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 challenging pro wrestling legend Jerry Lynn to a match early in his WWE career.
RVD said, “Yes I did [ask for a match with Lynn], and they weren’t too happy about it. And I was like, ‘Paul [Heyman], help me. We’ll show him what we can do, and then they’ll book Jerry more, because we’re gonna f***ing show them the match that we thought everybody loved. And we did a match. Didn’t have a lot of time, but we did a lot of our stuff. You know, in WWE, it is always — the timing never felt the exact same for me, because it became everything. Like before WWE, I was never put on a time limit. And so I didn’t even know how to judge time when I got to WWE. I had no idea. And then all of a sudden, it’s the number one thing.”
“And when you’re out there, you need to know if you have 90 seconds, or if you have f***ing four minutes, or if you have 17 seconds. And you need to know that while you’re out there, so you can get in what you want to get in and not be stuck with your dick in your hand and getting in trouble because the other matches are going to be shorter because you’re live. Which, I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot. And they plan for it like that, in the order that they put the matches in.”
On the match itself:
“But I had a match with Jerry Lynn. I think it was on Sunday Night Heat. Don’t know how many people saw it. I felt like it was pretty much up to par with our normal matches. But it wasn’t in front of an ECW crowd, we couldn’t do hardcore stuff and couldn’t really — because we couldn’t take it to that level, we couldn’t really take our time and soak in the moment that we would react to those moves that weren’t there. But nothing I think came from it. You know, I don’t think Vince [McMahon] liked him.”
On the Mr. McMahon documentary on Netflix:
“I will check it out… I hope that it’s like most documentaries where you learn a lot that you didn’t know, or can at least feel like you do, watching it. And [I’m] looking forward to it. They did contact me a couple of times actually about participating in the interviews. And it wasn’t something that I opted to do. It wasn’t a choice that would be conducive to my position in the business, the industry. So I passed, and I told them, ‘I look forward to seeing it.’ And I do, and I hope that they cover a lot of different grounds instead of just jumping to the main pillars of whatever story that you used to tell.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
