Goldust probably needed a brush up on his vocabulary.
He talked to Edge and Christian on their podcast recently about agreeing to become Goldust, which was vastly different than being The Natural Dustin Rhodes. As it turns out, he agreed to it without knowing an important word:
Me and my dad, we were kind of not on the best of terms at that point. And I had just gotten released from WCW, so it's like I'm sitting at home and Vince calls and he presents this ide. And then, Bruce Prichard (who was) on the phone, he presents this idea. He kept saying, 'this is an androgynous character' and I'm just agreeing with him, but I have no idea what the hell that means, so I'm like, 'yeah, sure. I'll give this a try' because I really wanted to try to do something on my own other than the Dustin Rhodes name, try to accomplish something that is fresh and new and then go from there and see if I could do that. (I) opened up the dictionary and looked to see what 'androgynous' was and I just shook my head. I'm like, well, I can't back out now, let's go and just give it my all.
One of his bigger feuds early on was a program with Razor Ramon, aka Scott Hall. Goldust says that Hall was against the gimmick, and didn't like the idea of working with such a character, which hurt Goldust as he just wanted to make the character work:
Yeah, yeah, Razor wasn't keen on it, man, and he fought it. I'm just trying to get a character over and do what's best for the company, best for business, best for me, and I'm young, so I'm not in other people's point of view sometimes. And even though this business is a work, people take it too seriously. For me, it's probably when I had the most passion for the business and where I did not let the little things get to me, and not care so much about what they're thinking of me. Man, just go out there and do what I can do to perform and put on a great performance, whatever. And to have him kind of, to have Razor be kind of a speed bump, it was frustrating. But we got through it, and it ended with a Roddy Piper special because Razor left.
Goldust has been off and on the WWE roster for over 20 years, first making his debut in 1995. His most recent run started in the fall of 2013, working as a tag team with his brother, Cody.
