Matt Hardy and Jeff Hardy are two of the most famous brothers in WWE history. But are Matt and Jeff Hardy brothers in real life? It hard to believe that wrestlers would lie about who their real-life siblings are, but The Hardy Boyz are not two of them.
Matt and Jeff Hardy are brothers in real life. Unlike fake brothers like Edge and Christian, the Hardy Boyz are related and grew up together from their time as small children up until adulthood. They used their ring-life siblinghood to forge a connection in the ring that most teams would never be able to. This allowed them to work together to come up many innovative moves that are still used to this day.
Even though Jeff and Matt Hardy are real-life brothers, that has stopped them from fighting occasionally in the ring. They have fought many times over the years in some of the most famous matches of all time. These included wrestling each other in both WWE and TNA.
The first time they feuded with each other was in 2009. Matt Hardy attacked his brother Jeff Hardy at the 2009 Royal Rumble event and started their rivalry which would last for months. He attacked Jeff with a chair while he was wrestling Edge for the WWE Championship, helping Edge to pin Hardy and win the title.
This betrayal was only a month after Jeff Hardy won the WWE Championship for the first time. He defeated Edge and Triple H in a triple-threat match at Armageddon 2008 to win the first World title of his career. The win was 14 years after his first match in the WWE and completed a long and hard-fought journey into the main event for “The Charismatic Enigma”.
The rivalry took a turn as Matt Hardy revealed all the horrible things he had done to his brother Jeff. He revealed he had caused a pyrotechnic issue which burnt Jeff, as well as causing a car accident that he suffered with and even setting fire to his house, which caused the death of Jeff Hardy’s dog. It made Matt the ultimate bad guy in the brother-vs-brother feud.
The two men wrestled for the first time at Wrestlemania 25. It was an extreme rules match which meant that there were no rules and the siblings could use whatever weapons they wanted to try and win the match. It was an entertaining match with lots of dangerous stunts and weapons used. The match ended when Matt Hardy hit Jeff Hardy with his finishing move, the Twist of Fate, while his brother had a chair wrapped around his neck.
Soon after they wrestled in an I Quit match at Backlash 2009. Jeff Hardy won the match and moved back into the World Championship hunt. However, his brother did very little after the feud and was released by the company in 2010. Matt Hardy signed with TNA in 2011, joining his brother who had joined the company in 2010. Jeff left the WWE in 2009 to help recover from his injuries and drug issues.