WWE Senior Vice President of Live Events “Road Dogg” Brian James recently spoke on his podcast, “Oh You Didn’t Know,” about a variety of professional wrestling topics including WrestleMania 34 and not getting the Broken Matt Hardy character when Matt came to back to the company.
“I didn’t get the Broken character. I never got it. I don’t understand it. If there’s something to understand, I would love to know what that is, but he just changed and talked differently. I don’t know. I didn’t see the transformation or follow it. I never got it. That was not me writing that. We put him with Bray because we thought together they could really be this cool entity, but I will say, no, we didn’t know what to do with them. The part I’m going to unpack is, what were their characters? If you could describe them to me, if you could give me an elevator pitch, a summary of their characters, then maybe we could have written them in that direction or something. I’ll take the heat and I always will for a failed opportunity, an opportunity I missed as a writer or a creative guy on the show. I’ll always take the hit for that. We let them be their creative selves and their creative selves, and this is horrible, and I don’t mean to say it like this, but I don’t think they knew at that time what they were trying to do. I don’t think they knew, I don’t think we knew, and together, it made a who knew stew, and so it turned out as such. I will take some heat for that, no two ways about it. I just don’t know if anybody else who should, will.”
James also commented on Rusev:
“I think with Rusev and Aiden English, I think there was something there with Rusev Day. We saw that. We felt it. We set it up and people forget that we set up Rusev Day. We made Rusev Day from a creative standpoint, but then people kind of took it and owned it and so they felt like it was theirs. It was like, well no, it’s not yours. It’s our creation and you can chant Rusev Day, but when it comes time to beat him, we’re going to have to beat him. It’s not because you like him that we’re going to put him over, but yea, we dropped the ball with Rusev and Rusev Day and that whole thing. It was very successful, but it could have been a lot more successful.”
You can listen to the complete podcast below:
