WWE: Woken Matt Hardy Has Been a Disappointment So Far

Since his return at WWE WrestleMania 33, the expectations of seeing the then “Broken” Matt Hardy in WWE were high. A year and a half later, it’s safe to say those expectations haven’t been met. Where did it go wrong?

Let us turn back time a bit. The date is April 2, 2017. Matt and Jeff Hardy make their return to WWE at WrestleMania after a decade away from the company. They’ve had their ups and downs since leaving, but recently were able to catch the wrestling world on fire with their “Broken” brilliance. The Broken Universe created in Impact Wrestling was so different than anything we’d seen in wrestling. It was so wacky and ludicrous that you couldn’t help but fall in love with it. So of course, when WWE got their hands on this, expectations were high.

On their first night back, Matt and Jeff captured the Raw Tag Team Titles — in a Ladder Match, their specialty. This is what started what I will refer to as the nostalgia portion of their current WWE run. Everyone was so excited just to have the Hardys back that all was well. Eventually though, the nostalgia tour would come to an end, and the question became “when are we going to see the Broken Hardys?”

While this was going on, the big story behind the scenes was the legal battle between the Hardys and Anthem Sports and Entertainment (Impact’s parent company) over if the Hardys should have the right to use their “Broken” gimmick in WWE. Seemingly, that was delaying the Hardys becoming Broken.

Now, I’m no legal expert, but I do often wonder why, if WWE ultimately decided to make them the “Woken” Hardys and not the “Broken” Hardys, why couldn’t they do that from the beginning? I would think that there was no sort of legal action that could be taken if they used names that weren’t trademarked and turned it into their own thing.

Regardless though, this nostalgia tour carried on, and it as it was dying off slowly, The Hardys would lose the Raw Tag Team Titles to Sheamus and Cesaro. The Hardys did have some very good matches with Sheamus and Cesaro, but it was clear at this point that the nostalgia tour was pretty much over. At some point after this, Jeff Hardy would end up getting injured. This would leave Matt on his own.

At this point, Impact Wrestling made the announcement that they would allow any former talent to use their gimmicks from Impact elsewhere, which would finally lead us the debut of “Woken” Matt Hardy. After losing a match to Bray Wyatt, Matt would sit in the corner, and repeatedly do the “Delete!” gesture, signaling, as Michael Cole would call it, a “breakdown.” This would lead to the next week where we would finally get the first “Woken” Matt Hardy promo.

When this promo first happened, I was just so happy to see it, that I didn’t really consider whether or not it would work. Not to say this was a bad way to debut it, because it wasn’t. What was bad were the weeks to follow. WWE basically decided to do the same exact promo above, for weeks and weeks, with not much really changing. That is where this started to lose its momentum.

What made “Broken” Matt Hardy work in Impact was how outlandish and ridiculous the segments he was in were. We never got that here. We got a regular WWE pre-tape promo, with two dudes who laugh a lot for some reason. That’s not going to work for this character. It needed to be more unique.

It would have helped drastically just to do these promos in a different setting. Having Hardy in his “compound” or do some sort of silliness with Hardy in the real world buying groceries, or going out to dinner with his family. Anything different from the status quo here was desperately needed.

So after this feud had been building for weeks with these promos, Bray Wyatt and Matt Hardy would meet for the first time since the “breaking.” It happened in an unannounced match at Raw 25, in front of a ticked off Manhattan crowd who basically paid to watch the real Raw 25 on a TV screen that was taking place in Brooklyn.

Not only was this match fast, but Hardy lost. So that right away made it feel like WWE was not treating this like something important. It’s one thing to have him lose, but to do it an unannounced TV match and in such quick fashion? It was at this point that I really lost faith that Hardy would ever live up to the expectations he had for this persona.

Matt would get his win back over Bray in an “eh” match at Elimination Chamber. To this point, it felt like all hope was lost. But then it was announced that on Raw, Bray Wyatt would meet Matt Hardy at the Hardy compound for an “Ultimate Deletion” match. Now, this is where things could possibly turn around with what made “Broken” Matt Hardy successful in this sort of environment.

The Ultimate Deletion, for me, delivered in the best way it possibly could have. It had the wackiness that we were expecting with Matt Hardy, but it also told a great story around Bray Wyatt and developed his character more in that one segment than WWE had done in years. This Ultimately ended with Matt winning the “match” and then throwing Bray into the Lake of Reincarnation, with the cliff hanger coming when Senoir Benjamin went to retrieve the carcass of Bray Wyatt in the lake, but he wasn’t there.

This would then lead up into WrestleMania 34, where Matt Hardy would compete in the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal. Matt would get some assistance from his former rival Bray Wyatt to win the match, joining the two together.

This is where the lack of creativity really showed for this character. With the two joining forces, we needed something different for them. I could see some fun segments of Bray Wyatt being invited back to the Hardy compound, and meeting Matt’s “Woken” family being some good segments. Instead, we got the same old tired Bray Wyatt Titantron promos, but just adding in Hardy to it.

Despite the lack of creativity, Wyatt and Hardy quickly rose to the top, winning a tournament to claim the then-vacated Raw Tag Team Championships. After this, nothing changed. They were still just another tag team. Their reign would last 79 days before dropping the titles to the B-Team of Bo Dallas and Curtis Axel at the Extreme Rules PPV. The B-Team, whose gimmick was basically that they get fluke wins and then celebrate over the top, pretty much beat Hardy and Wyatt clean. A disappointing end to a disappointing run.

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Now, here we are. It’s likely that Bray Wyatt and Matt Hardy’s time as a team is on its last legs, and it doesn’t feel like we’ve gained anything from the two being together. What has ultimately led them down this path of disappointment is simply a lack of creativity and being able to do something different.

This gimmick can’t work if it’s not given the opportunity to be unique. Every week on Raw, we all should have been looking forward to “I wonder what wacky adventures Matt Hardy and Bray Wyatt will take part in this week.” Instead, it has been impossible to care about what they’re doing.

It’s also worth mentioning here, Matt Hardy isn’t the wrestler he once was. Age has taken away a lot of the things that we would be used to seeing Hardy do when he was last in WWE. This is another big reason why this gimmick could’ve been so helpful for him, because he wouldn’t need to be that Matt Hardy. As long as you have him doing his “Broken” antics throughout the match, it can be entertaining.

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I’ll close this piece with this; yes, Woken Matt Hardy has been a complete disappointment, but is it too late to save it? The answer is no. It’s never too late to turn something like this around, but there has to be a commitment to doing so. Maybe Matt could split away from Bray and they can try this again with a more focused singles version of Woken Matt Hardy. Or maybe you can move Matt to SmackDown and try it with “Brother Nero” Jeff Hardy. No matter how they try to do it, as long as they give an actual effort to make the “Woken” Universe into something unique, it would be a welcome change.

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