TNA World Tag Team Champions The Hardys (Matt Hardy and Jeff Hardy) spoke with Fightful on a number of topics, including Erik Watts’ claim he helped inspire their look.
Jeff Hardy said, “They actually told me that idea about the Full Metal Mayhem match re-imagined back in the day when they were doing the tag team thing in WWE. It finally came to life. Like they gave me that idea, man. They were a team from the future, I think, right?”
Matt Hardy on how Michael Hayes helped them with their look early on:
“The one thing I can say is that, I feel like he started wearing that in February of ’99. The one thing I do remember is that whenever we’re doing independents, they told us they were going to do something, we’re going to be on every house show 10 days on, four days off. So the last independent we did was in January of 1999. That was like our final Omega show. So obviously after that, we weren’t on the independent scene anywhere. So I don’t know where we would have ran into on that. So that conversation does not show up in my memories, in my mind, or on my phone at any point. So yeah, I don’t know. I do know that whenever we went out to Hot Topic, Michael Hayes initially suggested, he said, ‘If we’re gonna be the new Birds, we gotta rock some gear. Maybe we’ll get some tight-ass jeans and some cowboy boots and some big belt buckles.’ I remember Jeff in a very cool, charismatic, enigma-type way, he says, ‘Yeah, that sounds cool, Michael, but what if we just kind of updated it, you know? So kind of like fit the 90s a little bit, you know?’ and then we went out and we got them at Gadzooks. A lot of people say Hot Topic, but Gadzooks is a store that we went in and we found those pants and they had those tight shirts and we said, ‘This is different and it’s like comfortable. I think we could wrestle in it and it kind of like it’s current of today’s fashion and whatnot.’ I’ll never forget Jeff and I put it on and I remember Michael Hayes, he was committed to the team. He said, ‘You know what guys? You’re right. That looks great.’ He says, ‘Y’all got my size?’ It was super exciting, he went and put on a pair right behind us and he was a team player.”
You can check out The Hardys’ comments in the video below.
(H/T to Fightful for transcribing the above quotes)
