On his Six Feet Under podcast, WWE Hall of Famer The Undertaker talked about WrestleMania 18. He revealed that Vince McMahon gave him two opponent choices – Ric Flair or Rob Van Dam.
Taker picked The Nature Boy, which shocked McMahon. During the build-up to this match, Taker beat up Ric’s son David Flair. This was one of Undertaker’s favorite vignettes from his career.
Here’s what The American Badass said:
“That was a lot of fun. I remember Vince coming to me that year, I didn’t have an opponent. And he comes up to me, he’s like apologizing to me. He goes, ‘Mark, we booked all this out and I don’t have anybody for you.’ He says, ‘You can either have RVD or Flair.’ And nothing against RVD. Because I had really good matches with RVD.
I was like, ‘Flair’. He looked at me like, ‘What?’ I’m like, ‘I want Flair’. And he just… he couldn’t grasp it. I mean Flair had a run in the WWE. But he wasn’t a WWE guy. For me, it’s Ric Flair.
I said, ‘At WrestleMania? Are you kidding me? I want Flair’. Flair was on the backside of his career. But still… that whole thing was a lot of fun. That’s where I went and beat up his kid at the training center. That was one of my favorite vignettes that I ever did.”
On his 1 Of A Kind podcast, RVD addressed Undertaker choosing Flair over him for a match at WrestleMania X8:
“WrestleMania 18 is when I wrestled William Regal and won the Intercontinental Championship belt, and that’s an awesome memory for a lot of us. They made an action figure out of it, which is cool. I have that to remind me. That was awesome. It was the first time I had been in front of that many people — 70,000 people — in Toronto. It was at the Canada Centre, or Air Canada Centre, whatever it was. Anyway, it was an awesome experience for me.
If I would have wrestled The Undertaker, I could see where wrestling Ric Flair at WrestleMania could have been a bucket list kind of thing for the ‘mark’ inside of Mark. There’s no telling.
I mean, I have good matches with everybody, but I could imagine that match being more like, ‘Let’s throw RVD around like a ragdoll, then slip out of something and catch the Van Daminator or something.’ You know, I don’t know.
As far as showcasing, I probably did some cool stuff with Regal. I don’t really remember the match, but let’s just say no regrets.”
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