WWE: Top 5 Matt Hardy Moments In Honor of His Retirement

1. The Final Deletion

If your sole experience of the Broken/Woken Universe is via WWE, I strongly recommend you seek out its original incarnation. That’s not to say that WWE’s version of it was a bust – it was perfectly enjoyable stuff, and surprisingly true to Matt’s original vision. However, the original Broken Hardys saga was lightning-in-a-bottle stuff.

A perfect storm of a creation, marrying the most outlandish excesses of Matt’s imagination with near-total creative control, it was Impact’s willingness to indulge the weirdness of the Broken Universe that led to the tour de force that was The Final Deletion.

At the time, The Final Deletion was highly polarizing. There were fans who considered it the death knell of professional wrestling, a derisible joke of a gimmick. Those fans are wrong.

It’s impossible to describe The Final Deletion. To reduce it to words takes away the magic. It defies explanation: part Shakespearean drama, part Game of Thrones, part hallucination. When asked to describe it, former WWE wrestler Simon Gotch said: ‘Try and imagine the worst thing you’ve ever seen WWE do. Then imagine if somehow it was good.’

More than just a squabble between brothers, this grandiose epic was truly a love letter to the Hardy Boys, their long and intertwined careers, and their fans, replete with clever references to past events woven into the fabric. For all its love-it-or-hate-it controversy, it can’t be denied that The Final Deletion saved Impact Wrestling at a time when the company looked to be circling the drain.

That Matt Hardy was able to bring his finest creation to a WWE audience is perhaps the most fitting coda to a career built and nurtured on WWE soil. When we look back at Matt Hardy’s greatest achievements, we should never forget that his finest hour was as a result of his own hard work, self-belief, and determination.