Rob Van Dam Thinks Vince McMahon May Have Revived ECW Just To Destroy It

WWE Hall of Famer Rob Van Dam has shared his mixed thoughts about WWE's decision to reboot ECW in the summer of 2006.

The Whole F'N Show recently discussed the ECW reboot during an appearance on The Ten Count with Steve Fall podcast, where he pondered whether Vince McMahon brought the promotion back to life just so that he could finally kill it off.

"At the time, especially when I was in that competitive state of mind of being in the dressing room and feeling like the writers are just, you know, f*cking with me and all this stuff when you're right in there for me a totally different state of mind than I have now with this happy time in my life. At the time, I really looked at it defensively from ECW. I thought he was making a mockery of ECW. I thought he might have even brought ECW back just to destroy it because he didn’t like the fans chanting EC-dub. He took credit for it, said he trained them to chant EC-dub during the shows by putting out the ECW DVD.

"Then I was like, wow, man, this dude's crazy. Maybe he brought it back to just completely wipe — and they did completely wipe out the extreme theme to it and made it, 'My refs have to have credibility, Rob'. So it was just like any other show, except they put way less into it. Way less budget, way less advertising. The house shows at that time were just the old ECW crappy arenas from the mid-90's. They were redoing those, and we would sometimes film after SmackDown on the SmackDown night, and there was some kind of weird way that we were getting paid off a split of their gate, which really wasn't fair, but I guess ECW wasn't –yeah, it's really weird. I mean, in the end, supposedly, all the numbers iron out. Whatever".

Van Dam left WWE when his contract expired in May of 2007.

H/T WrestleZone