Matt Hardy had a plan for the Wyatt Compound match that involved him leaping out of a tree through two stacked tables. Vince McMahon killed it at two in the morning and asked for a live fish instead.
The match, against Bray Wyatt in 2018, was WWE’s follow-up to the Ultimate Deletion. Hardy explained on the Extreme Life of Matt Hardy what he had originally laid out.
“I had these great ideas, and I was going to do a big thing. The tree, if you remember in the final deletion, there’s one point where Jeff climbs in a tree, and he jumps out, and I’m laying on a ladder, and he hits me. We had a ring set up in that exact location where Bray and I started the match, and you could climb in that tree again.”
“They’d sent us tables where I was going to set up two tables back to back, have Bray beat. I’ve got to finish him, put the final nail in the coffin, and put him on the tables. And I was going to jump out of that tree and do a leg drop through these two tables, but he was going to get out of the way, and I was going to go through, and that was going to lead to the heat session where eventually he’s beating the hell out of me. You think he’s going to win, and then the ghost of Brother Nero shows up, and then I end up dropping at the end, and we end up going to the finish.”
Production had been trying to reach McMahon since nine o’clock that evening. The answer came five hours later.
“They finally talked to Vince about two o’clock in the morning, and we were getting close to shooting that scene where I was going to get him back in the ring.”
“Michael said, ‘ Hold up, we’re talking to Vince. And they all walked away from where the group was, and they got on there. It was Michael and Ed Koskey, and Michael said, Vince doesn’t want any more of this wrestling bulls***. He said he thinks it’s been enough.”
Michael Hayes and Ed Koskey, WWE’s Senior Vice President of Creative Writing, relayed the instruction. Hardy said what came back was the opposite of what he had planned.
“He wants this stuff like a little hokey, a little campy. He wants it to be crazier than the original final deletion and the stuff you did with Bray, everything else.”
“So with the stuff we’re doing in the ring, we’re gonna cut that.”
The graveyard sequence, in which Wyatt chased Hardy between tombstones in the Land of Obsolete Men, is what replaced it. Hardy pushed back and got nowhere.
“I was like, I don’t think you understand. This is a big moment. It’s going to be real cool, and it’s going to pay off when it’s all said and done. But they were very adamant about that.”
One request could not be met at all. The finish had Hardy putting Wyatt in the lake, and somebody wanted more from it.
“He goes, this man has been deleted, and that was the finale of the match. And I was like, we’re gonna have to catch fish if we’re gonna get fish. I said, we are in the middle of Cameron, North Carolina. There’s not a lot of stores you can run out to and buy a live fish to put in this guy’s mouth for him coming out of the water.”
“So that was kind of a crazy request. That was at three o’clock in the morning.”
He said his own view of what those matches need has not changed.
“I have always felt in those matches it’s important to have a little bit of every kind of emotion in there wrapped in one big package.”
The Ultimate Deletion aired on Raw in March 2018. The Wyatt Compound match followed in April, with Hardy winning and reappearing shortly afterward as Woken Matt Hardy alongside Wyatt as a tag team.
Hardy left WWE in 2020, later worked for AEW, and is now with TNA, both on-screen and behind the scenes. Wyatt died in August 2023.
