Revisiting some of the best gimmicks of Matt Hardy on his birthday

Matt Hardy is considered to be one of the modern-day all-time greats in professional wrestling. He has enjoyed variable degrees of success in WWE where he has won the tag-team titles on multiple occasions mostly as one-half of The Hardy Boyz along with his younger brother Jeff Hardy, the United States Championship on one occasion, and the ECW World Heavyweight Championship. He has also won the Impact World Championship two times during his tenure at Impact Wrestling.

In a career that spans over 30 years, Matthew Moore Hardy has managed to keep himself relevant in the business through the use of various interesting and eccentric gimmicks. Matt Hardy was born on September 23, 1974, and today on his 45th birthday, we look back at some of the best gimmicks that he has portrayed on live television.

#1 Version 1

At the start of 2002 when WWE was going through its Ruthless Aggression phase, The Hardy Boyz disbanded and Jeff Hardy was drafted to RAW while Matt was relegated to Heat. On the August 12 episode of RAW, Matt turned on his brother Jeff by attacking him during The Charismatic Enigma's match against Intercontinental champion Rob Van Dam. The reason he did this was because he was aggravated by the fact that he was not getting a No.1 contenders match against Van Dam.

A few days later when Matt was drafted to SmackDown, he dubbed himself Matt Hardy: Version 1 and created a 'V1' hand signal using his index, middle, and little fingers. V1 Matt Hardy infamously won two matches against The Undertaker at this point of time although he had Brock Lesnar to thank for causing outside interferences. He developed a cult of his own which he named "Mattitude" and participated in some interesting storylines for the Cruiserweight Championship.

He would later win the title from Billy Kidman at No Way Out 2003 and go on to have a reign of 102 days as the champion before finally dropping it to Rey Mysterio. The gimmick was so popular that he received the Best Gimmick award from Wrestling Observer Newsletter.