Darby Allin Opens Up About Experience Wrestling Jeff Hardy

This past summer, AEW hosted the Owen Hart Foundation Tournament: a series of matches pitting some of AEW's most elite talent against one another to determine the winner of the Owen Cup. Ultimately, Adam Cole and Britt Baker won the final matches of their respective brackets and were awarded, but some of the bouts that led to that moment delivered unforgettable sequences. On May 11, Darby Allin and Jeff Hardy went one-on-one for the first time in a no-disqualification match, considered a dream bout of daredevil vs. daredevil to avid viewers. They lived up to the hype, too, with Allin leaping off a towering ladder set up in the ring onto Hardy, who was laid out on a bed of chairs outside. It looked absolutely brutal, but the two men finished the match, and there were no serious injuries reported from the incident.

"So, earlier in the day, I climbed that ladder, and I looked down, and I was like, 'Yeah, I'm for sure going to the hospital tonight. Like, there's no way around it. Like, for sure,'" Allin explained on "The Sessions." "But when the lights are on, and the camera is going, and you're up there, then I'm like, 'Alright, here we go.' And then everyone asked me, 'How'd that feel?' You know, honestly, it didn't feel like anything; it was so safe."

Allin describes the overall experience of working with a legend like Jeff as "so fun!" adding that it's like collaborating with himself. "It felt like I was talking to myself ... A week before, it was supposed to be just a normal match, like just a straight-up match. And I went up to Tony [Khan], and I go, 'Hey, nobody wants to see us exchange wrist locks.'"