The WWE Hall of Fame will need to stock up on tables as WWE just announced The Dudley Boyz, Bubba Ray and D-Von Dudley, are the latest inductees in the WWE Hall of Fame Class of 2018. The tag team of (kayfabe) half-brothers made a huge statement becoming the most decorated tag team in WWE history, as 18-time World Tag Team Champions (23 if we had the Word Tag Team Championships they won in TNA and NJPW).
The Dudley Boyz started with Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW) in 1996. Bubba Ray and D-Von, the sons of the unseen Big Daddy Dudley, were on opposite sides of a family feud among brothers clad in tie-dye and thick-rimmed glasses. Eventually, Bubba Ray and D-Von joined forces and kicked off two decades of tag team dominance.
They were ECW’s most reviled and dangerous villains, with a predilection for punishing opponents by slamming them through tables. The Dudleys captured the ECW Tag Team Championship eight times before they left the land of extreme in 1999 to join WWE. Bubba Ray and D-Von were also very active behind the scenes of ECW.
They arrived in WWE, with the same camouflage ring attire, nasty attitude and stock of tables to drive their foes through. In the WWE rings, The Dudley Boyz found a pair of teams just as willing to push competition to its extreme ends in The Hardy Boyz and Edge & Christian. The trio of tag teams squared off in the first-ever TLC Match at SummerSlam 2000 and led to a classic sequel at WrestleMania X-Seven in 2001.
By the time they left WWE in 2005, The Dudley Boyz had become World Tag Team Champions 8 times. They emerged in TNA just after, but also in NJPW and many independent companies. But 10 years after leaving WWE, they came back to compete with a new generation of Superstars, introducing teams like The New Day and The Usos to their brand of hardcore wrestling and a few tables. Though they left WWE again in 2016, they were present last week for RAW 25, making the crowd roar when they appeared to put Heath Slater through a table with a thunderous 3D.
As of now, Bubba Ray was working with ROH but wrestled his last match at Final Battle in December 2017. D-Von is still wrestling for independent companies but has become a WWE backstage producer after the team left the company as wrestlers. The duo also runs “The Team 3D Academy Of Professional Wrestling” in Florida and has trained new generations of wrestlers for more than 10 years.
The Dudley Boyz will take their rightful place in sports-entertainment history on what is sure to be an incredible night. They will be inducted, alongside Goldberg, during the 2018 WWE Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony on Friday, April 6, in New Orleans during WrestleMania 34 Week.