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| The worst Photo Credit: WWE.com, Manipulation: TH in MS Paint |
Sorry for putting the lede bluntly out in front here, but there are scant few people in wrestling I want to see on my television screen less than RVD. One of them is going to be wrestling new Intercontinental Champion Curtis Axel tonight, unless Stephanie McMahon is able to convince him he's too good to deign himself to perform in front of unwashed cretins like she's been trying to do. The thought of both of them being a part of the build to Money in the Bank or a part of said show just gives me unnecessary worry for what has become one of the surest things on the WWE pay-per-view calendar. I know, I know, the show can still be good even if there are a few obviously awful components to the proceedings. I highly doubt that Trips will even wrestle on that show, because what's he going to do, ugh, win the Intercontinental Championship? That belt was beneath him over a decade ago.
However, RVD will be putting his exquisite brand of bullshittery on display for everyone to see. I don't care if it's most likely going to be in one of the actual ladder matches. He'd be taking up a spot reserved for someone more entertaining, like, the Great Khali for instance. I don't care if he's just in one of those matches to be a crash test dummy. Sin Cara actually does it way better (probably because he legitimately gets hurt, but that's besides the point). At this point, I would rather see them bring up one of the non-indie star NXT guys and run with them, even if I don't know how to tell a Jason Jordan from a Colin Cassady.
This hate really isn't a blind hate either. I have reasons for not liking RVD. It goes all the way back to when he was Extreme Championship Wrestling, y'know, the original one, not the WWE reboot. I didn't hate RVD then, but I rarely got as hype for him as a lot of my peers. Jerry Lynn was always the bigger draw to me in their matches. Maybe it was that I got so lost in my own self as a wrestling fan that I couldn't see past how effective his "big shot" gimmick was. I was always a Tommy Dreamer guy anyway. I loved the underdog, the guy who got kicked while he was down and still got up despite the fact that he was probably going to continue to get kicked if he got back up. RVD was the opposite of that. If you didn't like ECW, leave and go let Turner or McMahon pay you money to be "Mr. Monday Night." His gimmick was effective.
But there were other things that even as a budding thinker that I was turned off by. For one, his tights? When I was 17, I had no sense of irony like I do now. They were ugly. He also didn't have good enough matches unless he was in there with Lynn or the team of Doug Furnas and Phil LaFon. Even then, I was a critic. There were guys I'd always rather be watching, whether it was Bam Bam Bigelow, the Human Suplex Machine Taz, Dreamer, or especially the batshit crazy Gangstaz, who would enter the arena rife with plunder, ready to break anything they could put their hands on over the heads of unwitting Eliminators or Dudley Kinfolk.
It wasn't until he got to WWE when he had to conform into a "Five Moves of Doom" style that I really saw his offense for what it was... absolutely contrived. Look, I know as a wrestling fan, I put up with a lot of stuff that wouldn't work in a real fight. As I have noted several times before, the Irish whip is about as believable move in real life as Joseph Gordon-Levitt's anti-gravity parkour fighting from Inception would work without a strong SFX department. But there's "suspension of disbelief" and "wait, why isn't the other guy trying to capitalize on RVD doing tai chi for five minutes before landing the impact?" Seriously, when RVD catches the guy's leg, steps over it, and then does the slowest, least-painful looking back kick to the face ever, I am ripping my hair out at how awful and fake what is on the screen looks to me.
Even if he'd ditch all the theatrics from his offense, it still would only improve its visual efficacy by an infinitesimal amount. Like I noted above, he has just the slowest offense imaginable. For a guy whose bread and butter is "high flying," he sure knows how to make his offense look like it could be avoided by pre-bell ringing Festus. I mean, Kofi Kingston's strikes look dreadful and way too drawn out to be anything but interpretive dance that comes a bit too close to the face for comfort. RVD makes him look like he's Floyd Mayweather in his prime.
Out of the ring, the guy lately has just felt like he's been showing up to get a paycheck from Dixie Carter. It's funny, TNA paid him to be a shell of the shell of himself that he was in his last WWE run but they won't give guaranteed weekly money to young, hungry guys and gals who might give them both effort and entertainment. That's all you need to know about TNA is that RVD was able to show up, phone it in, and still get phone calls from TNA about wanting him back after his contract expired. That company is shamefully perfect for him. Meanwhile, while WWE does feel like they elevate guys at a slow rate historically, but at least they elevate guys. If you're a Big E Langston or a Dean Ambrose, you can dream to being pushed up the card.
But with RVD? Man, this guy could just cut the same shitty promo in the same, burnt-out sounding, apathetic voice, with the same vacant facial expressions, and still get the main event scrilla and the TV time that goes with it. Thankfully, he "doesn't want to work a full-time schedule" in WWE, which means he won't be too much of a drain on the company's narrative, but man, it still means that I have to see him x amount of times more than I would want to in a year.
If you're a fan of RVD, even now, God bless your heart. Go and enjoy him no matter what someone like me might say or write. However, I'm not going to pretend that this is a great nostalgia signing on the level of Montel Vontavious Porter or Carlito would even mean at this point to me. RVD is one of the most overblown aspects of the ECW legacy, and the sooner he decides he wants to spend the rest of his days smoking pot, the better from my view.