Lee Johnson got his first pinfall on the February 10, 2021 episode of AEW Dynamite in a tag team match with Cody Rhodes against the team of “Pretty” Peter Avalon and Cezar Bonomi. Unfortunately, Cody Rhodes was injured in the match according to Arn Anderson. Johnson was given time to cut a promo after the match in which he thanked Cody, his wife Brandi (who is now pregnant) Dustin Rhodes, and Arn Anderson for training him as Lee is the newest member of The Nightmare Family.
What was somewhat peculiar about this segment was that QT Marshall was conveniently absent from this segment. Marshall had a major hand in training Lee Johnson, so one could conclude based on this that Johnson and Marshall could possibly engage in a feud in the coming months. Dave Meltzer has reported on Wrestling Observer Radio that Cody has been studying the Bruno Sammartino – Larry Zbyszko feud from the early 1980s as the framework off of which to orchestrate the puzzle pieces of the Johnson – Marshall story.
In the early 1980s, Bruno Sammartino was already a living legend in wrestling, while Larry Zbyszko was his protégé. Zbyszko got to a point where he was fed up with the situation and turned heel on Sammartino (who was well into his 40s at the time). It was Cody’s idea for Lee Johnson to play the role of Larry Zbyszko in the 2021 version of this story and for QT Marshall to play the role of Sammartino.
A more recent example of how this storyline between Lee Johnson and QT Marshall might turn out is the storyline in AEW back in late 2019 – early 2020 between Cody and MJF in which Cody served as a mentor to a young Maxwell Jacob Friedman. MJF threw in the towel for Cody in a match for the AEW World Championship against Chris Jericho (Le Champion at the time) at Full Gear in November 2019 when Maxwell was fully aware that Cody could never challenge for the title again if he lost. This disagreement between Cody and MJF led to a match between them at Revolution in February 2020, in which Cody unselfishly put over Maxwell Jacob Friedman.