Matt Hardy Recalls Reaction To Death Of WCW & ECW
Wrestling veteran Matt Hardy has spoken out about what it was like working for WWE in 2001 when rival promotions WCW & ECW went out of business.
The death of WCW in March 2001 was a huge story because the company was very profitable three and four years earlier. However, a number of bad moves led to the death of the company with WWE buying their former rivals prior to WrestleMania 17 that year.
As for ECW, they also died as a company in early 2001 after canceling the Living Dangerously pay-per-view that was scheduled in March 2001. Eventually, their assets were acquired by WWE while the company’s owner Paul Heyman joined WWE as an announcer.
During an ECW-themed episode of The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy podcast, the current AEW wrestler revealed that a lot of wrestlers in WWE hated it when other wrestling companies died:
“Man, everybody in the WWE hated it. I mean, we know it wasn’t good for the industry, we knew it wasn’t good for the talent. We knew it was gonna take away a lot of our leverage as far as trying to get better deals or trying to get more money. So we hated to see the competition go under. And obviously, we bought WCW and then ECW went under. So it was what it was, but we were not fond of it, none of the WWE talent was.”
At the time when WWE bought out WCW & ECW, Matt Hardy was part of the Hardy Boyz tag team with Jeff Hardy as they were building a rivalry with Edge & Christian along with the Dudley Boyz leading into their second TLC match at WrestleMania 17.
Matt Hardy last wrestled on AEW television on the August 3rd episode of Dynamite in a losing effort to longtime rival Christian Cage.