Rob Van Dam has a message for wrestling fans who throw around insider terminology to make themselves sound like they’re part of the business — he’s not impressed. In fact, RVD says the whole act can come off as insulting.
During the One of a Kind podcast, Van Dam was asked how he feels about fans using wrestling insider terms or calling wrestlers by their real names. His immediate reaction made it pretty clear this isn’t something he enjoys.
“I don’t prefer it. Um, I’m trying to think of an example that wouldn’t sound a little bit insulting, you know, uh, that wouldn’t, you know what I mean?”
The conversation then turned to fans calling other fans “marks.” RVD said when somebody does that around him, it sounds like they’re trying to separate themselves from everybody else and present themselves as some kind of wrestling insider.
“If let’s say a fan comes up, two fans come up and and the one fan says about the other one, you know, he’s a Mark, then that just sounds like, oo, I’m supposed to be impressed like, oh, we’re really — you’re an insider, bro. Like, you’re not a [ __ ] Mark, too. So, yes, it’s insulting like get the [ __ ] away from it.”
RVD then brought up Sabu as the perfect example of how he could tell when someone was trying way too hard to convince wrestlers that they were connected to the business. According to Van Dam, people would sometimes call Sabu by his real first name, Terry, as if that proved they were close to him.
“Over the years I always knew when people were b full of [ __ ] uh trying to sound like they were close with Saboo by calling him Terry because he did not like to be called Terry by anybody.”
Van Dam remembered people claiming they had personal relationships with Sabu while using the name Terry, which RVD immediately viewed as a red flag.
“So, when anybody would come up and they’d be like, ‘Hey, um you know, you talk to Terry?’ I’d be like, ‘Terry who?’ They’d be like, ‘Saboo.’ I always pick him up from the airport when he comes to [ __ ] Kentucky or whatever. And I’m like, ‘Yeah, right. You You pick Terry up, you know, like get away from me, dude. Get away.’”
RVD explained that Sabu didn’t even like Van Dam calling him Terry, showing why fans using the name to establish some imaginary closeness didn’t exactly work.
“Because he doesn’t he doesn’t like to be called Terry. So that was There’s no There was no exception to that, you know? … He would ask me not to call him. He wouldn’t like it if I called him, too.”
For RVD, that’s really what the issue comes down to. Fans can talk wrestling however they want among themselves, but he doesn’t like when insider language is used directly with wrestlers as a shortcut to pretend there’s a relationship that doesn’t actually exist.
“But I’ll, you know, speak it with each other. That, that’s fine. Don’t try to fool me into thinking we’re closer than we are, you know, by saying some terms that you don’t deserve uh to be saying from a time of kayfabe. That was before you were even born.”
Van Dam did acknowledge that not every so-called wrestling term belongs exclusively to wrestling. He pointed to “mark” and “over” as words that have meanings outside the business, so his problem isn’t simply hearing the vocabulary. It’s when fans use it to sell wrestlers on the idea that they’re somehow on the inside.
“There’s, you know, there’s a lot of terms that are also um also have meaning outside of the wrestling business. And Mark is one of them.”
RVD has spent decades around wrestling fans, locker rooms and the old-school kayfabe mentality, so he’s seen plenty of people try to blur the line between fan and insider. His position now is pretty simple: enjoy the business, talk about the business, but don’t use wrestling jargon to fake a relationship with the people actually working in it.
What do you think about RVD’s take on fans using insider wrestling terms? Does it come across like they’re trying to be “one of the boys,” or is it simply how modern wrestling fans talk? Let us know what you think and leave your feedback in the comments.
This transcript was produced exclusively for Ringside News from the original recording. Republishing the transcription in full is prohibited. When using excerpts, provide prominent credit and a link to this article.
