Matt Hardy has shared an opinion on what could have been with WWE's Edge, claiming the 2021 Royal Rumble winner would have been on AEW's books had WWE not cleared him to wrestle.
Edge made his return to WWE last January as a Royal Rumble entrant but was unfortunate to have his latest stint affected by a serious injury before returning this year ahead of the most recent Rumble. He's since made a few appearances on WWE programming, including WrestleMania 37, Elimination Chamber and SummerSlam. He has been announced to be part of SmackDown next week.
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Matt, meanwhile, has been at AEW since March 2020 and seems to believe Edge would have been on board too had WWE not gotten him back within their own ropes when they did.
“That was one of those things, too. I think if [WWE] hadn’t have cleared Edge and let him wrestle, he was going to end up at AEW,” the former WWE superstar said in an interview with the MCW Cast (T/T POST Wrestling). “So they kind of had to go, ‘Oh. If we don’t want him to go, we got to let him have his way.’”
AEW has signed a number of top names formerly on the WWE brand, including Sting, Paul Wight, Mark Henry, CM Punk and Bryan Danielson. Edge would have been quite the coup for the young company, which is being taken very seriously nowadays.
Hardy also made note of the fact that Tony Khan has embraced the word wrestling, as opposed to Vince McMahon, who prefers the phrase "sports entertainment." You could check out an updated list of the WWE chairman's banned words right here.
“It’s great to hear [wrestling] used because that is what it is," he added. "That is what it will always be, and you know, there was just - for so long, Vince [McMahon] just kind of saw that as a dirty word. ‘That word is beneath us. Let’s do something else’, and I get that and I can respect that he has a vision and he has this mold of this project he wants to create. And it’s sports entertainment, it’s larger than life. And you can’t hate him for doing that because he has contributed so much to the pro wrestling industry. And when it’s all said and done, at its core, it’s going to be pro wrestling because you can change the name, you can change the way it’s done a little bit, but at the end of the day, it is pro wrestling. A very unique form of athletics and showbiz combined.”
No Problems With The Belts
Khan apparently has no problems with the word "belt" either and encourages wrestlers to use it as often as they possibly can.
“And for AEW to go all in, ‘Yes, this is pro wrestling' and it’s something I heard just a while back,” Hardy explained. “Tony [Khan] was back at the Go Position and they were going, ‘Yes, this is for so and so and the TNT Championship Title.’ He’s like, ‘Call it a belt! We’re saying championships too much! Call it a belt,’ and that’s another word Vince hates. But, I mean, he grew up as a fan and he likes and digs all that terminology, and I love that it’s implemented in there because I feel like the fans, especially our fan base. They feel like they’re more at home and they feel like, ‘Yeah, this is cool. These people are listening to us. They’re catering to us.’”
