Former WWE creative team writer Freddie Prinze Jr. already mentioned in the past that pushing heavily for Jeff Hardy to be crowned WWE Champion brought him heat from Triple H. He revealed more on the matter on his Wrestling With Freddie podcast
He said once again that he thought Jeff winning the big one was the perfect ending for his story: “So I start pitching why this is a good idea. I’m telling you, this is an honest story, we’ve done nothing but tell the truth. If he has a relapse, if he goes down again, you take the title off him. You’ve taken it off him before for stuff like that on smaller belts. I said we’ve taken it off of other people in a day. I said we can pull this off. You know, I’m giving this passionate plea, it’s about five minutes long, and then Hunter starts shooting it down, again. You know, I don’t want it to be a fight. I don’t want it to be an argument. I don’t want to have enemies in the company, but I don’t want this whole story that we’ve built up to let the fans of Jeff Hardy down.”
“We’re waiting outside, we wanna know the answer. The production meeting on this day was on the same floor as a VIP cafeteria, so there’s like this empty cafeteria behind us. A lot of free space. I’m sitting there and looking at Freebird [Michael P.S Hayes] and I go ‘what do you think?’ and he goes ‘I don’t know, you did your best!’ He’s like trying to prep me for failure. So now I’m like shoot, man, this is not gonna happen. This is seriously getting killed right now?”
Ultimately, Triple H was right as Jeff Hardy got in trouble the year after. However, Prinze’s attempts worked: “Listen, again, Hunter was proven right at the end of the day. I mean Jeff got in trouble less than a year after this happened. They gave him the other belt after that, the other championship. And then he got in trouble and then got in bigger trouble and had to leave the company for a while. So at the end of the day, he was right, but all of a sudden the door swings open and only Hunter comes out, and he doesn’t even look at me. Right, and he walks by. So this now means two things; one, this dude doesn’t like me anymore or is probably going to work against me now, which is what happened. Or two, Jeff’s going to be the World Heavyweight Champion!”
