10 Current WWE Stars Who Are Triple H Guys
If only the Future was Now.
The manner in which Triple H has played the executive Game is really quite remarkable.
This is a man who once literally buried the Spirit Squad underneath a box lid before sending them back to Ohio Valley Wrestling in November of 2006. He was more concerned with popping the boys with a mocking insider reference than he was cultivating the next generation of talent. That future, incidentally, once looked - if not bleak - then very much like the present. As it became clear that Triple H was certain to TakeOver Vince McMahon's role as Chairman, following Shane McMahon's 2009 tap out, he took Sheamus under his wing. The Irishman was acutely aware, through the rise of Batista, that the weight room was pro wrestling's golf course.
The subsequent, absolute, shocking brilliance of NXT became steeped in irony.
Triple H is set to succeed Vince, but he is closer in spirit to his greatest-ever threat. Like Eric Bischoff, Trips has thus far taken a magpie approach to his role as promoter by bursting the WWE bubble. He has looked beyond it to gauge what is popular - and what can be subsumed into the WWE fabric. Where Bischoff liberally borrowed from ECW's reality-leaning aesthetic and one of the biggest money-spinners in puro history to inform the nWo, Triple H created NXT: a glorified - and glorious - mega-Independent.
This ethos is reflected in his choice of personnel...
10. Shinsuke Nakamura
Shinsuke Nakamura was drafted into the fold by Triple H with a sort of dual objective: to stem the rising tide of New Japan Pro Wrestling, and to act as top draw and figurehead for the next generation of NXT as it cemented its big arena TakeOver aura. With a difference-maker of Nakamura's standing - arguably, he was the coolest and best talent worldwide in early 2016 - at the helm, Full Sail soon became the sole preserve of the brand's weekly TV show.
Nakamura lived up to the incredible hype, initially; his debut match with Sami Zayn at TakeOver: Dallas resonated as nothing less than a new chapter of WWE's in-ring narrative. The gruesomely stiff manner with which he disposed of Zayn - he even delivered a leaping knee to the back of his bloody head - was inconceivable just a year prior.
It was a victory for the man and his mentality alike.
Nakamura appears somewhat enervated on the main roster while, in parallel, he has become stigmatised as perennial main event loser. But Triple H saw substance as well as Style; Nakamura's heel character work is an all-too-rare and pure joy on SmackDown, a weekly highlight, and he may yet fully recover his mischievous badass stigma.