Matt Hardy recently agreed with a tweet that basically said people should recognize The Elite and the quality of pro wrestlers and people that they are. Jim Cornette criticized Matt Hardy for agreeing with this tweet and said he can’t be friends with somebody who thinks this way. Matt also had a Twitter exchange with Cornette podcast co-host Brian Last.
Matt Hardy commented on all of this:
“It goes much further back than that because Jim hasn’t been a fan of The Young Bucks, or Kenny, or Hangman Page, or Orange Cassidy. I mean, there’s several people. There’s a laundry list you can name in AEW.”
“Obviously The Bucks are two of my best friends in the world. I’ve gotten to know Kenny really well over these last couple years that I’ve worked with him in AEW. I like him a lot. I knew Hangman. Our second episode was on Hangman. Our second episode was about Hangman. He was here grinding and coming up with the independents in the Carolina and Mid Atlantic area. That’s when I first got to know him and I booked him on Omega shows and Shane Helms booked him on Omega shows and we did all we could to help him out and support him.”
“So the fact that Cornette constantly needles me because these guys are my friends or whatever. I always got along great with him. I had a great respect for him. He’s got a great mind for the wrestling business. I understand why people enjoy his podcast. He’s a very charismatic, entertaining guy. He is gifted with the gab, with the gift of the gab. He has a golden tongue. He’s gifted with that and I understand why people like him. I understand why people are drawn to him. He is like one of those cult leader people and he draws in people just like that. The Cornette cult is quite the appropriate name for his followers, I guess.”
“So the fact that I always got along good with him, and I respected him, and I considered him a friend. I thought he did things to help me in the beginning of my career. He did. He booked me in Smoky Mountain. He pushed for us at WWE. He did the same thing with Chris Jericho. He brought Chris Jericho to Smoky Mountain and booked him there. There was a point where he said because Matt Hardy and AEW did football fu**ery, which is what he called the Stadium Stampede, which keep in mind, we were doing this like six to eight weeks inside a once in a century pandemic, like a pandemic that rarely ever happened in life, in existence. We don’t know what the fu** is going on as far as how contagious this stuff is and everything else. We’re still trying to make the television show as good as possible every single week. So the people that are sitting at home, they can’t leave their homes, have something to escape from reality for just two hours, you know, AEW programming, and we took a lot of pride in that. We were down there. We did that Stadium Stampede over the course of the night before. They edited it all morning and they worked on it.”
“Jim Cornette had the audacity to say, ‘Because Matt Hardy and Chris Jericho were involved in the Stadium Stampede match, I can no longer be their friends.’ Interesting. I can no longer be their friends because they’re in a wrestling match. I’m their friend, and I liked them as human beings and I thought they both had potential and I wanted to see them excel and do pro wrestling, but now because they’re doing a pro wrestling match that isn’t my cup of tea, I can no longer be friends with them.”
“I mean, is this real life? Who says that? Who thinks like that? At the end of the day, pro wrestling is entertainment and it’s just dumb pro wrestling, especially if you’re in the business. You know, just what it comes down to, Jim Cornette has got his schtick to do. Right now, he’s not a hot commodity. No one is looking for him right now to be a booker in their promotion or whatever else, and I’m sure he wants to be home. I’m sure he wants to be retired and he does have a successful podcast, but his whole schtick, his whole bit is going in there and hate-watching AEW and saying all the negative things he can to feed all his cult of Cornette followers, this dissension and this hatred and this negativity that they can slurp up like zombies. That’s what he does. That’s how he makes his money now, but the fact that he was willing to just throw away relationships with myself and with Chris Jericho because we were in the Stadium Stampede match, a match that wasn’t his cup of tea, I mean, that is just asinine. It is mind blowing and that says a lot more about him than it does about me or Chris.”
On if Matt is talking bad about anybody listening to Jim Cornette’s podcast:
“I will clarify that and I will apologize to people that just listen to Jim’s show and they enjoy it because he’s an entertaining, charismatic speaker. I didn’t mean everyone. I wasn’t trying to lump everyone into that one group. When I was saying like, the Cult of Cornette members, the people I’m talking about are the people that are going to get on Twitter and the people that are going to make up accounts that are going to have one or two followers that are going to come after me. They’re gonna come after the podcast and you know, it’s all good. Please, come after me. Please, give it your best shot. One thing I am very comfortable with, all my skeletons are out of the closet, brother. I have nothing to hide. I am good when it comes to that. So there’s nothing that I’m worried about getting out there.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit AdFreeShows.com with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
