One of the strangest matches in WWE history might have been even more bizarre if someone had time to go fishing.
The Ultimate Deletion cinematic match between Matt Hardy and Bray Wyatt took place on the March 19th, 2018 edition of Raw and saw the pair fighting all over the Hardy Compound.
The bout ended when Hardy dropped Wyatt with a Twist of Fate on the shores of the Lake of Reincarnation. Afterwards, he pushed The Eater of Worlds into the lake where Wyatt vanished.
Vince McMahon had other ideas for the Ultimate Deletion
Speaking about the match on his ‘Extreme Life of Matt Hardy’ podcast, the star revealed that Vince McMahon wanted things to go a little differently. Instead of Bray Wyatt disappearing into the lake, he wanted him to not only re-emerge, but to do it with a fish in his mouth.
“One of my favourite suggestions, he said, ‘I like this lake concept. I like this, how it changes a character. That’s great sh**, pal.
“What I could see is Bray gets knocked into the lake and then all of a sudden we have a false finish where he pops out of the lake but he’s got a fish in his mouth and then sinks back down. And they mentioned something about this. They said, ‘Can we get a fish?’
“I’m like, dude, we’re in Cameron, North Carolina. When they’re telling me this it’s 2 o’clock in the morning. It’s not like you can just go to a Bait and Tackle store that’s open 24 hours.
“I don’t think we want to spend time catching a fish out by the Lake of Reincarnation either. He said, ‘Well if we can’t do it, we can’t do it, but it would be great.'”
Matt Hardy also said that McMahon had part of the bout removed entirely because he didn’t want “wrestling bullsh**”. The move in question would have been a callback to the Final Deletion between Matt and Jeff Hardy in IMPACT Wrestling in 2016.
“Where Jeff did the Swanton off the tree where I was on the ladder in the Final Deletion, I had two tables I was going to set up, put Bray on the bottom one and come off that tree.
“I had built a stand on it and everything to go up there and I had already practiced it. I was going to jump off the stand and leg-drop him through the two tables and he was going to move, which was going to put me in jeopardy to kind of go into the heat aspect of the match.
“And Vince said ‘nothing else in the ring, no more of this sh**.’ I thought that would’ve been a real cool spot because I wanted to still incorporate the wrestling ring and wrestling spots and TLC sh**.
“Once they got that call from Vince they said, ‘Okay, we can’t go back to the ring. Vince said he doesn’t want any of this wrestling bullsh**, he wants this campy, over the top, this is supposed to be fun, larger than life, absurd to a degree.'”
H/T to Wrestling Inc. for the above transcription.