Matt Hardy’s history with Edge has been well documented and heading into the SummerSlam 2005 pay-per-view they were involved in a heated feud over Lita. There was a lot of reality behind what fans saw play out on TV and Matt Hardy recently explained on the Extreme Life of Matt Hardy podcast that Vince McMahon held a meeting with him and Edge ahead of SummerSlam.
According to Matt, Vince McMahon wanted to make sure there wouldn’t be tension between Matt and Edge, and he told them that if they took liberties with each other during the match that neither of them would work in the industry ever again. Vince then went into the psychology behind the match and apparently he used some colorful descriptions while explaining what he wanted to see.
“Vince continues, “‘Okay, with that being said, I want to get into the psychology behind this match tonight. So it’s not going to be a long match. I want to portray this as like an MMA fight. This is like a UFC fight right? It’s I don’t want to see any hokey wrestling bullshit. [This] is going to be like a brawl a fight short and effective. Matt’s in here, he’s kicking the shit out of you. You’re real piece of shit, Adam, so Matt kicks your ass the whole match. Then, you’ve got some spot, right? You’ve got some spot picked out where Edge hits a lucky move and then Matt hits the post, right? All of a sudden, his face is a crimson mask, and he’s bleeding all over, and that’s where you are able to take the advantage, is that the spot you guys have?’ ‘Yeah, that’s what we have.’ We told him in detail this what we were talking about doing, and he said, ‘Okay, great.’ I’m gonna explain something to both of you right now, this is really what I want to see. This is basic psychology. This might sound crazy to you. But I have done many, many studies in the basic psychology of human beings and animals. He said, ‘Have you ever seen two animals in the wild — in the Wild Kingdom, when they’re going to fight one another? Have you ever seen one animal wound another animal? When it wounds that animal and the animal starts bleeding, and it smells the blood, it gets bigger, It swells up, it [growling noise], and it just wants to kill the other animal? Do you know what I’m talking about?’ He said, ‘Listen to me, these are your primal instincts. This might sound crazy, but when two animals — the primal instincts kick in and survival kicks in, and it’s their basic primal instincts, and we all have them, even as human beings. If you see someone weaker than you, you see someone that’s crippled or in a wheelchair, deep down your primal instinct, you want to destroy them, you want to eat them, you want to eat them alive! That is what we do. That is what human beings do to one another. That is our basic primal instincts. When you look at a primal human being and the psychology behind it, that is our instincts. You want to take the person who’s weaker than you, that is below you in the food chain, and you want to f***ing EAT THEM! Do you understand?! That’s what I want to see out of this match.”
Matt went on to say that he and Edge were so freaked out by what Vince had to say that they have sometimes wondered if he tried to freak them out on purpose to bring them closer together.
“Adam and I now, we had got so freaked out from Vince’s monologue, we were sitting beside each other almost like cuddled like, ‘What the f**k?! Yes, we understand. We will follow this to a tee. Thank you very much, boss.’ As time ticked on down the road, myself and Adam, we think Vince brought us in there and he tried to like freak us out to bond us together. Give us something to talk about and really like, we were on that page. Everything about that match was super professional. But, Vince went crazy. He told us, ‘If you [have] ever seen a crippled person or person in a wheelchair, you want to eat them.’ That’s the quote. He said, ‘That is basic instincts, human psychology, us at our core.’ I swear to God, me and Adam have said many times since then, man. Maybe he just did that, to really try and give us something to talk about — how f***ing insane he was and that was the psychology behind that it helped bond us before that match.”
H/T Fightful
