AEW superstar Matt Hardy recently spoke with Fightful’s Sean Ross Sapp about a wide range of pro-wrestling-related topics, which included the Broken One revealing that he and his brother Jeff heavily considered going to WCW and ECW in the late 90s, but that plan was halted due to them signing with WWE. Highlights from the interview can be found below.
How there was a brief time when he and Jeff considered going to WCW:
Yeah. There actually was. Maybe this is why [WWE] told us, they told us late ’96/early ’97, that they were interested in doing something with us. ‘Just keep coming, keep doing what you’re doing. We’re gonna get you more dark matches. We’re gonna look at you and evaluate you.’ We just kinda thought they were full of shit. Then at the end of ’97, they did tell us they planned on signing us. Now I wanna say there was one moment where one of the agents there said, ‘Look, guys, just hang in there. They’re gonna do something with you, I promise. I promise they’re gonna do something.’ They did. They signed us in the beginning of ’98.
Says ECW was also an option, but WWE ended up signing them:
Before we signed, we were about to go work with some of the ECW guys. Sandman had an international tour we were gonna do and then we were also gonna go have some tryouts with ECW. We were close to doing that. We started talking to people in WCW, too. Like you had said, our names had been circulating around enough and we had enough dark matches that people had said, ‘Oh, my God, these guys had a match. They’re pretty good. They’re a decent tag team.’ There was starting to be a little bit of buzz about us. So we did have some other options and fortunately, WWE ended up signing us up.