Call it a war of the weird. In a recent interview with Sports Illustrated, Matt Hardy said he would love to step into the squared circle with current WWE star Bray Wyatt.
Hardy currently is hamming it up delightfully as "Broken" Matt Hardy on TNA's Impact Wrestling. That included a battle between brothers recently where Hardy defeated Jeff Hardy in "The Final Deletion", a bizarre match shot in cinematic style and staged on the Hardy "compound" in Cameron, N.C. That match, and the buzz surrounding it, helped Impact score its highest rating to date since it moved to Pop TV.
Less than a week later, the Wyatt Family battled The New Day at the "Wyatt compound" on the July 18 episode of Raw in a segment that appeared to draw many visual and thematic cues from "The Final Deletion." Hardy and Wyatt got into a back-and-forth on Twitter in the days after the WWE segment aired.
Hardy, who conducted the entire interview with SI for it's Extra Mustard online column in character, had this to say about Wyatt:
"I actually find fondness and appreciation for the Bray Wyatt. I see that he is driven by a higher power, much like I am driven and motivated and inspired and given strength by the Seven Deities. ... I would love, one day down that road, to show up in WWE and have a match with the Bray Wyatt. I would love to bring him to my battlefield and delete him--that would be an honor."
Hardy also addressed the New Day-Wyatts segment, albeit, once again, in "Broken" character. He acknowledged it was "a very tough position for them ... especially in such a serious environment where the Final Deletion was such an entertaining piece of art--it was a hard act to follow, and the fans let them know that."
Matt Hardy is, of course, no stranger to WWE. He had two long-term stints on the company roster that included 13 separate title reigns and, more significantly, popularizing the multi-man ladder match that has become a fixture at major pay-per-views such as WrestleMania and Money In The Bank.
You can read Hardy's entire interview with SI here.
By John Moorehouse
