Rob Van Dam is not a fan of what went down on the March 19th episode of AEW Dynamite.
During a recent edition of his “1 Of A Kind” podcast, the WWE Hall of Famer critiqued the brutal spiked bat spot from the AEW World Title Street Fight between Jon Moxley and Cope.
The match featured numerous interference moments, including Wheeler Yuta, PAC, and Claudio Castagnoli helping Moxley regain the upper hand after Cope suplexed him onto a spike, which got stuck in his back.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On Jon Moxley’s nail spot: “The broom of nails. I thought — you know, it’s not my thing, not my kind of thing. That’s not wrestling to me, but obviously it’s that it’s sacrificing a lot for the business. I mean, that could be said about it. But the more AEW has been doing stuff like that, the more personally I feel like I would rather be associated with WWE then AEW. A couple of years ago it was like, ‘Man, they’re growing. They’re trying things to get up there.’ And then there’s a feel that the inmates are running the prison, which there always has been for better or worse. I mean, that was used as a good point at first. Like, ‘Hey, the boys are running it, cool.’ But for me, this serves as an example of why that might not be a good idea.
“But it is a style of wrestling. I mean, I put that with the light bulb matches, the death matches where people grab each other and jump off the back of a semi-truck and land on a pile of light bulbs. That’s not my kind of wrestling, and it’s something that I personally look at as being lower than the standard, substandard. Because it’s going to draw only a certain niche crowd that’s into that kind of stuff. So what Jon Moxley did with having the spikes stuck in his back — which could have paralyzed him, it seems like so easily — that is the kind of stuff like, when they what did they put something through Swerve’s cheek? Even the staples, all of that stuff, just personally is a turn-off for me.”
On AEW separating itself from WWE: “The more I see that they want to go that route, I think — Well for one, it separates WWE from AEW as far as the paths that they’re taking in the business. And maybe AEW will be known more like the FMW of Japan used to be, where they do exploding piranha matches and stuff. I don’t know, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it. It’s really crazy dangerous. I don’t want to knock their freedom of expression. I think you know that’s probably cool to them, I guess. Or else they would turn it down when it was at the idea phase, if it didn’t sound cool, right? So congratulations on pulling off a crazy stunt, death-defying stunt that, for better or worse… Will it get ratings? When people say, like, ‘Oh, I gotta see this. What do they do next?’ I don’t know. I won’t, personally.”
