The first autograph seeker is an employee who approaches with a gentle manner and a blank order ticket. Each brother signs graciously and with care.

They do this maybe a dozen or so times over the next hour, as they autograph comment cards and pieces of notebook paper and pose for photographs. Even those who don't say hello acknowledge the stardom with their eyes, glancing toward the only patrons who arrived at the restaurant in a white limousine.

Matt and Jeff Hardy are the former world tag team champions of World Wrestling Entertainment's RAW brand. They are recognized all over the world. But their per-capita fame is biggest in this part of North Carolina, where the men grew up in Cameron and attended Union Pines High School.

They started their wrestling careers in the backyard, using a trampoline as the base for a wrestling ring. As teenagers, they videotaped their performances to use in post-match critiques. They even cut promos, those between-match verbal put-downs that rile up audiences for upcoming performances.

On Sunday, the men will wrestle Lance Cade and Trevor Murdoch at the RBC Center. Their father, Gil, who raised the boys after their mother died, will be ringside for the Father's Day match.

Matt, 32, and Jeff, 29, have deserved reputations as first-class entertainers, putting maximum effort into their high-flying wrestling personas. Wrestling fans revere them for their ability to dish out and receive punishment in matches that involve tables, ladders and chairs. Still, they are not the biggest characters in their family.

This becomes evident as the waitress approaches.

"Are you ready to order?" asks a pretty blonde.

"Yeah," says Gil, a 70-year-old farmer who retired from the U.S. Postal Service. "I'll take you."

Burning up the woods

Gil raised the boys after Ruby Mae Moore Hardy suffered a brain tumor and died when they were 9 and 12. He drove a mail route and raised tobacco, coached their baseball teams and let them have free rein in the backyard for their burgeoning wrestling empire. To a point.

Ring construction involved digging post holes, which in turn cut the phone lines. The boys didn't know what they had done until Dad tried to make a phone call.

After that, Gil made them move the ring into the nearby woods. Matt and a buddy cleared some brush to make room for it, and then, using teenage logic, figured they should dispose of the brush by lighting it. Gil arrived home and was greeted by the fire department.

A junked 1972 Chevrolet suffered the only real damage, although Gil still seems irritated that his car was destroyed.

Still, when asked if the boys received latitude, discipline-wise, because their mother was gone, the man who just told a story about his older son lighting the woods on fire answered with this: "They never did give me no trouble."

Matt interjects. "No, he whipped our asses."

"The only reason we could survive falling off those ladders and through those tables is the way he paced us for it early in our careers," he says in a way that simultaneously suggests both truth and humor.

"I'm glad he did. It instilled a lot of good discipline in both of us."

Real guys, real names

The brothers began wrestling professionally in their teens. Jeff was 16 when he got his first experience in the big time, wrestling Razor Ramon in an untelevised match in Ohio. Matt wrestled on TV that night on the same card, and in essence, the men have been on TV ever since.

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