D-Von Dudley insists that his next match will truly be his final one.
At TNA Slammiversary, it was revealed that The Dudley Boyz and Hardys will face off for one last time at Bound for Glory this October. It will only be the fourth match D-Von has had since 2016. Following a seven-year absence, he returned to the ring on the 1,000th episode of TNA Impact in 2023.
D-Von suffered a stroke in 2020 and underwent spinal surgery in 2022, but he’s feeling good physically after dropping 85 pounds through DDP Yoga and focusing on his diet. Appearing on a new episode of Insight with Chris Van Vliet, D-Von said he is not worried about getting injured by returning to the ring.
“Is there moments where I feel like if I get back in the ring, I’m going to get hurt? No, I don’t,” he said. “I have the wrestling school in Winter Park, Florida, which is doing extremely well. And the great thing about that is, is that I roll around with some of the guys sometimes in the ring. So every once in a while I take bumps and I feel good when I’m in there. So there’s no hesitation in how I think or feel about what I do in that ring now.”
The Insight episode was recorded last week prior to Slammiversary, so D-Von’s Bound for Glory return had not been officially announced at the time. D-Von told Van Vliet that, if he were to wrestle again, it would only be for one final match and not a more expansive run.
“But, you know, at 50 years old, I don’t want to go in here and do it, like I said, until I’m 70 and 80. That’s not going to happen. If we were to do one more match, it would be the last one and that would be it,” he said. “There is no one more, ‘Can you come back one more time, one more time?’ No, because — and I tell this to everybody when they ask — I go, every time I do one more time, that one more time is over, let a year go by, ‘Hey, you guys look great, you can go another match.’ No, we can’t, stop, stop.”
D-Von added that The Hardys would be the ideal opponents for his final match because of how much he trusts Matt and Jeff.
“If I was to do anything in the ring again, it would have to be with Matt and Jeff,” D-Von said. “And, you know, I would say Edge and Christian too, but they’re in the other, you know, organization, AEW, and I don’t think that would ever happen. When the opportunity came, when Edge left WWE and went to AEW, you had Christian and Edge there, and then The Hardys were there. And it was like, we were wondering why, you know, Tony [Khan], who is a huge fan of the business and always had it, why wouldn’t he take the opportunity to be the one to put those three teams together and to do that, but he never did. So I think that opportunity is lost.
“But, you know, if I was to come back and do something, it would have to be with The Hardys. And those are the only two I trust. Even though I think Jeff is out of his damn mind [laughs], but those are the only two I would trust [with] my body on the line and to go in there one more time.”
Bound for Glory 2025 is being held at the Tsongas Center in Lowell, Massachusetts on October 12. The Dudleyz vs. Hardys match was set up for the pay-per-view when Bully Ray issued a challenge to Matt and Jeff following their TNA Tag Team title win at Slammiversary.
D-Von worked as a producer for WWE from 2016-2023. At the end of 2024, he launched a new YouTube channel that has now grown to having more than 160,000 subscribers.
