Matt Hardy On The Payout For No Mercy 1999 Match, Far Exceeding His 2000 Downside Guarantee

Matt Hardy discussed how much money was paid out for the three-way tag team No Mercy 1999 ladder match and more in on his new podcast. Hardy’s new podcast The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy with Jon Alba launched on Friday, and during the first episode Hardy talked the famous match with the Hardy Boys taking on Edge & Christian.

You can listen to the first episode below, along with highlights per Fightful:

On the payout for the No Mercy ladder match: “Initially, in my mind, it was 10 grand. Then I thought, five more and maybe it was 15 grand. There was a number and then it was five grand more. This is per person. I started to rattle everyone’s memories as I spoke to them. ‘Does anyone remember exactly what everyone made?’ Christian reminded me, ‘Remember when Road Dogg pulled us aside and said, if you don’t make 30K each for that match, I’m going to quit the business. You guys killed it.’

“We got $5,000 for the match. I was like, Come on guys, this was a show stealer and people were buying the replay for the match.’ We knew it was special and we addressed JR about this. JR ended up bonusing us each $5,000. So we all make $10,000 on that night. That was the ultimate payoff after we question the $5,000 and we got a $5,000 bonus. We said, ‘there is so much buzz and hype, people are buying the replay for this match.'”

On WWE’s reasoning for the payout: “JR’s explanation was perfectly logical and he said, ‘Coming into this match, it was a big platform, but you guys weren’t the ones selling this pay-per-view. You weren’t Stone Cold, Triple H, Undertaker, DX. You weren’t a main draw who brought the people to the show or made them buy the pay-per-view.’ We did get highlighted with them so it was understandable. He did buy into our point of buying the replay because of the match and it created a buzz. So, they did bonus us.”

On his 1999 downside guarantee: “Back then, we had downside guarantees. In 1999, my downside was $75,000. If you busted your ass, worked hard, and got over then you could make double, triple, quadruple the guarantee. In that year, we tripled our guarantee. In 2000, we made 13 times our guarantee.”