During a recent appearance on the “Wrestling Life” podcast, Rob Van Dam discussed his WWE Hall of Fame induction in 2021 and expressed his desire for it to have occurred outside of the Thunderdome.
The WWE Thunderdome was established at a single venue, featuring video screens that displayed fans watching from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
RVD said, “It was very validating to be thought of on that Mount Rushmore of wrestlers. That’s something that they can never take away from me now. It felt like I elevated up to a level, and now people refer to me as a Hall of Famer. It’s very prestigious. So I was honored. The fact that it was during COVID and we didn’t have a crowd was kind of disappointing after going to Hall of Fame for so many years and watching the really long speeches. They told us to go three to five minutes on our speeches after hearing [really long speeches]. So it kind of felt like when I was in high school, all the grades sell M&M’s to pay for the senior trip, and then when you’re finally a senior, then you capitalize on it, but by the time we made, they stopped taking the boat to the Bahamas, and instead we got screwed because we just went to this local amusement park. That happens to me sometimes. But the thing about the time and there not being people there, if you’ve seen my speech, then you’ve seen like nine minutes of it, but the whole thing was actually 27 minutes, so I actually went in theory maybe 24 minutes over the three-minute request. I didn’t hear anything. When I got back, I said, ‘That was a little long, wasn’t it?’ I had no idea until I saw the whole thing that it was that long. You’re playing off of somebody turning the volume up and down on a response. I’ll have to get in it again.”
During a recent appearance on “The Takedown” podcast, Baron Corbin reflected on his portrayal of the sad “Bum Ass Corbin” character in WWE and revealed why he enjoyed that phase.
Corbin said, “I think that the sad Corbin, it was just supposed to be like a two-week thing. I think that was originally the plan. Let’s get you upset and then get you back. Then I grabbed onto it. I was like, this is so different. This is so fun. I can show my range. I have no ego, zero ego. So something like that is not going to… There are some people in our world that would be like, ‘You want me to look like a bum? I’m a WWE superstar.’ I have no ego. You want me to do that? Hell, yeah, let’s go. This is going to be fun. Let’s turn it up to twelve. That’s something I’ve always learned from seeing it. How do you take what they give you and turn it into gold? It’s a lot of work. I mean, you have to fully commit. There’s times I have to sit in the back and take 20 or 30 minutes of getting my head in the space of going out there and just being disheveled in a total disaster. I would walk to the ring and people are legit trying to hand me $20 bills. I had a lady in Houston. I was leaving the building in Houston. A woman shoved money in the window, and I was like, I don’t need your money. Jacob, he’s one of the Fox execs. He sent me a message that his daughter wanted to give me her allowance because she felt so bad for me. I was all in on that.”
