Josh Barnett

USA TODAY Sports

During a conversation with Matt and Nick Jackson before a recent Ring of Honor wrestling show, the talk hits on family, their potential longevity in the business given their high-risk style and their long-term goals. Then it turns to the Internet.

As the Young Bucks, the Jacksons have built a brand in the ring and the online world with a schedule that includes matches around the world and a merchandise website, YoungBucksMerch.com, that has become hugely popular.

Before the question is even asked, Nick Jackson nods. He knows what’s coming. The Young Bucks are “polarizing.”

Those who dislike them point to their cliché 1990s-style wrestling outfits with bright colors and tassels, or say they are exposing the wrestling business with sequences they say resemble stunts and not traditional wrestling, or point to their Twitter beefs with other performers. Or say their personality too brash, too over the top -- and that might be the nice way of putting it.

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“I love that,” Nick says. “You have to meet us to judge us personally. It’s the Internet. I think we’ve created this act on purpose that everyone believes until they actually meet us. We like blurring the lines a little. Wrestlers I don’t even know in a locker room I’ve never been in hate me because of something they heard. Or something we tweeted.”

Says Matt, “We want it to be that way, though. I don’t want everyone to like me. That’s boring. … In a conversation, people will say, ‘I hate them,’ and someone else will say, ‘I love them.’ Now they’re talking about us -- which is why we tweet the things we tweet and why we do the things we do. You have to polarizing in wrestling these days to get people to talk about you.

“We’re not traditional wrestlers. We break every rule. There’s no reason this should even work, but it does. The haters hate that. They don’t have to get it. We’re targets. We know. But we love it.”

As a tag team, the Young Bucks have been part of one of the most intriguing angles in wrestling in recent months, given the surprise appearance of the Hardy Boys in Ring of Honor, especially when the Matt and Jeff Hardy were under contract to TNA.

In an unannounced appearance after their TNA deal expired, the Hardys won the tag team titles from the Bucks in early March at Manhattan Mayhem. The Hardys then retained the title at Ring of Honor’s 15th anniversary show in a three-way match two weeks later.

Next up is Saturday night at Supercard of Honor XI in Lakeland, Fla., during WrestleMania weekend: The Young Bucks vs. the Hardy Boys in a ladder match. Supercard of Honor is available on pay-per-view through ROHWrestling.com and the Fite TV app beginning at 6:30 p.m. ET.

The Jacksons, widely considered the biggest starts in independent wrestling, have been champions virtually everywhere they have been – twice in Ring of Honor, four times in Pro Wrestling Guerrilla, five times as the IWGP junior heavyweight tag team champions. But as much as it’s about the titles for them – and they say they should be the tag team champions in any promotion they work for -- it’s about the matches.

“We’re not done innovating,” Nick says. “It’s kinda like Disneyland. We want to keep trying new things and keep the people coming.”

Keeping the people coming is key because the Jacksons consider themselves as running a family business, and any business needs customers to succeed.

That business includes their dates with Ring of Honor, New Japan, Pro Wrestling Guerrilla (the promotion they consider their home in California) and promotions around the world, but also a robust merchandise business around their trademark “Superkick Party” brand.

They have built themselves up without going to WWE, the largest wrestling company in the world. Clearly being what Nick describes as “self-made” is a point of pride.

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“We represent the DIY people in the world -- the people who want to invest in themselves and run their own business,” Matt says. “Maybe we can be two of the only guys who didn’t sell out, and I don’t mean that disrespectfully. Instead of letting someone else control our brand, we were always in control of our own brand and our own destiny. …

“But it’s one of those things where you never say never. You never know what’s going to happen tomorrow. Right now, we’re so happy with what we’re doing. We’re so happy as artists. We get to do pretty much whatever we want. We’re still busy and we still feel like we’re hustling.

“I don’t ever see us going there. When our contracts expire in 18 months, maybe the landscape will have changed and we’re ready to go. But if you’re asking me right now, I really don’t feel like I have to go there to feel like it was all worth it. If I retired tomorrow, I’d be OK with it.”

The Jacksons opted to re-sign with Ring of Honor in December, inking a two-year deal in part because of creative control, but also because of the scheduling flexibility. Each has two children.

“I’m a big family man and so is Nick,” Matt said. “One big thing for us is we do this on our own so we don’t have to live on the road as much as those guys (in WWE) have to. I don’t know how they do it. I’d rather have WrestleMania every time I wrestle and be able to go balls out because I’m wrestling way less than they are.”

In many ways, the constant reinvention that the Hardys have perfected -- from running their own promotion as teenagers in North Carolina to their early days in WWE to independent promotions and their recent stretch under the “Broken” gimmick in TNA to Ring of Honor and a potential WWE return -- is an inspiration to the Young Bucks.

The Hardys remain recognized virtually everywhere – even the top of a mountain in Chile. The two teams were scheduled for a match in Santiago and had some time off. They decided to go for a hike up and the fans stopped the group and knew who the Hardys are.

But in the arena, Matt Jackson says, the Bucks were “shocked” at how much the fans knew about them, chanting “Superkick Party” and “Too Sweet.” When the teams returned to Chile for a second match, Matt says the fans were “50-50.”

“The Hardy Boys are No. 1 for me in terms of tag team because of the fact that they’ve reinvented themselves,” Matt says. “They are who they are to this day.

“They’re so lovable at this point. I think they can do no wrong (with the fans). They’ve been around so long that you have to respect what they’ve done. They’ve done so much for the business.”

What makes Saturday’s match so unique is the plan was hatched by the four. Matt Jackson says the wrestlers were talking on their trip back from Chile about whether they might be able to pull off something similar in America despite working for different promotions. He said he put together an email to the ROH office last fall and then Matt Hardy was working with TNA’s creative team.

“I remember being really excited but also thinking, ‘No way we’ll be able to get TNA and Ring of Honor to agree on anything. This is going to be really tough,’” Matt said. “It was just the four of us really who came up with the original concept -- there wasn’t anyone else -- and it also took us to convince everyone else to play ball.”

There were some dicey moments. Matt Jackson recalls that Final Battle in December had already started when ROH executives decided they were comfortable enough to air a surprise video of Matt Hardy after the Bucks’ match.

“We’re two or three matches deep into the show and they were just really concerned about playing this video because of legal reasons and they didn’t know if they were going to get Matt and Jeff for sure so they didn’t even want to play it,” Matt Jackson says. “It took Nick and I a lot of convincing to (Ring of Honor COO) Joe Koff and to the other people to play the video – ‘Trust me. This is going to be awesome.’ We had to really work on it.”

“There was a stunned silence and then the place erupted,” Koff says.

Hence, wrestling fans will get a “Superkick Party” in Lakeland, the Young Bucks’ signature move and their brand. When wrestlers were giving the Bucks a tough time in the locker room for doing so many superkicks, one said it was like a superkick party. It became a joke in the locker room. The lightbulb went off. “We thought it could be a gold mine,” Matt says.

The slogan led to the most popular T-shirt that the Bucks had ever sold, so why stop there? It is now on virtually everything – apparel, stickers, bracelets. In a way, the Bucks are like a band, building their popularity through sales beyond their music.

“It started when we actually started feeling pain and we’re like we have to figure out how to make money outside of falling,” Nick says. “We started selling T-shirts. Then it was, ‘Oh wow, this is catching on.’ Now we have to figure out what else sells. It’s literally us going on websites, looking at other people’s merchandise.”

They even have an app based on the concept. The app, launched last August, features the Bucks as guards at their merchandise table. Players allow customers to make purchases but then must superkick other wrestlers coming to steal items.

“The fact that we have an app is so cool to me because fans and other wrestlers look at us differently and they say, ‘Those guys are on the cutting edge of things.’ “ Nick says.

The Bucks’ merchandise operation is largely run out of Matt Jackson’s house with his wife, Dana, handling the site, processing orders and then, Matt jokes, sending him to the post office to mail the items. They have sold items to fans in every state except Vermont.

Matt is 32 and Nick is 27, but they’ve been wrestling for 14 years and full-time for seven. They understand the pain that comes from their line of work. They are nowhere close to the end, but they know what they want as far as an exit strategy.

“Wrestling-wise my bucket list is to retire from wrestling and walk away in one piece. Not many people have done that,” Nick says. “I want to retire and still have my family intact and know that my family still loves me. That’s a rarity now.”

Says Matt, “We know with the style we work we’re not going to be regular 50-year-old men. We’re going to be hurt. We understand that, but we don’t want to get to the point where we can’t play with our kids and grandkids.”

For now, though, Nick jokes that figuring out the Young Bucks is fairly simple.

“Selling merchandise and superkicking people,” he says, “that’s pretty much everything about us.”