Jeff Hardy finally won the WWE Championship at the Armageddon pay-per-view in 2008, defeating Triple H and Edge in a triple threat after years of consistently coming up short in chasing a world title. But Hardy’s path the gold turned out to be quite different from what was originally planned, as Matt Hardy explained on the latest Extreme Life of Matt Hardy. According to him, Jeff was actually supposed to win that year’s Money in the Bank contract at WrestleMania XXIV. Jeff was one of the first wrestlers to qualify for that year’s ladder match but was pulled from the card due to a WWE Wellness Policy violation.
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“That was the plan,” Matt said. “He was gonna win this Money in the Bank briefcase, and I think at this point, they had pulled the trigger and decided they wanted to try and turn him into the champion,” Matt said. “I know Freddie Prinze had been given this edict, like ‘Get Jeff Hardy ready for the championship.’ That’s like around the time too when he was starting to paint his face again if I’m not mistaken. They started leaning into some stuff that was very Jeff Hardy-ish, and Freddie Prinze was kind of leading that charge in many ways.”
“But yeah, Jeff was in Mexico on an international tour, and at some point there, he ended up taking something, some sort of pill or substance for, I don’t know if it was his back or whatever it was,” he continued, “But he did end up getting popped on a drug test, and one of the things I remember he told me from the story, Michael Hayes had called him at home. He said, ‘Hey, what is going on here? I can’t believe you did all this,’ and whatever. He said, ‘Vince is gonna call you in a few minutes, so be ready to answer the phone.’ Then I guess Vince called him, and Jeff’s like, ‘Hello?’ He’s like, ‘What the fuck have you done?’ That was his greeting right from the beginning. I guess they talked it through, and at the end of the conversation, Jeff said they spoke for a while, they seemed to be kosher. Jeff apologized and regretted making that mistake, but it was what it was.”
With Jeff out of the picture, CM Punk wound up winning his first of two Money in the Bank contracts. He’d use the second of those briefcases on Jeff for the World Heavyweight Championship at the 2009 Extreme Rules pay-per-view, which wound up kicking off a feud between the two that would last until Jeff’s departure from WWE.
