Rob Van Dam admits this honor wasn’t as exciting as he’d hoped on the night.
Rob Van Dam was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame as part of the class of 2021. While WrestleMania 37 was held in front of a limited crowd inside Raymond James Stadium, the Hall of Fame ceremony took place in the Thunderdome amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaking in a new interview with Wrestling Life with Ben Veal, Rob Van Dam admitted that while it’s an honor to join the elite group of stars that make up the Hall of Fame, the experience itself was a disappointment.
“It was very validating to be thought of on that Mount Rushmore of wrestlers. That’s something that they can never take away from me now. It felt like I elevated up to a level, and now people refer to me as a Hall of Famer. It’s very prestigious. So I was honored.
The fact that it was during COVID and we didn’t have a crowd was kind of disappointing after going to Hall of Fame for so many years and watching the really long speeches. They told us to go three to five minutes on our speeches after hearing [really long speeches].
So it kind of felt like when I was in high school, all the grades sell M&M’s to pay for the senior trip, and then when you’re finally a senior, then you capitalize on it, but by the time we made, they stopped taking the boat to the Bahamas, and instead we got screwed because we just went to this local amusement park. That happens to me sometimes.”
Rob Van Dam Went Way Over Time On WWE Hall Of Fame Speech
Continuing, Rob Van Dam reflected on the speech he made going way longer than his allotted time. Thankfully, the Hall of Famer wasn’t in trouble afterward and joked that he’ll have to be inducted again to have a better experience.
“But the thing about the time and there not being people there, if you’ve seen my speech, then you’ve seen like nine minutes of it, but the whole thing was actually 27 minutes, so I actually went in theory maybe 24 minutes over the three-minute request. I didn’t hear anything. When I got back, I said, ‘That was a little long, wasn’t it?’ I had no idea until I saw the whole thing that it was that long. You’re playing off of somebody turning the volume up and down on a response. I’ll have to get in it again.”
h/t Fightful