Rob Van Dam Responds to Criticism of His Take on Jon Moxley’s Spike Bat Spot

In the latest episode of 1 Of A Kind, Rob Van Dam shared his thoughts on the backlash regarding his opinion on Jon Moxley’s spike bat spot during AEW Dynamite. Here are some key highlights:

On his mindset toward those kinds of matches: “Probably predictably, if you’ve ever heard me talk about it, me and Sabu called those matches garbage matches. And we just didn’t respect them, even in ECW. I have never even been in a barbed wire match, the only one — I ran out to one of Sabu’s, him and Terry Funk, that legendary one. But we always like — New Jack would have a garbage can, several garbage cans actually, by the door. And the fans would bring weapons, and they would grab them at the door and fill them in a shopping cart or garbage cans for New Jack to look through and choose which ones he wants to bring out to the ring. And that was his whole gimmick.”

On not being trained that way: “I mean, Sheik wouldn’t have — if I would have dancing and bringing a toaster in the ring, I think Sheik would have just cut my forehead open and said, ‘Don’t ever come back.’ That was just, ‘What are you doing? Are you trying to beat him? Are you trying to dance?’ But you know obviously, I got taught like one way. And then The Gangsters, they had a lot of fans and everyone had their own part of the show.”

On his issue with how it plays out now: “Nowadays when they load it all up with gimmicks that would never be anywhere near a ring like doors and big sheets of glass and stuff. It’s obviously just for the gimmick, and then it totally replaces wrestling. And that’s why I say I hate the style of two guys just grabbing each other’s neck on top of a pickup truck, looking over and then both jump over and smash through everything. That’s the furthest thing from wrestling to me. Who did a wrestling move to who? What happened? But you know, it is faker than it’s ever been now because people got into it that weren’t trained by old school legends like myself.”

On not being a fan of the deathmatch style in ECW: “I said the same thing about ECW back then too, though, you know what I mean? We’re stapling each other or whatever. I was like, ‘Ennh, that’s not my s**t.”