Brian Damage
A gimmick is something that is intended to hook the attention of fans to a wrestler. They may be outrageous or steeped more in reality, whatever the case may be…some have succeeded and many others have failed. The Gimmick Table takes a look at the origins of some of your favorite and not so favorite gimmicks of professional wrestlers.
Today we Browse the Gimmick of ‘Broken’ Matt Hardy
In 2016, Matt Hardy was seeing younger wrestlers becoming faster and more athletic. Realizing he was older and his body was a bit beat up and couldn’t compete with those wrestlers on that level anymore, decided to take his career in a completely different direction. Matt said he was initially inspired by watching the series ‘True Blood’ and seeing how vampires were immortal and lived through different eras and generations. Hardy said he took that concept and wanted to incorporate it into a gimmick for himself.
Hardy wanted to create a supernatural gimmick much like Papa Shango and the Undertaker. Matt said it was a big gamble because pro wrestling was evolving and not so much focused on gimmicks anymore. Despite that, Matt was convinced his idea for a gimmick could work. He ran the idea past his brother Jeff, who was 100% supportive. When he pitched his idea to TNA management, he was faced with doubts that a supernatural gimmick could get over now. Hardy convinced management that even if the supernatural aspect of it would be rejected by fans, he could still play it off as he was going crazy and actually believed in his own mind that he had special powers.
Jeremy Borash helped produce vignettes introducing the Broken character. Matt added comedic overtones to his character, which helped it get over more with fickle fans. He also added his family to the gimmick including his wife Reby, father in law Benjamin and son Maxel. Matt said he came up with ‘delete’ as a way to replace the cliché of saying he wanted to hurt or kill his opponent. He added the hand gesture of swiping to his delete his opponent much like you would on a phone deleting an email. The Broken Matt Hardy and his Broken Universe was a hit in TNA. He brought versions of that gimmick to both WWE and AEW but were heavily edited as opposed to the creative freedoms he had in TNA.
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Kyle Prescott
Vince seemed to want to run with this for a while, including a main event of Raw but lost interest quickly. Personally I thought it was a nice change at a time WWE was lacking interesting stories.