Rob Van Dam Says He Suffered "Hundreds" of Concussions Throughout His Career

Rob Van Dam recently spoke with Wrestling Inc. while promoting his new documentary Headstrong, and [...]

By Connor Casey

Rob Van Dam recently spoke with Wrestling Inc. while promoting his new documentary Headstrong, and opened up about his long history of concussions during his decades-long professional wrestling career. According to Van Dam, he can think back on "hundreds and hundreds" of occasions where he's been concussed, even though he didn't learn about the lasting damages they can cause until after Chris Benoit's double-murder and suicide in 2007.

"Once I found that out, I started thinking about all the times Balls Mahoney whacked me with a chair, and I'd take a second and I'd be like, 'Whoa!' Sometimes everything is in slow motion, sometimes the sound is out just for a couple of seconds. That happened hundreds and hundreds of times during my matches, and I just kept on going and ignored it," he said on an episode of the WINCLY podcast. "Now, they want to pull you aside and make sure you're OK because that's a pretty big thing, which I didn't know back then and now I do know that. But I feel fine now, to answer your question, I feel great mentally and physically."

Van Dam said he had no signs of CTE, which is why he never got involved in the class-action lawsuit against WWE made by former wrestlers regarding concussions and CTE.

"There's this class-action lawsuit that has a lot of wrestlers attached to it. They sued the NFL and won big money, and with the same structured suit they're going after the WWE saying that the higher-ups knew that they were causing long-term brain damage by ignoring concussions or forcing wrestlers to wrestle when they had concussions already," Van Dam said.

"I can say I've never been a part of that, I never told anybody that I had a concussion because that's the way I was brought up," he continued. "If you can still wrestle, then you're not hurt, so don't tell anybody that you're hurt because then you're not gonna work. That's an old-school mentality, but I definitely don't have anybody to blame but myself. And also, I'm not a candidate anyway because I don't have CTE, so for a lot of reasons I don't mind talking about it."

Van Dam made his wrestling debut in 1990 and broke out onto the national scene in 1996 in Extreme Championship Wrestling. Across 29 years in the business, he is the only man to ever hold the WWE Championship, ECW World Heavyweight Championship, and the TNA (Impact Wrestling) World Heavyweight Championship.

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