Rob Van Dam Reveals How He Felt About WWE’s Revival Of ECW
Rob Van Dam has shared how he felt about WWE’s decision to bring back the ECW brand as a regular thing in 2006.
When Rob Van Dam‘s wrestling career took off in the mid-to-late 1990s it was when he worked for Extreme Championship Wrestling. Thanks to his high-flying style as well as his ability to throw kicks from any angle, RVD stood out from the pack and became arguably the biggest star in ECW history.
After ECW’s run ended in 2001, RVD signed with WWE where he would spend the rest of the decade with WWE until his 2010 departure. During his WWE career, RVD won the WWE Title in 2006, he was a six-time Tag Team Champion, he won Money in the Bank, and was very popular with WWE fans the entire time. RVD last competed in a WWE match in 2014.
In a recent interview with WrestlingNews.co, Rob Van Dam shared how he felt about WWE’s decision to bring back the ECW brand in 2006.
“I have a very balanced feeling on that because I have pros and cons that I feel. At the time, especially when I was in that competitive state of mind of being in the dressing room and feeling like the writers are just, you know, fu**ing with me. You got through all this stuff when you’re right in there. For me, totally different state of mind that I have now with this happy time in my life.”
Rob Van Dam went on to say that he looked at it defensively as if WWE’s Vince McMahon was mocking what ECW was with how WWE chose to present the new ECW brand.
“So at the time, I really looked at it defensively from ECW. You know, I thought he’s making a mockery of ECW. I thought he might have even brought ECW back just to destroy it because he didn’t like the fans chanting EC Dub. He took credit for it, so he trained them to chant EC Dub during the shows by putting out the ECW DVD. Then I was like, Wow, man, this dude’s crazy. Maybe he brought it back just to completely wipe out the extreme theme to it, and they did completely wipe out the extreme theme to it.
“So it was like, you know, just like any other show except they put way less into it. Way less budget, way less advertising. The house shows at that time, you know, we’re just the old ECW crappy arenas from the mid-90s.”
“We would sometimes film after SmackDown on the SmackDown night, and there was some kind of weird way that we were getting paid off a split of their gate which really wasn’t fair. In the end, you know, supposedly all the numbers ironed out, whatever.”
The WWE version of ECW ended up running for less than four years from the summer of 2006 until early 2010 when the company chose to pull the plug on the brand.