During an episode of his weekly ‘One Of A Kind’ podcast, Old School Wrestling Legend Rob Van Dam spoke about the AEW All In incident featuring CM Punk & Jack Perry, and mentioned that such backstage fights did happen in the past as well, only the old school promoters were resolving them in a different way, by arranging actual matches between them.
Here’s what RVD said:
“It happened, and it wasn’t that big of a deal. I’m sure people are going to sh*t on this opinion, but that’s what I said when I saw that every single site was picking this up. I said to Katie, I’m sure it’s my old school fundamentals, but I said, ‘I don’t think this should be that big of a deal.’ She said, ‘Right, they’re both fighters, right?’
I see at weigh-ins where they do the face off, and they take the picture, a lot of times they get to close and they pie face and start going at it or whatever, and I get you got to set some strict rules if you don’t want that to happen every single time, I get it with that.
But with wrestling, it’s even a little bit different because the competitors don’t have the whole injury, win or lose, be in the best condition possible to have every advantage, wrestlers aren’t in that the same way that a fighter is.
So if they let out a little bit of steam every once in a while, usually what would happen is that the promoter would put those two in the ring as soon as possible. That happened every time that I can think about it. That’s what Paul (Heyman) did with me and Taz.
It’s always been that way, and I always find that people work it out by working together. I’m surprised that it’s that big of news, but if you look at it like it’s football, sure whatever, I guess.
With wrestling, I don’t know, it’s not something you should just ignore if you’re the boss, and you got millions and millions invested and some of that is going to these two players, and you need to handle the business end of it to protect your investment.
Besides that, it’s not the same thing as the corporate office, it’s the dressing room.”
During his long, illustrious career, Rob Van Dam wrestled for all the (at that time) biggest pro wrestling promotions on the planet, including the World Wrestling Federation / WWE (1997, 2001-2007 & 2013-2014), Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling (1992-1993), Paul Heyman’s Extreme Championship Wrestling (1996-2001) and Total Nonstop Action! / IMPACT Wrestling (2010-2013 & 2019-2020).
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