Devil's Advocate Series Part III: Blame the System Not Matt Hardy and Ric Flair

Over the span of a month, both Matt Hardy and Ric Flair have "fallen from grace".

Hardy, found himself arrested, fired, and in the E.R. in a span of five days. While Flair's legal past is coming out to haunt him via several Internet articles. Many fans feel disgusted by both men and feel they ruined their legacy and career.

However, fans should take a step back and see the wrestling world for what it is. Very few real upstanding individuals are involved in this craft. Everyone from promoters to performers have a sorted past, even Vince McMahon himself cannot cast judgment on decisions made by his employees.

Wrestling as a whole is a sideshow traveling circus. The main difference being, it has a bigger mainstream following and television rights. Many fans relate pro-wrestling to WWE, WCW, ECW and TNA—the fact is there are hundreds of promotions worldwide.

Most don't have the money or exposure that the mainstream companies have. Instead, they were breeding grounds for future stars and former superstar wrestlers with broken dreams. They tend to have sub-par equipment and ask a lot from their wrestlers in exchange for little pay.

Over the years, we have come to find out the sorted past of some of our wrestling heroes. Guys like Eddie Guerrero, Test, Umaga and Brian Pillman, left the world too soon due to their history of drug use.

Now onto the case of Matt Hardy and Ric Flair.

Both men are talented and have made names for themselves. Flair obviously, is the bigger and more respected of the two. Calling himself "The Nature Boy", on-screen he portrayed a fast-lane lifestyle full of Rolex watches, high priced suits and fancy cars.

Meanwhile, Flair was spending more than he could handle. It ultimately cost him marriages, relationships with his children and possibly his wrestling legacy.

Then you have Matt Hardy, who built his career alongside his brother Jeff as The Hardy Boyz.

Both he and Jeff were a solid tag-team and had several title reigns and memorable matches. later we would find out that Jeff had some problems with drugs, while Matt appeared to be clean. As we now have learned this week, Matt was hiding problems of his own.

So you may ask, how can these two not be solely responsible for their actions?

Simply put, both men were their on-screen character more than they were ever truly themselves. Flair was constantly on the road portraying this mega-heel with a taste for the finer things in life. If he were to arrive at events in anything less than a limo fans everywhere would be highly disappointed.

This really gave Flair little choice, but to portray the character both on and off-screen. He wrestled during a time when heels and faces would never be seen together. People really bought into the storylines and thought pro-wrestling was not staged in advance.

Now we know better and realize the on-screen person may not be the same as his real life counterpart.

Hardy's case is a bit different, as he really embraced social media and gave his fans access to his life that they otherwise would not have had. Unfortunately, this led to Hardy creating this over-the-top Internet character out to shock and amaze fans. Hardy was separated from his on-air character, except now he had a new character on the Internet.

The Internet Hardy was "on" all of the time making smart quips and letting fans know he was taking things to a new level--sadly, we never witnessed this.

Both men being in this business really didn't have much of a choice but to embrace what made them famous. They had to live a certain way in order to continue to make money.

This is why the system should be blamed for both men's success and downfall. Hopefully, this will also be a lesson to future stars and they will learn from the mistakes of the past.