12 WWE Superstars Who Made It Big And Then Just Disappeared
4. Jeff Hardy
Jeff Hardy has held nearly every title that WWE has or had to offer: Tag Team, Light Heavyweight, European, Hardcore, Intercontinental, World Heavyweight and WWE Championship. Some fans referred to him as HB2K as a play on the year 2000 nickname and the fact that he was being compared favorably to Shawn Michaels (HBK) as a future main event superstar. But it took a while, and a long and winding path, for Hardy to reach that main event plateau. Wellness policy violations derailed him a couple times. He left WWE in 2003 after six years in the company and stopped over in TNA for a couple years before making his way back in 2006. It was during this run that he finally realized his potential with a main event run in 2008-09 that included three title reigns (one WWE Championship and two World Heavyweight Championships) and a hellacious feud with CM Punk over the WHC. Unfortunately, that feud was also Hardys exit from WWE, as he lost a loser leaves WWE steel cage match against Punk, ending a hot feud and sending Hardy back to TNA, where hes been since. Any time a wrestler is a world champion one day and leaves the company five days later, its just about the biggest Houdini act youll ever see.
Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.
