In Episode 40 of The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy, Hardy gets personal about addiction–specifically his own.
At the end of 2009, Jeff had left WWE to pursue other opportunities. Matt was working matches on house shows teaming with Undertaker and Batista against CM Punk and Chris Jericho. Hardy then moved into the Intercontinental Championship picture. He was seen as someone who was reliable and could work multiple styles of matches with a variety of opponents.
After years of wrestling, his body was “not in a good place.” “My back and my hips, this is when it really set in hard for the first time. I felt I could be in a more top tier position in working matches and working with other people. But physically too, I was having a lot of issues. I had that scenario where my hand was broke and I worked around it. My intestines literally popped through my abdominal wall and I had to have the corrected. I was pretty beat up because I had so many other injuries, so I was overcompensating and getting hurt even more. I should’ve just asked for time off at that point already before we get into this. Me being this…workhorse mentality, I was going to try to work through everything and work around it.”
Matt Hardy’s addiction to pills begins
Around the end of his U.S. Championship run, he told John Laurinaitis that his back was “pretty beat up.” He was struggling to stand and would have to “half-ass crawl” to take a bath to soak in. Laurinaitis’s response was that Hardy was in a good spot. “We want to keep you on the road. You’re someone we trust. Just go to the doctor and see what they can do for you. We can’t really afford to give you time off. And then you go to the doctor and say, ‘well, I’m having these issues. I’m in constant pain because of my lower back and my hip. Is there anything you can do for me without doing surgery? Is there any kind of therapy or rehabilitation I can have?’ They said, ‘well, you can stop doing what you’re doing. The only other thing we can say it take these pills, they help relieve the pain and these pills help relax the muscles so you won’t be as tight.’ And that’s where it starts and it’s a very slippery slope.
By the spring of 2010, Hardy was still taking pills. His brother is in TNA and he felt like he was being punished because the office was mad at Jeff. Between that and the pain he was in, it was taking its toll. He discussed how taking pills can affect you emotionally. “Pro wrestling in general–but WWE especially–is so tough emotionally and then once start taking pills to feel better physically, there’s times when you get emotionally down or mentally down and you’re like ‘well, this make the physical pain go away, maybe it’ll make the emotional and mental pain go away too.’ There was way too much of that going on with me at the time.”
Taking pain pills is a slippery slope
At the height of his addiction, Hardy admits to taking five Vicodin and ten Somas a day. “You take a few in the morning to get you started. Then, you take some in the afternoon and some at night to go to sleep.” He says he didn’t have his first beer until the age of 25. Following knee surgery he was given pain medication that he threw away.
“I got to a point where I was so physically beat up and emotionally frustrated. It’s so mentally taxing being in WWE at a time like that. And then it was just like, alright I don’t want to deal with that pain. It was a very bitch thing to do and I was being a bitch at the time. I’ve learned to better and stronger since then. It’s a very slippery slope.”
“Anytime there’s a prescription and someone is given pain pills or muscle relaxers or Valium or whatever it may be, it’s a very slippery slope because whenever you start taking those things, you become reliant on them. And then it kind of like takes away the trauma of real life and the real world. That’s a very scary thing because once you start going there, it’s very easy to become reliant on it.”
Hardy has a lot more to say on this very special episode of his podcast.
