Rob Van Dam has undergone somewhat of a resurgence as of late in AEW. The 52-year-old made his surprise debut in the promotion during the 200th episode of AEW Dynamite and went on to unsuccessfully challenge Jack Perry for the FTW Championship. Van Dam has gone on to form a tag team with HOOK, the son of his former rival Taz, and is set to compete on tonight’s edition of Dynamite in the spiritual home of ECW, Philadelphia.
However, it looks like his decision to appear in AEW has come with some consequences. During the latest episode of his 1 Of A Kind With RVD podcast, Van Dam claimed that he had been pulled from an upcoming booking in Philadelphia by “the big company.” While he didn’t explicitly state which company, it’s highly likely that he was referring to WWE and its WrestleMania 40 festivities which will be held in the city next April. WWE previously advertised RVD for WrestleMania weekend as part of an ‘ECW Experience’ within one of its Priority Pass packages.
“I got a phone call, I picked up because it was from ‘the big company’, and had a little talk, got officially unbooked from Philly,” RVD stated. “Then about 30 minutes later, I got another message, got officially rebooked in Philly from another company. So that was pretty good. In the meantime, I’m just reading letters: A. E. It happened when I got there and before I left, before I even had a chance to even think about the first message, and so that’s just the universe doing what it does which is pretty awesome.”
The former ECW Champion went on to share that he didn’t want to publicize being pulled as he had someone within the company attempting to do some damage control on his behalf. This is also why he kept quiet when social media users tried to get him rebooked. Ultimately, he admitted that he wasn’t too torn up about losing out on the booking as he is enjoying his current run with AEW.
“The reason I don’t want to put too much detail on that is because word got out when I said before that I was unbooked,” Van Dam admitted. “It kind of worked against me because then I had someone inside trying to do some damage repair and then I got people on Twitter saying, ‘let’s pass this around, man, we need RVD rebooked.’ I was trying to not give that much attention because I had someone working on it. But either way, different dates, same town and the one is becoming more and more valuable than the other one to me each time anyway.”
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If you use any quotes from this article, please give a h/t to Haus of Wrestling and credit 1 Of A Kind With RVD.