If WWE's version of ECW proved anything, it's that it wasn't worthy of using the initials that once stood for "Extreme Championship Wrestling."
That's what Rob Van Dam believes, anyway.
"Mr. Monday Night" recently spoke with the folks from WrestlingNews.co for an interview, during which he shared his belief that WWE's version of ECW "lacked extremeness," while also reflecting on Vince McMahon wearing a durag during the revived ECW days.
Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview where he touches on these topics with his thoughts.
On how the new ECW lacked extremeness: "I have a very balanced feeling on that because I have pros and cons that I feel. At the time, especially when I was in that competitive state of mind of being in the dressing room, [I’m] feeling like the writers are fucking with me, for me, totally different state of mind then I have now with this happy time in my life. At the time, I looked at it defensively from ECW. I thought he was making a mockery of ECW, I thought he might of even brought ECW back to destroy it because he didn’t like the fans chanting EC-Dub. I’m like ‘Wow man, this dude’s crazy, maybe he brought it back just to..’ and he did, he completely wiped out the extreme theme to it."
On memories of that time, like Vince McMahon wearing a durag: "So it was just like any other show except they put way less into it, way less budget, way less advertising. The house shows at that time were just the old ECW crappy arenas from the mid-90’s, they were redoing those. Sometimes we would film after SmackDown on the SmackDown night and there was some kind of weird way that we were getting paid off a split of their gate, which really wasn’t fair but I guess ECW wasn’t… yeah, it’s really weird. In the end, supposedly all the numbers iron out whatever but at the same time, I thought Vince looked really cool in the durag, I did. I loved it, I thought that was cool because you saw [him] buff in the black sweatsuit. I loved working with him. I had a match, there was a three against one [against Vince, Shane, & Umaga], so that was pretty cool. Something like that, makes me think maybe I was considered in a much higher position than it felt like at the time because that wouldn’t normally be something they would do with like a midcard [guy] or whatever. Sometimes I think it’s really cool that I got to work with Vince and Shane and Umaga in that moment, so there’s that as well."
Check out the complete Rob Van Dam interview with WrestlingNews.co via the YouTube player embedded below. H/T to Fightful.com for transcribing the above quotes.