During the latest episode of The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy, the AEW superstar spoke about his experience as “Broken Matt Hardy” and doing “The Expedition of Gold” with his brother Jeff in IMPACT Wrestling.
When Hardy debuted in AEW during the pandemic, he appeared on the show as Broken Matt for a short period of time but was switched back due to the absence of crowds. Matt spoke about what his plans are for the future with the Broken character and why a weekly show might be coming to the Hardy Compound.
“That’s what I want to do, I want to bring back the Broken Universe at some point, even when I’m not wrestling in the ring full time, and make it a small series and try to put it on a platform somewhere because it was just so much fun,” Hardy said. “I would love to sit back and hook up with JB, Jeremy Borash, and Jimmy Long and do this and make it into an entertaining series.
“It was, it was so much fun and a great mixture and combination of making movies and doing this Broken Matt entertainment, super meta entertainment stuff along with having some in-ring action and still getting to do something I’m very passionate about which is wrestling in-ring. We had a great balance going on at this point.”
During the “Expedition of Gold” Matt and Jeff Hardy ended up showing up at Ring of Honor’s Final Battle 2017 in New York City to call out the tag teams looking for ROH gold. Matt revealed that the moment almost didn’t happen due to issues with IMPACT Wrestling and Ring of Honors relationship.
“I had been talking with the Young Bucks pretty regularly at this point and we had started planning and plotting out a Ring of Honor/TNA IMPACT crossover angle,” Hardy said. “It was starting to work and we were starting to mend the broken relationship that they had. And then because of some of the stuff that happened with Billy Corgan and Anthem and they had a little bit of a legal issue with one another over ownership, we had to move back the taping dates of Total Nonstop Deletion.
“We were going to do this, it was going to be a big production, over three days and if it had been in the initial setting, we were going to have the Young Bucks come out and do it. We had already kind of gotten a green light on that and we changed the dates, they ended up being in Japan and we talked about doing a cameo because we definitely wanted to build to this angle as it started to work and seemed like it was going to get greenlit.
“I ended up doing this promo, I talked to them a few days before Final Battle, they cleared on their end and I cleared on my end. I was doing a tour through Europe with Inside the Ropes, I was wrestling with WhatCulture, the night that [appearance in ROH] aired and I remember coming back from the ring and my phone blew up. I remember the phone just blowing up with all this stuff after I popped up on the Ring of Honor pay-per-view.
“We were close to this not happening, Ring of Honor was like ‘what are we going to get out of this? Is there going to be a payoff?’ I remember talking to the Bucks recently about this, they are the hottest thing ever, The Hardyz were so red hot, why would you not want to do this?
“This is going to be great, build something that’s going to be great for Ring of Honor. Even John Gaburik was having second thoughts about it and I had to talk him into letting it happen. We set it up, we were going to do it and then everybody had reservations about it hours before the show and we literally got it green lit an hour before it aired.
“It was close to not airing and that was such a huge moment, obviously it set up what would happen later in Ring of Honor. I was trying to do as much as I could to make TNA seem like it was unpredictable, we could literally show up anywhere. The Broken Hardyz come to your show, then maybe on ROH, then maybe in WWE, who knows? This was something that was a throwback to the old school territory days and one of the reasons we were so hot also at that time.”
