Rob Van Dam Recalls His Decision To Leave WWE in 2007

On the latest episode of 1 Of A Kind, Rob Van Dam talked about when he decided he wanted to leave WWE in 2007 and more. You can check out some highlights below:

Rob Van Dam on when he decided he wanted to leave WWE in 2007: “I got suspended for 30 days. And then both championship belts were forfeited. And then I felt like ECW was in the toilet, swirling down the drain, and they wanted to flush it. So my passion was gone. I said, ‘I’m finishing my contract, and then I need a break. I’m not going to re-sign.’ And we talked many times about what it would take for me to re-sign, and I chose spirit first. It was priority for me to get my spirit healthy, and I couldn’t do that if I was tied to a timetable because I’d be counting down the days until I had to return.

“What they offered was, ‘How about you sign for six months, or you sign [that] it says you’ll come back in six months, go enjoy yourself. Okay a year whatever.’ And I was like, ‘I can’t do it. I need to know what it felt like to be free in order to grow from where I’m at right now.’ And I just knew that. I’d been doing a lot of inside studying, and I needed that. The career had been so consuming for the last seven years that I felt I’d had enough of giving everything to that. And I needed my spirit to be healthy again. I needed to be detached from what was consuming me. Then and only then, would I be able to grow enough to know when I’d feel good and I’d be strong enough to go back. But it never f**king happened.”

On his mindset at the time: “I didn’t care if I ever set foot on an airplane again. I didn’t want to travel. I was just done, burned out with everything. And some months went by, and I didn’t want to do anything. I wasn’t looking into it. And it was a friend of mine, Kirk White, a wrestling promoter with Big Time Wrestling in California -— not the s**tty one in Ohio. But Kirk White said, ‘Hey, I’ve been talking to this guy in Portugal. I guess he’s going to book you there.’ I asked, ‘What do you mean, you guess he’s going to book me?’ He replied, ‘Yeah, he’s going to book you in Portugal. I told him I’d take this much, and he said, okay.’ I was like, ‘Oh he did?’ And that set my new standards, and I owe Kirk White for that. After Kirk, that became my new standard. I was like, ‘Well, I guess it’s worth it to leave home if I’m getting this much. Anything less, I don’t want to do it.’ And that was probably around ’97 or ’98. And also the promoter in Portugal became a good friend of mine as well.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit 1 Of A Kind an h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.