Rob Van Dam says Bubba Ray Dudley did not simply insult ECW fans to get heat. He targeted people in the front row, humiliated them in front of their partners and pushed things so far that RVD started feeling sorry for the paying customers.
RVD addressed Bubba’s infamous crowd work on the One of a Kind podcast after a fan asked whether Paul Heyman should have allowed The Dudley Boyz to deliberately piss off ECW audiences before their matches.
The former WWE Champion immediately corrected the idea that this happened during one isolated incident. According to RVD, tearing individual fans apart was a regular part of Bubba’s routine.
“Not just one time. That was their regular shtick. It was Bubba. It wasn’t D-Von. D-Von was there to back him up, but Bubba would get on the microphone and he would go way, way past what would be cool. You know what I mean?”
RVD said there was a huge difference between trashing an entire city and singling out one fan who had nowhere to hide. Bubba would allegedly find a man sitting in the front row with his girlfriend or wife and make the attack brutally personal.
“It’s one thing, in my opinion, to be like, ‘Cleveland smells like cow manure. Boo, you people.’ But he would pick out one person in the front row, like a dude who’s got his lady right there, and he’d say, ‘What the f*ck do you think you’re going to do?’”
Bubba did not stop at calling the fan names. RVD recalled him making graphic sexual threats involving D-Von and Big Dick Dudley while telling the man that he would be powerless to protect the woman sitting beside him.
“He would start getting really personal, and he’d say, ‘I’m saying that me and D-Von and Brother Big Dick Dudley could run a train on this girl, and there isn’t sh*t you’d be able to do about it because you’re too much of a [censored]. Don’t laugh. Don’t laugh. No, I’m not f*cking joking.’”
RVD made it clear that he was not exaggerating the severity of Bubba’s promos. He said the abuse reached a point where he could tell the targeted fan was no longer enjoying the show.
“I’m not even exaggerating. It got that bad to where I felt sorry for the person in the front row. I’m like, ‘There’s no way that person is having a good time right now.’”
The problem, according to RVD, was that Bubba created a situation where the fan could not win. If the man stayed seated, Bubba could mock him for refusing to defend his partner. If he reacted, he risked getting beaten up and thrown out of the building. RVD admitted that Bubba’s verbal attacks were part of his performance, but he still believed the ECW original crossed a line that never needed to be crossed.
“Who am I to judge someone else’s art, though? But yeah, I thought that he went way too far. He did cause people to want to react, and then, if they did, they’d get beat up and kicked out.”
“There’s no winning for it. I didn’t think it was necessary, in my opinion. Luckily, Bubba softened up a lot over the years.”
Bubba Ray built his career by making audiences hate him, and those ECW promos helped turn The Dudley Boyz into one of the most despised teams in the company. RVD is not questioning whether the act worked. He is saying Bubba got so personal that the fans he targeted stopped being part of the show and became victims of it.
Do you think Bubba Ray Dudley’s ECW crowd attacks were brilliant heel work, or did he take things too far? Let us know what you think in the comments.
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