During a recent edition of his “1 Of A Kind” podcast, Rob Van Dam expressed his belief that his opportunities in WWE were restricted due to his lack of politicking.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On whether he ever politicked in certain ways in WWE: “I don’t think so, and I think that’s why I was limited. But I did where — I mean, I did make it to the top. So I can’t say it’s impossible, since I did it. I don’t think, I never ever felt like I was like their man. Like, I didn’t talk with them about plans of what we’re going to do. I was all about ECW, and that was going to be used against me eventually, no matter what. But I mean, maybe you could say I politicized with an ECW bias, you know. Maybe if you really tore it apart, maybe me saying ‘ECW, ECW, we need to do ECW. Look at the look at these numbers, and look at these fans. Look at these wrestlers that were ECW, and look at what we can do with it.’ I guess I could see where one might argue that that was politicking.”
On whether he thinks about wrestling for all of the top promotions: “No, I mean it’s been a really long and colorful career. So those are all accolades, you know. Also, I think that you have to wrestle for at least a minimal amount of different companies in order to consider yourself fully rounded. And Japan used to be so different — I think it probably still is. But there’s so many different companies now, and lot of different companies have different styles from each other, even. But it used to be — you know, not everyone could go to Japan because not everyone would get over there, because you had to be athletic and appreciate stiffness and a lot of things. Be able to eat their food [chuckles], be able to survive over there for a few weeks, you know, without America.”
