WWE Hall of Famer Rob Van Dam has had many nicknames throughout his illustrious career. “Mr. Monday Night,” “Mr. Pay-Per-View,” and “The Whole Damn Show” are just some of the names that he has been given over the years, but the one everyone associates with RVD is, of course, “The Whole F****** Show,” a name he adopted during his time in ECW. Van Dam was asked by a fan during a live edition of his “1 Of A Kind” podcast where the name actually came from, to which the his revealed it was poking fun at another WWE Hall of Famer.
“It was a spoof, for a lack of a better word, but it was a play on Shawn Michaels being the ‘Showstopper,'” RVD said. “That’s what he was calling himself, ‘The Showstopper,’ and he was the number one guy in the business at the time.” The moment where RVD calls himself by his now famous nickname for the first time was recorded as he successfully completed the world’s first “Van Dam Lift,” a weightlifting technique he invented, perfected, and executed before anyone else. RVD set the world record by lifting a 165.5 pound dumbbell off the ground while doing the splits across two benches, and the lift was even approved by the United States of America Weightlifting Association, though no one has been able to attempt it while elevated off the ground like RVD was in 1998.
He was so pleased with himself that he looked down the camera and told everyone to forget about Shawn Michaels because RVD was the real show. “It was something that I spontaneously said,” RVD revealed. “I don’t think I knew that I was going to say it, I was doing the split, and I picked up the weight, and they blew their whistles or whatever when I held it high enough, and I dropped it…After I did the split, boom, I said ‘I never claimed to be the Showstopper, I’m Rob Van Dam, I’m the f****** show,’ or something like that.” That spontaneously one liner has now lasted nearly 28 years as RVD still gets called “The Whole F****** Show” to this day.
Please credit “1 Of A Kind” when using quotes from this article, and give a H/T to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.
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