25 WWE Champions Who Never Got Their Rematch

13. Rob Van Dam

 The Rock Raw WWE Championship
WWE.com

Title Lost: WWE Championship
Lost Title To: Edge

Rob Van Dam was flying high during the summer of 2006. Mr. Monday Night was also Mr. Money in the Bank, and he used that briefcase to defeat John Cena at One Night Stand and become the only man to hold the WWE and ECW Championships at the same time.

For a month, RVD was on top of the WWE landscape, ruling both Raw and ECW. It looked like after years of trying to break through the glass ceiling in WWE, Van Dam had arrived.

And then he and Sabu were busted with drugs in their car. Just three weeks into his reign, RVD would drop both titles on successive nights to Edge (WWE) and Big Show (ECW) because he was facing a 30-day suspension. While Van Dam would receive a rematch against Show, he never got a chance to get revenge on Edge and reclaim the title.

In hindsight, that was RVD’s peak in WWE. He left and would return a few times for short runs with the company, but he hasn’t sniffed gold like that since then.

Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.