9 Worst Botches In ECW History
5. Whole F’N Show Breaks F’N Ankle
Professional Tigger impersonator Rob Van Dam – you’re doing the thumb gestures in your head reading that, aren’t you? – is pretty notorious for two things: his enthusiastic bouncing around in ECW and WWE wrestling rings, and his long term relationship with a young lady by the name of Mary Jane. Why those two crazy kids haven’t gotten hitched yet, we have no idea.
Regardless, a lesser known fact about RVD is that, despite his status as an ECW mainstay of the old school, and despite his habit of cheerfully leaping all over things and people for the last twenty-five years, the man has almost never injured himself in the ring. He’s not quite living a charmed life, however: in January 2000 during a house show match with Rhyno in Orlando, Florida, Van Dam would go for a simple baseball slide to his opponent outside the ring and – somehow – break his F’N ankle.
No, we’re really not sure how he managed that, either. In the interests of fairness, we should point out that RVD went on to work another ten minutes or so of the match, because WRESTLING.
Oddly enough, Van Dam’s big feud at the time was with Jerry Lynn, over RVD’s ECW world television championship. Lynn had conspicuously failed to take the belt from RVD: but following the ankle injury, Van Dam was stripped of the title while recovering. Lynn would have been first in line to be awarded the belt in the subsequent tournament for the vacated title, had he not suffered his own broken ankle shortly after RVD… which is a bizarre coincidence, given that so much of their long storyline together was about Lynn trying to one-up The Whole F’N Show.