You Have To Be Able To Rank Things
Time for another question about some tag teams going out of their element.
Speaking of Edge
How would you rank Edge & Christian, The Hardys and The Dudleys singles careers?
I know Devon’s bottom but there could definitely be an arguement Jeff had a better overall career than Edge.
This one might surprise you a bit.
1. Edge. You just can’t argue against that many titles and all that other stuff he’s won. I believe he’s the only person to win every non-weight class title and has more titles than anyone else in company history, plus a Royal Rumble, King of the Ring and Money in the Bank. That’s never being topped, ever.
2. Jeff Hardy. I know he’s not quite what he was back in the day, but egads he was crazy over back in his day. There was a real case that he was the second biggest star in the company behind Cena, and that’s one heck of an accomplishment. If he had stuck around, I’d love to see how far he could have gone.
3. Christian. Not the biggest surprise, but if you could combine his talking and charisma levels in TNA with his success in WWE, he would have been an even bigger star. He managed to craft an entire career of his own away from Edge and he was quite the big deal on his own. That feud with Randy Orton in 2011 would have run away with Feud of the Year if not for Cena vs. Punk.
4. Bubba Ray Dudley. I loved his singles run as Bully Ray and he was a heck of a heel. I know that’s down in TNA, but he was still a success and fighting against some top names. He’s an incredible talker and played a good power heel in the ring. The tag team success helped him out a lot as well and gave him extra credibility. To go from what felt like a joke of a singles run in WWE to this was quite impressive.
5. Matt Hardy. Really, it’s just hard to care. Some of the stuff he did was good and the Mattitude Facts are hilarious but his World Title reigns in TNA barely existed and his ECW Title reign is forgettable. He had some nice midcard work but it never really felt big and he never broke through to that next level. The potential was always there and it just didn’t click.
6. D-Von Dudley. Back in the day, a buddy of mine and I would use our 13 inch Marvel figures for wrestling toys. They had theme songs, storylines, entrance music and all that jazz. One of them was a Ghost Rider figure named Blaze. One of his finishers was a reverse implant DDT called the Inferno. D-Von occasionally used that as his finisher. For me, that is the high point of his singles career.
Matt’s singles run in 2005 is one of those great missed opportunities for WWE. Could’ve had a legit top face considering the wave he was riding and the support he had from the fans.
I agree completely with the order and, for me, it’s a no brainer. Edge did everything there was to do in WWE and so has Jeff Hardy, as far as championships go, with the exception of CW runs for either man, but Edge always came off as the much bigger star. It helped, a LOT in my view, that Edge didn’t have the issues with drugs that plagued Jeff Hardy during the peak years of his popularity. For me though, the prime of Hardy will always be as a tag team guy.
Christian, to me, was a much more entertaining in-ring performer than Edge was, he was also loaded with charisma and did a good job on the mic. I’ve heard that one thing that held him back in WWE was that Vince simply didn’t like the look of the guy’s face, which sounds a lot like Vince as he known to have some extremely weird hang ups. He was a lot of fun in TNA and if you were to combine his time there with his WWE career, he’d be a much bigger star overall. Like Edge, he was someone that could be counted on to deliver good work consistently, better so than Edge in some ways, in my view.
Take a lot of what I said about Christian in terms of success in WWE and elsewhere and apply it to Bully/Bubba Ray. Bubba Ray’s tag team career will always overshadow his singles career because: A. he and D-Von won almost every significant tag championship in wrestling over the last 25 years at least once and B. Bubba’s singles career went down in TNA and that’s just going to keep him below Edge, Christian and Jeff Hardy. It’s not necessarily fair since he did really godo work in TNA, but it’s simply how it is.
When it comes to Matt Hardy, there are few significant names in American wrestling over the last 20 years that I’ve cared less about than him. Matt was always the slower, less athletic, less charismatic of the Hardy Boyz and just about everything he did as a singles wrestler, for me, was forgettable. I give him credit for the Broken/Woken stuff, it’s definitely different and it let him step out of his brother’s shadow to some degree, at long last, but I still didn’t care for it.
D-Von is low man on this particular totem pole and for good reason: his singles career is even more forgettable than Matt Hardy’s.
I think this is a fascinating question because of how many angles you can look at it from. For argument’s sake let’s look at it from a Wrestling Observer Hall Of Fane criteria which boils down to 2/5 Star Power/Drawing Capability, 2/5 Longevity at any particular level, and 1/5 work rate.
1) Edge: Clear winner and is the only one who feels like a surefire HOF singles guy. He was essentially the top drawing heel on whichever brand he was on from 2006 until he retired in 2011( the last 7 months he was babyface but let’s not get to granular). He main evented dozens of PPVs including a Wrestlemania. He popped the last huge Raw rating that I can remember with the Live Sex Celebration angle and he has gone on to have mild success as a tv actor post wrestling which speaks to some star power. His in ring is roughly the same quality as Christian and both Hardy brothers post neck injury in 2004 so that’s almost a wash. Some might knock him because he never replicated his success outside of WWE but the flip side was he was undeniably a top guy in WWE so he never had to leave.
2) Christian: There is where I disagree with you KB. I think Christian edges( pun unintended) out Jeff solely based on his career arc. Christian has that clear career career path of tag guy to midcard main stay except he didn’t settle for that role and left for TNA once it was clear he wasn’t going to get a fair shake. You could argue that TNA’s hottest/most successful period came when Christian arrived in 2005 and he was one of the top guys along with Samoa Joe, AJ Styles, and eventually Kurt Angle. He then comes back to WWE right as Hogan is about to turn TNA into garbage by misusing Jeff Hardy, and he ends the focus of dying third brand but he makes it work for a year better than Matt Hardy ever could. Finally gets the big main event run in WWE proper and has the tremendous program with Orton and if not for injuries might have salvaged a handful more years near the top of the card. Plus Christian is the most consistent in ring worker of the 6 imo.
3) Jeff Hardy: You are right that he got insanely hot a couple of times in WWE and got a megapush during his TNA run but none of those runs lasted more than 6-8 months before they lost steam or unfortunately Jeff would harpoon it with real life issues. Always more a big spot worker than anything else. For me, there is just no longevity or big history of consistent drawing power that warrants his elevation over a steady star like Christian.
4) Bubba Ray Dudley: Entirely based upon that hot 2-3 year run as Bully Ray in TNA which was still continuing to decline. His WWE and ROH singles runs have ranged from unremarkable to irritatingly awful.
5) Matt Hardy: Never broke through from the midcard without being attached to his brother in some capacity and those successes were limited. That feud with Edge was extremely hot and could have propelled him but it fizzled out too. So Matt’s singles career comes off as a poor man’s version of his brother’s tbh. Lots of potential and a handful of moments where you can point to and say he almost got there( Jeff got there just couldn’t stay there) but for one reason or another it never sustained. Injuries also played a huge role in his declining in ring work.
6) Devon: Deacon Batista and DVon’s kids in TNA. I rest my case your honor.
Any thoughts? I love a good counter argument.