Matt Hardy has revealed that Vince McMahon changed the finish of his WrestleMania 19 match against Rey Mysterio just two days before the show.
Speaking on TMZ Inside The Ring, Hardy was asked about memorable last-minute WrestleMania changes from his career. He described a scenario where a story had been taken from him and replaced with a cruiserweight angle built around his Matt Hardy Version One character, only for McMahon to reverse course at the eleventh hour.
“There’s a lot of things that have happened that have changed, like last-minute WrestleMania. One of the wildest things that had changed was whenever I was wrestling Rey Mysterio at WrestleMania 19. I was kind of given that story of losing weight and dropping down to be a cruiserweight, kind of a bullshit cruiserweight. I was given that story kind of because one was taken away from me, that was given to someone else.”
Jeff Hardy had recently departed WWE at the time, leaving Matt without his tag team partner and in a position where his individual standing with the company needed to be established on its own terms. The Matt Hardy Version One character, built around Hardy’s real-life weight loss journey, had resonated with fans and clearly made an impression on McMahon. Hardy retained the Cruiserweight Championship and went on to carry it through the summer before eventually dropping it later in the year.
“And Vince tried to reward me to a degree, but he liked the work I did so much as Matt Hardy Version One, losing the weight. I was going to drop the title to Rey Mysterio, and Vince changed that like two days out. So that was something that was pretty chaotic, which was pretty surprising, and it was very cool that Jeff had just left the company. Jeff was kind of going through a very rough period. He was in some dark days at that time. And it was very cool that Vince could see my value, and he rewarded me, and he let me have it throughout the summer. Then we eventually did the title change in Anaheim,” Hardy said.
WrestleMania 19 took place on March 30, 2003 at Safeco Field in Seattle, Washington.
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article, please credit TMZ Inside The Ring with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
