their driver was already dead.
Speaking with Santino on What Do You Wanna Talk About?, Cody revealed the wild story from their WWE days, which ironically began because Triple H had given the younger wrestlers some pretty sensible travel advice.
“Triple H said, ‘Hey, you know, top guys aren’t the only ones who can get a bus. Why don’t you guys get a bus? But just split it. Get three or four guys on there. Get the fridge on there. You got your food, you can park it at the gym. You know, no excuses.’ Honestly, sounded like a good deal.”
So Cody, Santino and Sheamus did exactly that. Their vehicle was closer to a giant camper than one of WWE’s massive tour buses, but it had four bunks, two lounge areas and a refrigerator. They were headed toward Madison, Wisconsin, in the middle of winter when their driver confidently assured Cody the trip was a “drop in the bucket.”
Then everyone went to sleep. Cody had barely settled into his bunk when he felt the vehicle moving violently underneath him.
“I felt like I had just gotten in the bunk and then I just—bus is going. And I just felt this. And it’s moving. But it could have just been the road.”
Then came the crash. Santino heard something break in the front lounge before Cody felt the vehicle grinding rather than normally slowing down.
“The next thing you know, I feel the downshifting a little, and it’s grinding to a stop. Which in my heart, I thought, are we going to fall off a cliff? A bridge?”
Glass started shattering around them, and that’s when Cody’s mind went to the worst possible place.
“Basically, as it’s grinding to stop, you hear all this glass shatter. So I’m thinking, my God, we are—this is—we’re gonna die. This is, we’re gonna die.”
Santino Marella was trapped inside a windowless bunk thinking exactly the same thing.
“All of a sudden I’m just gripping, going, ‘Oh shit.’ And I’m waiting for it. And it’s grinding to a stop, there’s a shatter, and I’m thinking we’re gonna tip over a goddamn bridge. All I could think is just, ‘Come to a stop, come to a stop, come to a stop.’”
Eventually, it did. For around ten seconds, nobody moved. Then Cody rolled out of his bunk and saw just how bad things were. Then he saw the driver. The windshield was destroyed, there was red on the glass and the man was slumped motionless over the wheel.
“The bus finally comes to a stop and there’s like a ten-second, just nothing. And I roll out and I look into the front lounge. The door that blocked the bunks has been busted open. I look in the front lounge and the fridge is completely tipped. The bus—there’s these dents. It looks kind of like it’s been turned upside down in an earthquake. Then I saw that bus driver sitting in the seat completely hunched over, and the full glass is shattered, shattered, shattered, shattered. You see red on the glass. And I’m thinking, ‘He is fucking dead. He’s dead.’ Like, he’s not moving.”
The American Nightmare started moving toward him before the driver suddenly shot upright.
“I’m moving up there and moving up there, and then all of a sudden he just shoots up out of the chair and he takes this big jug of water and he puts it all over his head. He’s got glass in his eyes.”
The driver survived, but apparently wasn’t in much condition to explain himself. Cody remembered him sitting down and repeatedly apologizing while everyone tried to process what had just happened.
And somehow, this is where the story gets funny. While Cody was dealing with a bloodied driver and a destroyed bus, Santino was crawling around looking for his contact lens. Cody couldn’t believe it.
“I look back and you’re just back there with a phone looking at the floor. And then you’re going, ‘Does anybody have a torch? Does anybody have a torch? I can’t find my contact.’ I’m thinking, ‘Who cares?’ We’re like, do you realize we’re on the side of the road in the middle of the winter with the frigid air blowing into the bus?”
Santino actually had a pretty good excuse. He suffered from keratoconus and could barely see without his contacts.
“I have since had contact lenses implanted in my eyes because it was my whole career—I had keratoconus, having very, very bad vision. And so I can’t see shit without my contacts.”
The crash had left the bus totaled, and Cody later said they determined the driver had fallen asleep and smashed into a highway sign.
Santino: “So he ended up—Barbosa ended up clipping the highway sign.”
Cody: “Road sign. Just shattered the corner of the bus.”
Santino: “Totaled the bus. The front of it was destroyed. We were just in the compact area, and we came out and we saw—we saw the damage that had been done. We survived though. We survived.”
Cody: “We survived.”
But this was still WWE, and there was another show to make. A roadside assistance worker got Cody, Santino and Sheamus to a rest stop, where they eventually found an old-school yellow cab and continued toward Madison with all their luggage.
“You, me and Sheamus got a cab, and it was an old-school yellow cab. And we sat in it with our bags on our—and we drove all the way to the show.”
Then Sheamus managed to make the night even worse. They finally reached Wisconsin as the sun was coming up, only to discover he’d booked their hotel for the wrong day.
“The plot even thickened. We pulled in when the sun was coming up, and I remember seeing guys fishing on the ice, and we pulled in in Wisconsin, we got to the hotel and Sheamus had booked it for the day before.”
The hotel staff eventually helped get them somewhere else to stay. Ted DiBiase Jr., meanwhile, missed the entire disaster. He was supposed to join the group the following day and arrived expecting their fancy new bus—only to find Cody and the others traveling in a Ford Explorer instead.
And somehow, the bus company had one more offer for Cody. Rather than pursue the crash further, Cody said the company offered them another bus for free the following weekend. Cody accepted.
“Their offer to me, instead of us perhaps suing them or at least looking into, investigating the incident, their offer to me was, ‘Listen, bad—that’s bad—but we’ll give you the bus for free next weekend. We’ll try it again.’ And I just did that. I was like, ‘Yeah, okay.’ Not in my mind thinking, well, I’m terrified of every bus ride to this day.”
And that may be the craziest part of the entire story. Cody, Santino and Sheamus survived a driver falling asleep, smashing their bus into a highway sign, shattering the windshield and leaving them stranded in freezing weather—and Cody got back onto another bus the following week because the company offered it for free. He made the next town. The fear apparently never left.
What do you make of Cody Rhodes, Santino Marella and Sheamus’ insane WWE road story? Let us know in the comments.
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