RVD says he would rather be associated with WWE than AEW

ECW legend Rob Van Dam wasn’t a fan of a recent hardcore spot on AEW Dynamite.

The March 19 edition of Dynamite featured a street fight where Jon Moxley retained his AEW World Championship against Cope. During the match, there was a spot where Cope used a board of nails as a weapon and slammed Moxley onto it. The match generated a lot of differing opinions on social media, and TMZ Sports even posted an article about the weapons spot.

RVD shared his thoughts on the latest episode of his 1 Of A Kind podcast, saying spots like this make him feel he would rather be associated with WWE than AEW.

“I thought, you know, it’s not my thing. Not my kind of thing,” RVD said. “That’s not wrestling to me, but, obviously, it’s sacrificing a lot for the business. I mean, that could be said about it. But the more AEW has been doing stuff like that, the more personally I feel like I would rather be associated with WWE than AEW.

“A couple years ago it was like, man, they’re growing, they’re trying things, you know, to get up there. And then there’s a feel that like the inmates are running the prison, which there always has been, for better or worse. I mean, that was used as a good point at first — you know, like hey, the boys are running it, cool. But for me, [this was] an example of why that might not be a good idea. But it is a style of wrestling. I mean, I put that with the light bulb matches, the death matches where two people grab each other and jump off the back of a semi-truck and land on a pile of light bulbs. That’s not my kind of wrestling, and it’s something that I personally look at as being lower than the standard — substandard. Because it’s going to draw only a certain niche crowd that’s into that kind of stuff.”

RVD believes spots like this separate WWE from AEW, and maybe AEW will be known more as a hardcore promotion like FMW of Japan used to be. When he was in ECW, RVD felt like they had a superior form of entertainment compared to the other wrestling promotions, but he now understands that ECW was never going to draw the mainstream audience that WWE had.

“I didn’t like it, it’s really crazy dangerous,” RVD said about the Moxley vs. Cope spot. “I don’t want to knock their freedom of expression. I think, you know, that’s probably cool to them, I guess. Or else they would turn it down when it was at the idea phase if it didn’t sound cool, right? So congratulations [on] pulling off a crazy stunt, death-defying stunt — for better or worse.”

In 2023-2024, RVD worked several matches for AEW when he was brought in as a legend for sporadic appearances. He’s since made a couple of cameo appearances for WWE on SmackDown and NXT.

RVD was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2021 and is under a Legends contract with the company, though the Legends deal does not prevent him from wrestling for AEW.