RVD has already defended himself against fans calling him a hypocrite over his Jon Moxley and AEW comments, but apparently the backlash still hasn’t gone away. Now he’s got an even more direct message for anybody claiming they’ve suddenly “lost respect” for him over the controversy.
Speaking on his 1 Of A Kind podcast, RVD brought the situation up himself after spotting a headline about his recent comments. The headline focused on his criticism of Moxley’s use of weapons and his claim that AEW’s creative freedom has resulted in “the inmates running the asylum.” RVD found it pretty funny watching people react to the headline without actually hearing everything he had said. He specifically called out fans who immediately threw his ECW past back in his face.
“I saw someone—there was a headline. Oh, I was crying. There was a headline that said, somebody wrote some shit, I think it was today, about me. It said something about RVD criticizes John Moxley for using weapons or something like that, you know? And it’s always funny, the fans that’ll respond to that, like they just read a headline of what somebody says somebody said, and then they go off of that, you know? And they’re like, ‘F*** that! And man, he was in ECW! What the f***?’ So it was all that stuff again, which is always entertaining.”
But the reactions that really got RVD going were from people saying they had lost respect for him. He doesn’t exactly sound heartbroken about losing those people as fans, because he questioned how much respect they actually had for him in the first place if one headline was enough to erase it.
“Yeah. So it’s like, yeah, just—the best is then there’s some s*** on there, wrote, ‘I just lost all respect for RVD,’ and whatever. It’s probably whenever that member of the internet mark community comments that, it’s always hilarious to think like we’re supposed to think that he had so much respect for me. I was real important. And then after reading a headline of hearsay, somebody giving their interpretation of what Rob was talking about in one sentence, and then all of a sudden that real important respect is just out the window. Like, ‘No, I can’t with RVD.’ It’s like, dude, you don’t know how to respect. You never respected me in the first place. It wasn’t a big loss.”
RVD then used a pretty ridiculous comparison to explain his point. He argued that genuinely respecting somebody means you probably aren’t going to completely turn against them because you disagree with one opinion they supposedly expressed.
“Nobody, a real person wouldn’t say that. If you already hate somebody, it’s easy to say, ‘Oh, I lost some respect for him.’ If you love somebody, or someone—if your dad is your hero and you grew up and you’re just like, ‘Oh my God, man, I just always want to be around him. I wanted to follow—I just wanted to follow in his footsteps, man. I was so proud of him.’ But then I read that he said the Detroit Lions sucked. ‘F*** that. I don’t ever want to talk to him again.’ That’s like the equivalent, you know?”
And if anybody was still wondering whether RVD wanted to win those people back over, he made that answer pretty damn clear.
“Anybody that’s like that, go ahead and leave right now. F*** y’all.”
The whole mess started after RVD criticized the kind of weapon-heavy wrestling seen in Moxley’s AEW matches. Fans accused him of hypocrisy because of his ECW background, but RVD previously insisted he has always considered that kind of stuff “garbage wrestling,” even admitting he thought some of The Gangstas’ weapon spots were stupid back in ECW.
RVD clearly isn’t interested in reopening the actual hardcore wrestling debate every time somebody gets angry at him online. At this point, his issue is with people judging everything he said from a headline — and anybody who decides that’s enough reason to stop respecting him is apparently welcome to hit the door.
Do you think RVD has a point about fans judging his Jon Moxley and AEW comments based on a headline instead of hearing his full argument? Let us know what you think in the comments.
