While speaking on the latest edition of his “The Extreme Life Of Matt Hardy” podcast, Matt Hardy talked about his surprise return to TNA Wrestling at the Rebellion 2024 pay-per-view event.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On who know about it: “I left everybody in the dark, Jon. You know who knew I was actually going to Las Vegas to appear? Just my wife. Maxwell too, but it would’ve been hard for him to stooge to anyone because he doesn’t have a phone. I didn’t even fill in Jeff, no one knew. I was trying to ensure that the word didn’t get out.”
On the appearance: “It started on Tuesday, getting a text from Tommy Dreamer. He just said, ‘TNA has been asking me about you, you know, if you’re free now. They’d be interested. I got some dates I could run by you.’ He said, ‘It would be great to work with you again.’ I ended up speaking to him and he shot me some of the dates, and it was wild, the dates that they shot fell on the weekends that I wasn’t already booked to signings or a con or whatever. I said, ‘I think this could be cool.’ We worked out some stuff on Wednesday and Thursday creatively, I talked to some of the creative people. We got everything up and running, they got me a flight, they got me set up. There’s gonna be a big secret kayfabe, come in at the end of the show as I did. It materialized very quickly just over a couple of days.”
On his contract status: “No, I’m just doing a per shot, per appearance deal. We’re just playing it by ear to see how long this lasts. This is while I’m still speaking to entities at AEW, still speaking to other entities in other places. I feel like, and this is one of the reasons I say this. Towards the end of AEW, myself and Jeff, I feel like we had cooled off so much. I wanted to put that Matt fact in that I’m in no rush to sign a contract because I think I can do TNA television for a few weeks, be in a good angle, be in a good story, and I think it will help heat me back up a little bit. I think that’s important, especially when you’ve cooled down, to heat yourself back up and get some buzz on you and surrounding you as far as the business goes. Once again, I think there’s some other places that I could pop up and make appearances or whatever. So, as far as the contract thing goes, when you sign a contract, you are locked in, you have to be there. That takes away a little bit of your freedom of creativity and whatnot, it kind of tightens the knot of you being able to like pop up and show up whenever you want to. TNA, they were great, they were open to everything, they really rolled out the red carpet for me, which was amazing. It was great to be back there, it was a great locker room, it was great to see the people I hadn’t seen in a while. I was very happy with the weekend, it felt like a very productive weekend and it should lead to a couple very fun weeks of TV coming up.”
