WWE Hall of Famer Rob Van Dam recently spoke on his podcast, “1 of a Kind,” about a variety of professional wrestling topics including Eric Bischoff offering him a job with WCW in 1997:
“I went to a WCW show that was in a town where I lived in Savannah, Georgia at the time. I went to see Scotty Riggs, maybe Louie Spicoli might have been there too, I think. I think he was part of NWO. I saw my friends and Eric Bischoff stepped aside with me and personally offered me a job. Somehow that got out online instantly and then the industry knew that I was going to be leaving ECW for WCW because that’s what you do. That’s what everyone does. They use it as a stepping ground to get up to more exposure, more money, a bigger job. I’m not on the pay-per-view anyway so it doesn’t seem like Paul is offering me much to get me to stick around, so I’ve got to see what’s going on here.”
“So Paul brought me in and we had a big meeting where Paul said, ‘Is there anything I can do to make you want to stay?’ That’s not a bad way to start negotiations, especially since I really didn’t want to go. I really didn’t. I loved the ECW style. It was my favorite and the most fun that I’d had and I appreciated very much how my efforts were making a difference, not just in ECW, but then also, you know, in a outer wave the whole industry because everyone’s watching ECW and they’re all influenced by it, and the company is growing so much right now, like we’re hot, and the crowds are doubling. It’s like, man, I really would rather stay there and be the whole F’n show than be a cog in the wheel, so to speak.”
“So Paul and I worked it out when he put me on a guarantee. I had favored nations, which I’ve heard a few of us did, I’ve heard recently. You also had the idea, you know, everyone thinks you’re gonna go to WCW. What if you went out there and said, ‘Yeah, I belong on Monday nights where all the big stars are. You can expect to see me there’, but what if we throw them a swerve? It gets you on Monday night. I said, ‘How are you going to do that?’ He said, ‘Let’s just say Vince owes me some favors. If I could do that, if I could put you on RAW just for a few weeks, just long enough to however long the angle lasts, and you would be on Monday Night Raw and you would be on ECW here. You will be in the spotlight. The business would be around you. You’d be the center point, plus all the money and shit’, and that’s how we worked it out. I was like, ‘You really can do that?’ I had no idea about his relationship, none of us did, with WWE. We didn’t know he was working for them. I sure didn’t know that he was selling me to them without me knowing which ended up being the case.”
DDP trying to recruit RVD to WCW:
“DDP would call me and say, ‘Eric’s got these hot ideas. This is gonna be insane bro. You got to be part of this. Eric is gonna make these Mortal Kombat characters. They put a lot into it and you gotta call him.’ I would just say, ‘Okay, whatever.’ A couple weeks go by and DDP would call and say, ‘Do you not want to do this? They’re gonna put a lot of money into this. They’re gonna change the lights. There’s gonna be a bunch of characters like right out of the video game.’ Finally he asked me how I felt about it and I was upfront. I said, ‘I don’t think I really feel like wearing a mask and being a character. I kind of got several years invested into this RVD guy.’ He’s like, ‘Bro, why didn’t you tell me? You wasted all this time.’ That’s what happened. I wasn’t anywhere near sure that I was gonna go to WCW. I was definitely on the fence.”
“Then Paul said, ‘Bro, not only can you go to ECW, but we’re going to start fu**ing paying a guarantee, taking care of you, giving you opportunity to make more’, which didn’t happen with the pay-per-views and the royalties on the T-shirts and stuff. That was a part that didn’t happen, but they were paying me though, so I wasn’t suffering. Also, of course, you know, the whole thing with jumping the fence and being on WWE television without having to compromise who I was, boom, I mean, yeah, that sealed the deal right there. Like you’re really going to be able to do that. I’m going to be able to be myself and go there and say, ‘Hey, I’m ECW, RVD, Mr. Monday Night.’ That happened.”
If he was going to be Glacier:
“That’s what DDP told me. When he (Glacier) came out, I was still talking to DDP. We hadn’t settled the matter yet, because that was like, after we’ve been talking for several weeks, he was like, ‘Did you see it? They already launched the first one. There’s gonna be a whole bunch of them.’ That was when I was like, ‘You know, I’m good’, so that was during that time.”
“Eric Bischoff recently, well, a year or two ago, I saw him in an interview respond to that situation and he was like, ‘What? Rob Van Dam was gonna be Glacier? Where did this come from?’ He had no idea. So when I saw him, I brought it up. Eric was like, ‘It must have just been DDP in the middle that got that confusion ‘, because that’s definitely where I got all my info from, DDP, and he was acting like he was talking to Eric every day like he was sitting with him at his desk or something. So I don’t know how far up the plans went for that to happen in the big picture.”
You can check out the complete podcast below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
