Matt Hardy discussed a wide range of topics during the latest episode of The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy. During it, he recalled The Hardy Boyz nearly worked for ECW in 1997 before signing full-time deals with WWE in 1998. They had been working enhancement matches in WWE for years, but never signed up until this point.
“They (WWE) told us like, late ’96, early ’97, that they are interested in doing something with us and to just keep coming (as enhancement talents). Keep doing what you’re doing. We’re going to start giving you more dark matches. We’re going to look at you and evaluate you,” Matt said.
“We just kind of felt they were full of sh*t. At the end of ’97, they did tell us that they planned on signing us. I want to say there was one moment where one of the agents there said, ‘Look guys, just hang in there. They’re going to do something with you. I promise they’re going to do something’, and they did. They signed us in the beginning of ‘98.”
“Before we started, we were about to go work with some of the ECW guys. Sandman had an international tour we were going to do and then we’re also going to go have tryouts for ECW. We were close to doing that.”
“Our names had been circulating around enough and we had enough dark matches where people said, ‘Oh my God, these guys had a match. It was pretty good. They’re a pretty decent tag team.’ There was starting to be a little bit of buzz about us, so we did have some other options. Fortunately, WWE ended up signing us.”
(H/T to WrestlingNews.co)
