Somehow, the Hardy Boyz Are Still F’nDoing This
Last Sunday, Mike and I ended up at TNA Lockdown at Credit Union 1 Arena at UIC.
And somewhere during the night I realized something that made me feel approximately 900 years old.
The last professional wrestling match I distinctly remember sitting down and watching with friends including Mike was in January 2000.
I was at a birthday party in grade school. WWF was basically required viewing if you were a kid at the time, and we watched the Hardy Boyz Matt and Jeff Hardy take on the Dudley Boyz Bubba Ray and D-Von in a tables match at the 2000 Royal Rumble.
That wasn’t just another match, either. It was WWF’s first Tag Team Tables Match, and the Hardys won after Jeff Hardy did exactly the kind of completely insane Jeff Hardy shit that made an entire generation of children think jumping off furniture was an acceptable recreational activity.
Fast-forward 26 years.
Mike and I walk into a wrestling show in Chicago.
And who is in the main event?
Matt and Jeff F’n Hardy.
This time they were defending the TNA World Tag Team Championship against brothers Nic and Ryan Nemeth inside a steel cage.
And this time the Hardys lost.
The Nemeth brothers walked out with the championships, with Nic Nemeth becoming only the second wrestler in TNA history, after Kurt Angle, to simultaneously hold the company’s world and tag-team championships.
Twenty-six years.
Think about that.
There are people watching professional wrestling today who weren’t alive when I was sitting at that birthday party watching these same two guys put the Dudleys through tables.
From WWF to WWE to TNA
The night also sent us down a rabbit hole about just how much professional wrestling has changed while somehow remaining completely recognizable.
When we were kids, it was WWF.
Hulk Hogan. Macho Man Randy Savage. Jake “The Snake” Roberts. The Undertaker. Bret Hart.
Then came Shawn Michaels, Triple H, The Rock, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Mick Foley, Kane, Chris Jericho and eventually guys like John Cena, Randy Orton, Brock Lesnar and Rey Mysterio.
And wrestling wasn’t confined to television.
Some of my earliest memories of it are literally stuffed animals.
In kindergarten we had those giant Wrestling Buddies stuffed versions of wrestlers that children could body-slam without immediately creating a trip to the emergency room. Hulk Hogan, Macho Man and the others essentially became pillows specifically designed to get the shit beaten out of them by five-year-olds.
It was brilliant.
By the late 1990s, wrestling had become something much bigger culturally.
WWF had Monday Night Raw.
Ted Turner’s WCW had Monday Nitro.
WCW had Sting, Goldberg, Ric Flair, Kevin Nash, Scott Hall and Hulk Hogan reinventing himself as Hollywood Hogan with the nWo.
WWF had Austin, The Rock, DX, Undertaker, Kane and Mick Foley.
For a while, WCW was actually beating WWF. Nitro famously defeated Raw in the television ratings for more than 80 consecutive weeks during the Monday Night Wars.
Then everything flipped.
WWF purchased WCW in 2001, effectively ending the biggest corporate rivalry professional wrestling had ever seen.
A year later, WWF itself disappeared at least the name did.
Following its legal battle with the World Wildlife Fund over the WWF initials, the World Wrestling Federation became World Wrestling Entertainment WWE in 2002.
“Get the F out.”
If you grew up during that period, you probably still instinctively call it WWF sometimes anyway.
Then Came TNA
With WCW gone, there was suddenly an enormous hole underneath WWE.
That’s where Total Nonstop Action Wrestling TNA entered the picture.
Founded in 2002, TNA eventually became home to a combination of emerging wrestlers and established stars. Over the years, its roster has included names like AJ Styles, Samoa Joe, Christopher Daniels, Sting, Kurt Angle, Jeff Jarrett, Christian Cage and, eventually, the Hardy brothers.
TNA itself went through multiple identities, including years operating primarily under the Impact Wrestling name, before restoring the TNA Wrestling branding.
Which brings us back to Chicago in 2026.
The company that emerged after the death of WCW is still here.
WWE is still here.
And somehow so are a surprising number of the wrestlers.
That’s probably what struck us most about the whole night.
Professional wrestling has gone from cable television and pay-per-view to streaming, social media, international events and enormous multimedia businesses. The presentation has changed. The companies have changed. The audiences have changed.
But some of the people haven’t.
Rey Mysterio debuted professionally in 1989.
Chris Jericho started in 1990.
The Hardys started wrestling as teenagers in the early 1990s.
Sting wrestled across five different decades.
Ric Flair’s career stretched across generations.
And somehow Matt and Jeff Hardy can still walk into an arena in 2026 and immediately connect a bunch of adults in the crowd to memories from when they were children.
That’s a kind of longevity almost nothing else in entertainment can reproduce.
Actors can play the same character decades later.
Bands can reunite and play the old songs.
But wrestling asks someone in their 40s or 50s to climb into a ring and physically perform a version of the thing we watched them do when they were 20.
It’s nostalgia with a very real possibility of a concussion.
Also: Does Spider-Man’s Lawyer Know About This?
Of course, while Mike and I were contemplating our mortality through the continued existence of the Hardy Boyz, we noticed something else.
Trey Miguel.
Or, as they immediately dubbed him:
Spider-Trey.
The guy comes out looking suspiciously like somebody got really into Spider-Man and then wandered into a wrestling ring.
Mike and I basically looked at each other like:
Holy shit. Disney and Sony don’t mess with them?
Because professional wrestling has always lived in this wonderful universe where characters are just close enough to something you recognize that you occasionally wonder whether an intellectual-property attorney is watching from somewhere in the building.
Apparently not our problem.
We were just F’nAround.
But the whole experience reminded us why wrestling became such a gigantic part of American pop culture in the first place.
It’s ridiculous.
It’s athletic.
It’s theater.
It’s superheroes and villains performed in real life.
It’s soap opera with steel cages.
And somehow, after 26 years away from really watching it, Mike and I walked into an arena and found two of the exact same guys we remembered from grade school still jumping around a wrestling ring.
Except this time the Hardy Boyz lost.
Maybe we’ll check back again in 2052.
Unless they invite us back…
