Matt Hardy just peeled back the curtain on one of the darker twists from his WWE feud with Jeff Hardy, and this one still sounds wild all these years later.
While speaking on the Battleground Podcast, Jeff Hardy was first asked about the infamous pyro spot from WWE, where fireworks blasted him during a storyline attack. Jeff remembered the moment as hot, scary, and ugly when he watched it back.
“Uh just blown away burnt uh blown away um as far as what had happened. And uh it was hot. It was very hot. And uh one of those things, man, you never expect to happen. and just I’m just blown away.”
Jeff joked that Matt had been going to school to become an engineer before wrestling, so he gave him sarcastic credit for “rigging” the pyro in the storyline.
“You know, Matt was going to uh college to be an engineer before we made it in pro wrestling. So, I was just super impressed how he rigged up the pyro to almost kill me underneath. So, props to him for getting away with that and how he made that happen.”
When Matt was asked about being revealed as the person behind everything happening to Jeff, he said WWE saw a chance to elevate him as a heel. At the time, Jeff was WWE Champion and Matt was ECW Champion, and Vince McMahon believed Matt could climb higher on the card by turning on his brother.
“Um well, they they had talked about that. They they thought we were at that point where we were both so popular. Uh they wanted to see if we could continue to to rise up in in the cards and whatnot. And obviously Jeff, you know, Jeff was the WWE champ and I was the ECW champ. And we had simultaneous runs as as champions of brands, which was very very cool. and and Vince saw that I could continue to be elevated by Turning Hill.”
Matt said the idea was for him to feud with Jeff and then possibly move on to John Cena. The jealousy angle made sense to him, but then WWE wanted to take it a lot further by using Jeff’s real-life house fire.
“They were hoping that I would have this program with Jeff and then continue on do something with John Cena. And uh that that was their plan to do it. And I think the way it it it begun uh historically, could I be jealous of Jeff for being more popular? You know, this no one is more popular than this guy in the pro wrestling industry. Of course. And and that totally makes sense. And uh I I love the fact that we just chose these these different incidences and people were trying to, you know, someone was trying to sabotage Jeff. Who is it? these different things happen.”
Then came the part that Matt thought might be too much. Jeff’s house had actually burned down, and Matt said Vince wanted to put that into the story by making Matt the person responsible.
“Uh, and then I remember we got to the point where Jeff’s house had legitimately burnt down and then Vince said, ‘You know what? His house had burned down. Let’s let’s pin that on you. I think that’ll get good heat.’ And I was like, ‘Ah, I don’t know.’ Vince, that might be a little too much. Like I don’t I think they get that you’re jealous. You want to sabotage him. You want to have a better career than him, but like burning his house down might be a lot, but Vince was adamant and he wanted to do that.”
Matt said they went with it because that is how wrestling often works, taking real life and blurring it with fiction.
“So we rolled with the punches, man. And it was what it was. And we’re just incorporating real life in a story. And that happens in pro wrestling all the time. And you have to be able to do that because that is what pro wrestling is now. You know, in a nutshell. It uh incorporates things uh to try and blur the lines of what is fiction and you know what what is uh reality.”
Even with how heavy the angle got, Matt said he is still proud that it led to his WrestleMania 25 Extreme Rules match with Jeff.
“I’m just happy we got that Wrestlemania 25 extreme rules match out of it. I’m very proud of that match. was also another one of our dreams when we were coming up. We wanted to have a one-on-one match at Wrestlemania and we got to do that in a marquee match which was very cool.”
The Hardy brothers have been through a lot on-screen and off-screen, but Matt’s story shows just how far WWE was willing to go at the time to get heat. Blaming him for Jeff’s real house fire was not just a wrestling angle — it was a real-life tragedy turned into TV drama.
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