Rob Van Dam shares his thoughts on the WWE Hardcore Championship.
The Whole F’n Show spoke about the now defunct title during the latest episode of his “One Of A Kind” podcast. RVD admits that he thought the title was poking fun at ECW at first, something that made him unhappy as he took a lot of pride in what ECW had done for the wrestling industry.
I was insulted by it until I got it. And that was because I felt like they were making fun of us and ECW because we have this, in my opinion, superior artform, making wrestling cool. To people that aren’t even wrestling fans like something like ‘you’ve got to see this’ and and and obviously I was a big proponent of it and and always will be but then I would see the Hardcore Title match on Monday Night Raw or whatever and in my opinion from that competitive state of mind I thought they were making a joke out of it. It pretty much meant the hot dog stand is going to get tipped over. They’re going to fall in the pit of balls in the kids area. Like, that’s, the hardcore match was something to laugh at. Stick a plunger in your face. And for me, I had a lot of pride in it.
RVD’s perception of the Hardcore Title would change was he was champion. He says that he would make those defenses the best match on the card, and even got it into the main event. WWE eventually just got rid of it. However, WWE would get rid of it shortly after that.
So when I was the Hardcore Champion, guess what? And all of a sudden, the Hardcore Title matches sometimes are the best match on the card. That can be subjective, but to the people that enjoyed it, continuously the best match on the card. I even main-evented. And I know they didn’t want the Hardcore Championship to be a main event on their shows and so what do they do? They got rid of it. I was making the belt mean too much.
RVD will be taking on Jack Perry for the FTW Championship on the August 9th edition of AEW Dynamite. Check out his podcast episode here.