Is Matt Hardy The True Master Of Reinventing Himself?
Professional wrestling is an incredibly unique industry. A combination of sports and entertainment in which a person can compete for three decades, or see their entire run start and finish in less than three years. The wrestlers who stick around for the long haul need a number of key elements to work together in order to make that happen. Some are within the wrestler's control, while others, like a freak injury, are not.
One of the elements that is in a wrestler's control, to an extent, is their character. No matter how intriguing or unique a wrestling persona is, failing to adapt it as time passes will eventually result in you being left by the wayside. Take The Undertaker. It might seem like he has been the same guy for 30 years, but that couldn't be further from the truth. There are various iterations of The Deadman, and I'm not just talking about the American Badass. If The Phenom had not evolved his character over time, he would not have been around as long as he wound up being.
Team Xtreme And Matt Hardy Version 1
The Undertaker gets a lot of credit for his ability to adapt, as does Chris Jericho. While both deserve that credit, someone who should be mentioned in the same breath as the pair but rarely gets his due diligence is Matt Hardy. Hardy has changed his character so many times over the years and while some have been more popular than others, very few of them have been a complete miss.
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Hardy broke into WWE with his brother Jeff. Jeff has also successfully tweaked his wrestling persona over the years, but in a much more subtle way than his brother. The two got over with the fans alongside Lita as Team Xtreme. Their attire and the way they wrestled played right into the hands of wrestling fans at the time. However, Vince McMahon reached a point a few years later where he felt like splitting up pretty much all of WWE's established teams.
For the first time in their careers, Matt and Jeff had to go it alone. There is an unwritten rule in wrestling that once a team splits, one becomes a bigger star than the other. While Jeff will likely go down in the history books as the better Hardy, Matt got right to work on reinventing himself alone for the very first time. He came up with Matt Hardy Version 1, and it worked.
Big Money Matt And The Broken One
Shortly after that, Hardy's first run with WWE came to a messy end. He and Lita were in a relationship for real, but Lita had been cheating on Hardy with Edge. WWE eventually brought Hardy back so his real-life anguish could be used for an on-screen angle. While Hardy continued to tweak his character during that second run, it wasn't until he left again and signed with TNA, now Impact Wrestling, that his creative juices were really allowed to flow.
Impact was where Hardy debuted his Big Money Matt character. Nothing will make fans hate you more than incessantly bragging about how much money you make. A simple premise, but Hardy made it work and it resulted in him hitting the ground running in Impact. It also proved Impact right to trust Hardy's creativity, opening the door for what might well be Hardy's most iconic character change to date. Broken Matt Hardy.
Hardy's Broken persona is one of the most inventive characters created in the modern era of wrestling. In a world before the letters AEW had even been uttered in that order, Hardy had everyone in wrestling talking about something outside of WWE for the first time in years. There is definitely a limit on how wacky you can get with a wrestling character if you want it to be a success, and The Broken One walked right up to that line and maniacally yelled “yeeeeeessssss” over it and into the abyss.
Hardy's Broken character made such an imprint on the business that he was eventually allowed to revive it during his third, and at this moment in time final, run in WWE. Rebranded as The Woken One, probably for legal reasons, Hardy once again assumed what may well be remembered as his most famous role. It's even the character he debuted as when he left WWE and joined AEW. His run as the Broken/Woken One didn't last long in AEW, but that hasn't necessarily been a bad thing.
So far, in what might well be the final chapter of his in-ring career, Hardy has been treating AEW a little bit like a greatest hits tour. The Broken One has reappeared, and he is currently Big Money Matt once again. It would be pretty cool to see him keep moving back through time, perhaps reviving Version 1 if he can, and maybe even reuniting Team Extreme under AEW's banner once Jeff's WWE contract is up. The perfect way to end what has been one of the most imaginative careers in wrestling history.
