Professional wrestler Rob Van Dam opened up during a recent segment on the “Wrestling Life” podcast. He discussed his induction into WWE’s Hall of Fame in 2021, expressing a small disappointment it happened in the Thunderdome, an experience that threw a different vibe due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Thunderdome is a unique venue outfitted with video screens that showed fans watching from home during the pandemic restrictions.
Van Dam highlighted, “It was very validating to be thought of on that Mount Rushmore of wrestlers… It felt like I elevated up to a level, and now people refer to me as a Hall of Famer… The fact that it was during COVID and we didn’t have a crowd was kind of disappointing… So it kind of felt like when I was in high school, all the grades sell M&M’s to pay for the senior trip, and then when you’re finally a senior, then you capitalize on it, but by the time we made, they stopped taking the boat to the Bahamas, and instead we got screwed because we just went to this local amusement park… But the thing about the time and there not being people there, if you’ve seen my speech, then you’ve seen like nine minutes of it, but the whole thing was actually 27 minutes…”
In a different episode on the “The Takedown” podcast, Baron Corbin, another renowned figure in WWE reflected on his role as the “Bum Ass Corbin” persona. Despite its challenges, Corbin revealed that he actually enjoyed playing the part.
Corbin’s explained, “I think that the sad Corbin, it was just supposed to be like a two-week thing. I think that was originally the plan… Then I grabbed onto it… This is going to be fun. Let’s turn it up to twelve. That’s something I’ve always learned from seeing it. How do you take what they give you and turn it into gold?… There’s times I have to sit in the back and take 20 or 30 minutes of getting my head in the space of going out there and just being disheveled in a total disaster. I would walk to the ring and people are legit trying to hand me bills… Jacob, he’s one of the Fox execs. He sent me a message that his daughter wanted to give me her allowance because she felt so bad for me. I was all in on that.”