Rob Van Dam was honored to be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame three years ago but was disappointed with the event’s circumstances.
RVD was inducted in 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the ceremony saw the 2020 and 2021 classes be inducted in the crowdless Thunderdome.
On a recent edition of the “Wrestling Life” podcast, Van Dam shared his disappointment with a school-based analogy. He said,
“I was honored. Um, the fact that it was during COVID and we didn’t have a crowd was kind of disappointing. After going to the Hall of Fame for so many years and watching the really long speeches—super, super long—and then they told us to go, uh, three to five minutes on our speeches…after hearing these guys going on and on. After the Hillbilly Jim 45-minute speech, right?
“Yeah, so it kind of felt like when I was in high school, like, uh, all the grades sell M&M’s to pay for the senior trip, and then when you’re finally a senior, you know, then you capitalize on it. But by the time we made it, they stopped taking the boat to the Bahamas, and instead, uh, we got screwed because we just went to like this local amusement park. I think it was Cedar Point we went to. Damn, you know, that happens to me sometimes.”
Rob Van Dam added that the speech fans saw was just a small chunk of his original speech that was planned for the evening. He said,
“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, um, in theory, like maybe 24 minutes over the three-minute request. You know, I didn’t hear anything when I got back except, ‘That was a little long, wasn’t it?’ But I had no idea till I saw the whole thing that it was that long. Because it’s your moment—it’s your moment in the spotlight. Yeah, and you know, you’re playing off of somebody turning the volume up and down.”
RVD recently shared his thoughts on WWE ID, the promotion’s latest recruitment program. Click here to find out more.
