During the latest episode of his The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy podcast, Matt Hardy revealed Vince McMahon’s creative involvement in the iconic Ultimate Deletion match, and how Mr. McMahon didn’t want any “bells and whistles” or “serious wrestling bullsh**,” and instead aimed for “absurd stuff” and “over-the-top, super-campy” things.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On what Vince thought of the idea: “One of my favorite suggestions, he said, ‘I like this lake concept. I like this how it changes a character. That’s great sh**, pal. What I could see is Bray gets knocked into the lake and then all of a sudden we have a false finish where he pops out of the lake but he’s got a fish in his mouth and then sinks back down,’” Matt recalled. “And they mentioned something about this. They said, ‘Can we get a fish?’ I’m like, dude, we’re in Cameron, North Carolina. When they’re telling me this it’s 2 o’clock in the morning. It’s not like you can just go to a Bait and Tackle store that’s open 24 hours. I don’t think we want to spend time catching a fish out by the Lake of Reincarnation either. He said, ‘Well if we can’t do it, we can’t do it, but it would be great.’”
On a spot McMahon removed: “Where Jeff did the Swanton off the tree where I was on the ladder in the Final Deletion, I had two tables I was going to set up, put Bray on the bottom one and come off that tree,” Matt said. “I had built a stand on it and everything to go up there and I had already practiced it. I was going to jump off the stand and leg-drop him through the two tables and he was going to move, which was going to put me in jeopardy to kind of go into the heat aspect of the match, and Vince said ‘nothing else in the ring, no more of this sh**.’ I thought that would’ve been a real cool spot because I wanted to still incorporate the wrestling ring and wrestling spots and TLC sh**. Once they got that call from Vince they said, ‘Okay, we can’t go back to the ring. Vince said he doesn’t want any of this wrestling bullsh**, he wants this campy, over the top, this is supposed to be fun, larger than life, absurd to a degree.’”
