Rob Van Dam says he named his tag team leg drop maneuver with Rey Mysterio after… their shoe sizes?
RVD recently spoke with Nick Hausman for Wrestling Inc. and shared a funny story about how he needed to explain the reasoning behind naming his “420 Leg Drop” move in WWE. According to RVD, Vince McMahon wanted to know if it was a drug reference and sent Paul Heyman to get an explanation about it. The “420” leg drop was a move RVD and Rey Mysterio used in the brief time that they teamed up, and RVD says he told Paul to tell Vince it had to do with their shoe size, not marijuana.
“One night before the match, Paul came up to me and he said, ‘Vince wants to know what the 420 leg drop means.’ I said, ‘why?’ He said, ‘he needs to know if the commentators can’t say if it’s a drug use. He wants to know is it a drug use?’ And I said, ‘no, it’s the name of our move.’ He goes, ‘I know, but he wants to know what it means.’ I said, ‘it’s 420. I pick Rey Mysterio up. Then I jump up while I’m holding him up and all of our legs come down on the guy, so it’s four legs and twenty is our combined shoe size. I wear twelve. He’s eight,’ and he’s like, ‘OK, I can work with that.'”
RVD says he never heard anything negative after the fact, so he doesn’t know how it went over. He noted that they stopped using the move after tearing his ACL during that time, which led to him being sidelined for most of that year.
“I never heard anything back on it, so I don’t know. I think what happened was I ended up tearing my ACL, actually, around that time because I know Rey Mysterio and I were tagging when that happened, when it finally tore all the way through. So I was out for 2005 because I had to have knee surgery. So that’s pretty memorable.”
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