TNA World Tag Team Champion and pro wrestling legend Matt Hardy spoke on an episode of his podcast, “The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy.”
During the episode, he discussed various topics, including the impressive career of Nic Nemeth, a fellow TNA Wrestling star who has had significant success in WWE.
Hardy said, “No doubt. I mean, he had a tremendous career in WWE. Anybody who was there for a 20-year stretch is very talented. To be able to survive and be around that long, you are talented. And the fact that he has won all those championships — and that is quite a decorated list of championships you just rambled off then. Yeah, he very well could possibly be the most underrated WWE superstar of all-time.”
On whether Nemeth deserves a spot in the WWE Hall of Fame:
“Oh, no doubt. No doubt. There’s a lot of people with a very small percentage — with 10, 15% of that — in their career that have gone into the Hall of Fame. So yes, he is absolutely a Hall of Fame[r].”
On Nemeth’s downfall being that he made his opponents look too good:
“No, for sure. I mean, in some ways that does work against you. But sometimes you wrestle yourself into a corner. And maybe this is part of the thing, Vince saw him. Vince said, ‘Well, he’s a really good hand. He makes people look really good. But I don’t know if he is the guy that I want as the face of my company. We can have him up there circulating with those guys, but he is at his best when he’s going out and having a killer 20 minute match and he’s elevating someone else, and making it look like this person is murdering him.’ I mean, he could have wrestled his way into that. And once again, I just — I think that’s not the proper way to view wrestling. I think if you have someone that is extremely talented, and they have a gift of selling and and putting people over and making them look great. He would take the most — towards the end, when I was there in 2010. I worked with him quite a bit on the road, He would take a side effect. I remember he would go straight up, and he would go up, he’d kick his legs up, and he would land high on his shoulders and back, like a high angle. And then he would he would stick, and he would spin like a top, and then collapse. And like, he would do this on house shows all the time. He said, ‘Oh, let me see if I can take that bump.’ He even said that one time when we first did it in TNA . He said, ‘Oh God, let me see if I can remember that bomb I used to take with a Side Effect. It was so cool.’ But I mean, he was extremely talented and also very selfless when it came to that. It was important to him to try and make people look good.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
