During an appearance on The Dropkick Podcast, Rob Van Dam commented on people comparing Matt Riddle to him:
“I get a lot of people on social media saying that he’s [Riddle] a new version or that they’re trying to make him like me. You know, when I was there [WWE], they didn’t understand me. Paul [Heyman] is the only guy I think that ever really understood me and had my best interest at heart out of everybody, Vince [McMahon], bookers, whatever. When I first got there, they thought that my laid-back attitude didn’t go — that it took away from my wrestling. I don’t know if you felt that way but just like you said about Matt Riddle, they felt like that about me and so they were trying to change me and I was resisting it because I was stubborn, and I was resisting it because I didn’t wanna change and I thought that I had everything, whatever but I remember one time — and first thing, they wanted me to get rid of my airbrush outfits. So they wanted WWE to make me outfits that would be made of the material, I guess like Kurt Angle’s or whatever, and they made it and you can see a few pictures of it because it’s black, it has a red dragon. It’s so basic but it was black and it had a few patches on it. Maybe a yin yang here, ‘RVD’ here, dragon here and I wore that for a short time and then I just went back to my airbrush outfits and started wearing that on the non-televised [shows] because the airbrush outfits wear out.”
