WWE Hall of Famer Rob Van Dam (RVD) recently took to an episode of his “1 Of A Kind” podcast, where he talked about a number of topics including which brand it was better to be on during the WWE brand split.
RVD said, “Well, Raw from the perspective of, that was always considered the A show. Smackdown was always considered to the B show. You know, sometimes we’d do the Smackdown TV taping the very next day so it’d be like a Monday, Tuesday. The A-show would be live, then we would do Thursday’s show on Tuesday. That happened a lot. And then there’d be other times when we would do live on Thursday or whatever, we’d actually be doing on Smackdown live but it was still always considered to be B show. When ECW came out as a third brand, they piggybacked. So we would do Raw on Monday, and then Tuesday would be like an ECW/Smackdown show. Where first it’d be Smackdown, and they would somehow promote ECW as being the heels on their show. And then [they would] expect, after the show’s over, for all the fans to instantly turn into hardcore ECW fans even though they just made us get booed on their own show in front of the same people.”
On the WWE schedule in 2001:
“And when I first was in WWE in 2001, we were actually doing, sometimes three shows a night that weren’t on television. So you got Monday Raw and Tuesday TV, but also we would do non-televised shows on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. And this, by the way, is every, every, every, every week. Not once in a while, not when we have a tour coming up. This was the standard. If a Friday was off, it was definitely out of the ordinary. What would happen is, sometimes our days off would become travel days and then we wouldn’t have those. For instance, one time in Europe we did 16 out of 17 days, we worked every day in a row. And so that could happen.”
“But anyway, that was the schedule. And when I first got to WWE, there were so many shows going on. There’d be an A show, a B show, and a C show all the same night, spread out in different towns. The A show would be in the bigger city, New Orleans. That would have Triple H on it, and maybe Stone Cold, Undertaker. There may be a B show, and then like I said, even a C show. So that’s why a lot of times I was main eventing shows as a Hardcore Champion. Because I elevated the belt, gave it prestige and substance that it wasn’t meant to have. And also, we had that many shows. So that was another factor going into that. But for those reasons, it was always better to be on the A show, because you could expect to make more money and have better conditions. Meaning better buildings, better city, bigger crowds as opposed to being stuck in Jefferson Parish in the middle of Swampville for the show C at the local elementary school.”
You can check out the complete podcast below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
