WWE Hall of Famer Rob Van Dam (RVD) recently appeared on his “1 Of A Kind” podcast episode. He discussed several topics, including when he decided he wanted to leave WWE in 2007.
RVD said, “I got suspended for 30 days. And then both championship belts were forfeited. And then I felt like ECW was in the toilet, swirling down the drain, and they wanted to flush it. So my passion was gone. I said, ‘I’m finishing my contract, and then I need a break. I’m not going to re-sign.’ And we talked many times about what it would take for me to re-sign, and I chose spirit first. It was priority for me to get my spirit healthy, and I couldn’t do that if I was tied to a timetable because I’d be counting down the days until I had to return. What they offered was, ‘How about you sign for six months, or you sign [that] it says you’ll come back in six months, go enjoy yourself. Okay a year whatever.’ And I was like, ‘I can’t do it. I need to know what it felt like to be free in order to grow from where I’m at right now.’ And I just knew that. I’d been doing a lot of inside studying, and I needed that. The career had been so consuming for the last seven years that I felt I’d had enough of giving everything to that. And I needed my spirit to be healthy again. I needed to be detached from what was consuming me. Then and only then, would I be able to grow enough to know when I’d feel good and I’d be strong enough to go back. But it never f***ing happened.”
On his mindset at the time:
“I didn’t care if I ever set foot on an airplane again. I didn’t want to travel. I was just done, burned out with everything. And some months went by, and I didn’t want to do anything. I wasn’t looking into it. And it was a friend of mine, Kirk White, a wrestling promoter with Big Time Wrestling in California -— not the s**tty one in Ohio. But Kirk White said, ‘Hey, I’ve been talking to this guy in Portugal. I guess he’s going to book you there.’ I asked, ‘What do you mean, you guess he’s going to book me?’ He replied, ‘Yeah, he’s going to book you in Portugal. I told him I’d take this much, and he said, okay.’ I was like, ‘Oh he did?’ And that set my new standards, and I owe Kirk White for that. After Kirk, that became my new standard. I was like, ‘Well, I guess it’s worth it to leave home if I’m getting this much. Anything less, I don’t want to do it.’ And that was probably around ’97 or ’98. And also the promoter in Portugal became a good friend of mine as well.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
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