10 Wrestlers Who Stopped Trying (But WWE Pushed Anyway)
7. Jeff Hardy - 2002
Vince McMahon was always enamoured with Jeff Hardy, in such a way that it defies a key narrative spanning decades.
Hardy is a slight, short crowd favourite who has on several occasions brought the company into disrepute—and yet, the Charismatic Enigma was never thrust into anonymity nor ever humiliated in a remonstrative onscreen lesson. CM Punk’s jibe at his expense, following his 2009 exit and arrest, marked the only occasion on which Vince lashed out. McMahon in 2002 defied another narrative, one truer than ever seventeen years later: he shoved the brass ring in Hardy’s hand when Hardy showed little interest in reaching for it himself.
Hardy was more interested in grabbing a paint brush, an outside endeavour Vince allowed him to indulge on television. Hardy was pushed as a never-say-die challenger to the Undertaker’s Undisputed World Title, a guy so determined that even the last fumes of his last given f*cks were enough to soar close to the sun.
Reality betrayed the fiction; the sight of an emaciated Hardy lent the match a disturbing and emotive visual, but this wasn’t method acting; rather, the telling throes of Jeff’s methamphetamine addiction.