Flair scoffs at wrestling Leroy Dargan, expecting some competition; then Wahoo comes out and offers to take his place and Flair wants him out, too. Flair finally turns to go wrestle the man in the ring and discovers the original wrestler is gone and Jack Brisco has taken his place. Mid-Atlantic, August 1982.\
Ricky Steamboat wrestles "Maniac" Matt Borne. On the same night, the winner meets "The Tennessee Stud", Robert Fuller in the finals for the NAWA Heavyweight title. Steamboat and Fuller square off and have closing remarks post-match. NAWA, 1991.
On his first ever Twitch live stream, AEW superstar Matt Hardy talked about he and his brother Jeff’s memorable return to WWE at WrestleMania 33.
During that time, The Hardy Boyz had a lot of buzz as the Broken Matt Hardy character was very over. Hardy spoke about Vince McMahon not having a clue who Broken Matt was when he reached out to them for their comeback at Mania 33, noting that McMahon did know though about the hype surrounding the legendary tag team in IMPACT.
“Vince probably didn’t have any idea about Broken Matt Hardy,” Hardy said. “Whenever we signed up for WrestleMania 33, we spoke with Vince but Triple H was the guy who did the majority of our negotiations. Thats who kind of worked out the deal with, when it was all set and done. It was very on the down low, only a handful of people knew about it and that was a part of the magic and what helped us coming back. Triple H was great the whole while, it was great working with him, it was great negotiating with him at the time.
“One of the reasons I think we were asked to comeback is because Vince kept saying ‘Why do these people keep saying delete? What is this delete s--t? Why do people keep going delete?’ Eventually, we spoke to him and that’s how we ended up back there. We came back, we were the Hardy Boyz and once Jeff got hurt, I was going to do a Woken Matt Hardy run.”
Hardy also talked about the moment he found out that he was going to be doing Broken Matt Hardy in WWE, revealed that he learned of it that day from Bray Wyatt. The 46-year-old described what it was like having a conversation with McMahon about the character and trying to explain to him why everyone liked the character so much.
“I remember pulling up to the building one time and I had no idea,” Hardy said. “Bray Wyatt, who we were buddies before that and we really bonded and gelled as friends, but I remember pulling up to television that day and Bray Wyatt pulled up and he said ‘Hey man, are you excited about tonight?’ I was like ‘Why, what’s tonight?’ He’s like ‘You haven’t heard? We’re starting the whole Bray Wyatt, Broken Matt Hardy thing.’ I was like ‘We are?’ Then I remember walking in and Michael Hayes said ‘Hey, Vince needs to talk to you, he’s got 30 minutes chiseled out for you and he wants you to explain the whole Broken Matt Hardy lure and how’d you come up with this and tell me about the character and what’s going on.’
“That was definitely one of the most interesting 30 minutes I ever had, especially telling him the whole idea of the essence of Broken Matt Hardy going from one body or vessel to another body over time. Explaining that to Vince McMahon was one of my favorite memories of all time. I remember there was a lot of ‘Hmmm, okay,’ and I know in his mind he’s going, this son of b---h is crazy. I had to sound like a mad man to him, an absolute madman. It was cool, it was fun and Vince really did stay open minded. He let me do Broken Matt on WWE T.V. and on top of that they had said we’re going to get some sort of compound deletion fight. He stayed true to his word, we really had to fight and work hard to do it.”
AEW commentator Jim Ross recently revealed the origins of Vince McMahon’s legendary “That’s such good sh**” line, saying it came during his interview with Mankind. Hardy said he never received that line from Vince when describing Broken Matt Hardy to him, but appreciated Vince for giving his character a chance on WWE television.
“No, I didn’t get that,” Hardy said. “Really, Vince is such a great talker. 30 minutes, it was probably 26 minutes of me talking and four minutes of him. He really was, he had an open mind to it. From what I understand, the Broken Matt Hardy craze is what ended up bringing us back to WWE so he knew there was interest there. Also it’s very different because WWE is such a more massive global deal. When we were doing it on IMPACT, it was viral online and on the internet and it did really well on the IMPACT shows but that’s also a much smaller audience as opposed to WWE. Vince gave it a shot and for that I commend him and thank him. I have nothing but love and a lot of respect for Vince McMahon.”
Matt Hardy debuted in AEW at the start of the pandemic as Broken Matt Hardy and was instantly put into a feud with Chris Jericho and the Inner Circle. Unfortunately for Hardy, his feud with Jericho and use of the Broken character was met with a lot of criticism, which caused the gimmick to be dropped.
In a recent interview, AEW President Tony Khan admitted that he was not a big fan of the character. However, Hardy believes that the character will likely appear again in AEW once crowds open up.
“I definitely think now that we have this Twitch capability you’ll be seeing some Broken Matt appearances here,” Hardy said. “But now for the time being in AEW, it’s definitely Big Money Matt. I think the whole pandemic scenario threw a huge monkey wrench in the plans. Especially not having fans live in the building and in the venue and just doing empty arena shows and literally just having nothing to gage on what you’re doing. I feel terrible for Orange Cassidy, if we had been having fans when he was going through that run with Chris Jericho, he would’ve been so over at that time. I dig his gimmick and obviously you guys know me, I did Broken Matt Hardy so I like that out of the box thinking.
“As far as Broken Matt goes, I definitely think when crowds are back and the moment arises and the time is right, I think Broken Matt could be 100% back. If he comes back to AEW, one of the lessons I feel like I’ve learned from the past when I first started as Broken Matt, I wanted to come in and be a little bit more vicious. The very first thing I did whenever I did the deal with Jericho and we did a teleportation thing, it was Chris’ idea and he was really giving and trying to make this character over the top and special. We did it and I know it was met with a lot of criticism from both sides. Long story short, I would definitely go without being the magical character or the supernatural route. I would make Broken Matt almost go back to his roots as just vicious, crazy, primal, animalistic and I think that type of Broken Matt would work in front of fans, in front of an AEW crowd.”