On a recent edition of his “1 Of A Kind” podcast, Rob Van Dam discussed Bobby Lashley, MVP, and Shelton Benjamin signing with AEW.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On Bobby Lashley, MVP, and Shelton Benjamin signing with AEW: “Shelton Benjamin’s one of the best athletes in the business, very gifted. And MVP, he’s a bad motherfu**er… They’re all part of Hurt Business. What I’m thinking is that if AEW is going to bring in wrestlers who are known for being good wrestlers, could that change the style in a good way? To where it’s less about breaking through tables and glass and less about diving every single match, and more about really good mat wrestling. Like, could that be something that could be a byproduct of bringing in guys like that?
“I mean all three of those guys will roll with you on the mat and will beat you, will pin you. All three of those guys are great, f**king great wrestlers and very skilled in it. And I don’t see any of those guys wanting to dive over the top rope to put a guy through a weird glass sliding door that happens to be on top of a wheelbarrow next to the ring.”
On scripted matches: “I would think that’s more the preferred way now. So maybe when they say scripted, maybe they mean in their head, I don’t know. But yeah, then there’s the opposite. I’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately, and this comes up sometimes. But when I wrestled The Undertaker on the loop several weeks, we had cage matches. And I wouldn’t have to even see him before the match, you know? I didn’t have to say one word to him. I had a pretty good idea of how it was going to end up, and there was no need to talk about anything else. We’d go out there and — you know, they probably weren’t the very top of all of my fans’ favorite matches ever of mine. But they definitely were decent matches where the crowd was into it. And you know, I just say that because they were live events, not even on TV, so I don’t even remember what we did. But you know, just experience. He’s been doing it forever, I’ve been doing it a long time too. And I didn’t have any need to even think about what I was going to do till I went out there.”
On a recent edition of his “Hall of Fame” podcast, Booker T discussed Shelton Benjamin’s signing with AEW, the promotion’s lack of focus on consistent growth, and other topics.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On Shelton Benjamin joining AEW: “Those are my guys, man. I want to see those guys come up. I don’t want to see anybody out in the cold in this situation. But no, I’m glad that Tony Khan pulled the trigger, got them all in, and continued the Hurt Syndicate, whatever they gonna be calling themselves. But I like it. I like it a lot.”
On AEW not focusing on the right things: “But my thing is this: five year anniversary for Dynamite. And I’m sure their debut on Dynamite, they had close to a million viewers, all right? The fifth year anniversary, they had 680,000 viewers which was down from 702,000 from last week. This is their anniversary. It seemed like everybody and their mama that’s AEW fans would have been watching this show. And for that show to have 680,000 viewers, I’m gonna continue to talk about it as far as — you know, as long as it happens. Because five years in, seems like those numbers would be going up as opposed to going down, if we’re doing the right things. If we’re creating the show that the fans truly want to watch.
“And my thing is, fans are fans. I don’t care who they are, if they want if they love wrestling they’re going to watch it. I know we got this tribalism going on right now, but if you got a good show going on, people gonna watch it. I just feel like — I don’t know, I could be wrong. But it seems like AEW is really not focusing, or really just doesn’t care about that part of AEW. I could be wrong. I could be 100% wrong, but it seems like they’re not focusing in the right places.”
