During the latest edition of his “Something to Wrestle” podcast, Bruce Prichard commented on Matt Hardy’s release from WWE in 2005 due to the way he was acting backstage over Lita cheating on him with Edge. You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On if Matt Hardy rubbing former WCW guys the wrong way had anything to do with his release: “I don’t think that had anything to do with and I think that that is just something that was created out of a narrative for whatever reason.”
On Matt making an issue backstage over the Edge – Lita situation and making it hard to do business: “Unfortunately for Matt, the situation took place with Lita and the break-up and instead of, kind of going with it, Matt made an issue out of it pretty much to everybody, and it was unfortunate. It made it harder to do business, so when you look at it, and you’ve got all these elements, and if you remove one element from the situation, the situation becomes better, then unfortunately that’s what you have to do. And that, in a nutshell, is pretty much what happened to Matt at that time. I think he took out his frustrations and his feelings on everybody and everything, just wasn’t a healthy atmosphere.”
On if there is any truth to Vince McMahon never seeing Matt Hardy as a guy with main event potential: “Probably so. I think that if you look at the two, Jeff was the star, Jeff had the charisma, Jeff had that ‘it’ factor, and Matt was a little bit more of the cerebral of the two. As time went on, for those that knew Matt and knew both of them, early on, you’d say Matt was going to be the star and Jeff will have a decent career. As time went on, Jeff kind of came out of his shell and became the opposite. But they’re both just highly creative and they’re both damn great talents. It was Jeff whose star was shining the brightest at the time and a little bit harder to find a place for Matt to shine.”
