Breaking Holds: Episode Twenty Four, Featuring Matt & Jeff Hardy

Today’s Episode: The Sad, Sad Tale of the Hardy Brothers

I fell in love with the Hardy Boys, as a wrestling team, mind you, not as potential boyfriends, on September 27, 1998 after watching them bust out moves that I had never seen before on an otherwise uneventful episode of Sunday Night Heat. They defeated Mens “Terry Boy” Teioh and Shoichi Funaki of the once-incredible Kaientai, beating them with that awesome top-rope leg drop/splash combination that I later learned was called “The Event Omega.” They were young high fliers with goofy tights and long hair, and I immediately decided that they were my team. Why they weren’t on television more often, I had no idea, as these were the guys. I was certain that, given the right opportunities, they would be destined for superstardom, and wished my little wrestling fan wishes that I would see more of them.

And I did. We all did. We all saw so, so much more of them, and that has turned out to be, alas, among the most mixed of blessings.

Really, is there any wrestler or pair of wrestlers that have fallen farther out of graces with the Internet wrestling community and, to a lesser degree, all wrestling fans, than the Hardys?

We were thrilled when they revolutionized the ladder match with Edge and Christian, and cheered them on as they showed us night after night how they were masters of the art of tag team wrestling. Do any of you remember the day that Jeff busted out that Swanton Bomb for the first time? It was absolutely breathtaking, death-defying, like a man leaping out of a plane and pulling the parachute just before the point where he would have broken both of his legs. Fans didn’t know what to make of them and their absolutely marvelous abilities, and we loved them for it. Of course, Jeff got the lion’s share of the attention, as he was a bit prettier, a bit weirder, and was the one pulling the absolutely insane stunts in TLC matches and otherwise, but we all recognized that Matt was the glue that held them together, the in-ring technician that kept the Hardys from being more than just a bunch of doofuses jumping off of high places.

We were even pleased to see them as singles wrestlers, even though their feud with one another fizzled. We cheered like mad when Jeff Hardy beat HHH for the Intercontinental title, and were furious when HHH killed him dead on an episode of Raw. Matt Hardy Version 1.0 made Smackdown a blast to watch, with his Windows Media Player entrance video, Matt Facts, and MFers like Shannon Moore to play the little toadies buying into his hype.

We loved the Hardys. Loved them.

And now look at them.

Jeff Hardy went from beloved tag team wrestler to beloved singles wrestler to kind-of-drugged-out wrestler in TNA to theoretically-cleaned-up beloved wrestler in WWE to not-really-clean-but-still-kind-of-beloved wrestler in TNA to what we now know is a guy who was either unable to get or uninterested in getting his demons under control. Maybe that’s because Jeff doesn’t think he has demons. After all, even if we on the Internet sort of deplore him/feel sorry for him these days, he still has a screaming horde of fans that support him no matter what.

Matt was a similar story. Remember how furious you were when he was fired after the whole Edge/Lita hubbub? When my friend and I were live at the original ECW One Night Stand, we shouted “You Screwed Matt!” as loud as we could right in Edge’s face as he passed by. Edge was a piece of garbage, a disgusting piece of human filth, while the one guy who did nothing wrong was the one who ended up out of a job. Sure, when he was hired back, he couldn’t deliver on the main-event promise we hoped he’d fulfill, but hey, he was back, right?

Looking back, do you still hate Edge in that situation? You probably don’t even hate Lita over it, either. The only one you can’t stand is the one who did nothing wrong. The good guy. The victim.

Matt Hardy was a great ECW Champion. He really was. He had great matches with everyone and solidified the ECW belt as the one that was given to solid workhorses who could be counted upon to deliver. Then, somehow, when that was all over, he kind of became a joke.

He put on some weight, and we made our fat jokes, and he started complaining to the point where we all just sort of got tired of him. He was finally fired from WWE, and we were happy to see him go. When he ended up in TNA with his brother, who was acting the heel for the first time in his career, most of us couldn’t care less about what happened to either of them.

Now, both are punch lines in the wrestling world, with Jeff showing up to Pay-Per-Views in “no condition to compete,” and Matt pulling a Mel Gibson sans the racial epithets. It’s a tragic fall for men who we saw as wrestling heroes, as talented kids making it in an industry due to awesome ring work and, for a time, supreme dedication.

And yet, like “Casey at the Bat,” there’s no joy in Hardyville today. We’re unsurprised by whatever nonsense one or both of them posts on Twitter or Youtube, sadly shaking our heads at their unique brand of idiocy as they believe everything that every star-crazed fan said about them. Make no mistake, theirs is a rather unique brand of wrestling psychopath, who identify themselves across the Internet by their love for the Hardy Boyz, and their inability to see a single flaw in the “Angelic Diablo” and his “Charismatic Enigma” of a brother.

“Angelic Diablo”, “Charismatic Enigma” and “Event Omega”…such odd names. The Hardys were never great with coming up with names that sounded anything other than something beyond their backyard beginnings. These, along with “Cold Blood” or “Dark Cloud”, which Matt is guilty of, have always reeked of a bush-league independent wrestler who thought the names sounded “cool” like “Dirk Steel” or “Ramrod Jackson” or other such nonsense.

I wonder, then, if the brothers ever truly left that state of mind, where their ideas were great and people thought they were the best, and they just watched as wrestlers like Edge and Christian evolved and they just sort of stood still, sort of reinventing themselves, but always falling back on people loving them just for being the Hardys.
But they’re not the Hardys anymore, not really. At least, they’re not the ones we know. Jeff hasn’t looked quite right for awhile, and no one knows what Matt believes these days. His recent tweets smack of a Charlie Sheen level of insanity.

Boys who were our heroes became men who were true superstars in their own right, and now we absolutely can’t stand either one of them. It’s a shame that the Hardys are all we have now, because I think if the Hardy Boyz were still here, they’d be really, truly disappointed.