6 Wrestlers That Visibly Hated Working For ECW

6. Rob Van Dam

Virtually everybody agrees that Barely Legal, the inaugural ECW pay-per-view, arrived at least a year too late. 

By April 1997, the WWF had already started to push Stone Cold Steve Austin as an antihero. Bret Hart had sworn on television. The commentary table was getting wrecked frequently. WCW, meanwhile, had raided ECW’s main event and midcard scenes several times. Barely Legal, purportedly the dawn of a new era, was in fact the beginning of the end. The smarter, more prescient wrestlers had grasped this. Raven was months away from leaving; Rob Van Dam reportedly wished to join him.

Prior to his match against Lance Storm, which wasn’t originally scheduled for the card, fans pelted RVD with chants of “You sold out!” The ECW fans were in-the-know. They knew Van Dam had been negotiating with WCW; it was widely believed that this was essentially a done deal. 

The resulting match was a vapid and often-botched procession of moves. It was pretty crap. A decent effort to begin with, it went off the rails towards the finish. Storm was never comfortable wielding a chair, and was heavily jeered for obviously holding back. Van Dam, meanwhile, was hardly at his most motivated. He shot to fame as the most cocksure dude in the entire industry. He was beyond smug. He radiated little of that energy at Barely Legal. 

After the match, he cut a promo, acknowledging that he was a substitute who did not want to appear on the show, but had swallowed his pride. In ECW’s defence, they thought he was done, and wanted to provide a platform - the biggest in its history - to somebody who was ready to contribute. 

This was miserable business all round - an ominous glimpse into ECW’s doomed, untenable future.