It’s been 10 whole months since Impact Wrestling aired “The Final Deletion,” the transcendent masterwork from Matt and Jeff Hardy. The impact (no pun intended) of “The Final Deletion” is still being felt, and directly led not just to the career revitalization of both Hardys, but their eventual return to WWE.
There have been a lot of people reporting over the past year that scores of people backstage at WWE loved “The Final Deletion” (and we could have assumed as much, given that disastrous pre-taped fight between the New Day and the Wyatt Family at the Wyatt Compound — which was never mentioned again).
Luckily, recently-released Vaudevillain Simon Gotch is now here to not only confirm those stories, but let us know the specific ins and outs of how everyone in the WWE locker room got hold of “The Final Deletion,” and how much John Cena loved it. On the latest episode of the Journey of a Frontman podcast, Goth relayed the entire tale of the backstage viewing party.
“Chris Jericho had actually been given an advanced copy of it because Matt had done his podcast and he gave him a copy of it. So when we were over in Japan for a couple days, he was showing it to us. He was telling us that this video’s insane, it’s insane, it’s insane, it’s insane. So we had a viewing and Cena sees everybody laughing and asks what’s going on. And we were like, ‘Oh, we’re watching this Matt Hardy video.’ And he asked how it was. I said, ‘Try and imagine the worst thing you’ve ever seen WWE do. Then imagine if somehow it was good.’ And he looks at me for a second and he goes, ‘I don’t want to come in halfway. Please tell me when it is over. I would like to watch it.’
“So it finishes and we’re all dying laughing because it’s just the most insane thing anyone’s ever seen. I actually brought it up to Chris and found out he ended up bringing it up to Matt at Mania. If you watch the video when he lights the fire, Matt actually gets engulfed in a ball of flame for a second. If you watch it closely when he throws the fire down, pay attention to Matt. Don’t look at Jeff, don’t look at the fire. Look at Matt. The fire comes up and engulfs him. And he was like, ‘Yeah! No one noticed that! We were doing it, it took all day and we were losing the gasoline. They were like you just gotta go, just do it. And we just went and did it. It got all over me!’ And so it was just one of those where it was just a complete accident, but apparently not a lot of people noticed it.
“I came back in later, Cena was watching the video, he looked at me and said, ‘You are absolutely right.'”
This story makes me so very happy. Mostly because Cena didn’t want to come in in the middle of this completely insane thing; he wanted to experience it all. (Which is obviously the correct call.) The Broken Hardys cannot possibly make their official debut in WWE soon enough.
