Aron Stevens has fond memories of his 2023 Money In The Bank win.
During a recent interview with WrestleZone, Aron Stevens (fka Damien Sandow) looked back on winning WWE’s Money In The Bank match during his run with the company. WrestleZone’s Bill Pritchard mentioned that Cody Rhodes once referred to the match as a personal favorite. Stevens said it was one of his career highlights as well and shared how the competitors in the match had to tell the right story to earn the Philadelphia crowd’s respect.
“Philly, bottom line, they are a very, very tough crowd, but they’re awesome. And here’s the thing, if you know how to do this, right? Whether it’s like really really good at its Southern Memphis Tennessee style, and you can do it and look believable, Philly will get with it. If you can do Lucha and tell stories like we do in North America,” Stevens explained, “like Rey Mysterio, Philly is gonna get with it. If you’re good at this, Philly gives you love, but they don’t just hand that out. They’re very, very different and out of all the major cities, Philly’s, the one where it’s like ‘Okay, here we go.’”
The 2013 World Heavyweight Championship contract match featured seven participants, but Sandow and Cody Rhodes were teammates (as The Rhodes Scholars) going into the match. Stevens said he knew he was winning the match, but it wouldn’t mean much if they all couldn’t get the fans in Cody’s corner before the night was over.
“Everyone worked selflessly. Like, okay, the briefcase was going in my hands, fine. What picture do we paint? Doesn’t mean anything — if I grab that briefcase, it doesn’t mean anything if the crowd isn’t cheering ‘Cody.’ Oh, by the way, we came to the ring together because we were a tag team at the time. So look, we have to make Cody,” Stevens explained. “We all structured everything, we need to do it. And the thing is, we did it and it was just awesome. And that was one of those ones that I think that match to this day, it stands the test of time. And that was everyone working together with it. So yeah, that’s my memory of that.”
Sandow and Rhodes then entered a feud that ran through that summer. Sandow ultimately cashed his briefcase in on John Cena during the October 28, 2013 episode of Raw. Cena won the match, making Sandow the second WWE Superstar that failed to win his cash-in attempt. Coincidentally, Cena lost his cash-in the year prior, although he lost a match via disqualification.
