10 Secret Messages Wrestlers Sent
Sly burials, coded signs and deafening silence - featuring Triple H, the Undertaker and more...
Wrestlers tend not to be subtle.
By trade, they are theatrical performers who are meant to project their star power and the stories they tell to the back row of a major arena. Since wrestling is a performance art, it relies heavily upon audience interaction. They have to be the opposite of subtle, in most cases, to get something over.
The most subtle the majority of wrestlers get is when they attempt to feed the crowd a line. This is usually the preserve of the heel; when they pretend that they don't want the crowd to chant something, when they do in fact want the crowd to chant something, they will say something to the effect of "People, I am not a piece of sh*t...", allow their words to register, and ask the crowd will receive the message.
"Piece of sh*t! Piece of sh*t! Piece of sh*t!"
Only, because wrestling is generally so broad, sometimes the crowd don't grasp their role. On this week's RAW, Kevin Patrick conducted an interview with The Miz. The idea was to get the crowd to chant "Tiny balls!" at Miz. Despite setting up the call-and-response, the Laredo crowd either didn't get the message, or didn't care about the terrible patter. "Come on guys, tell me I've got marbles under my cack" Miz suggested with his despondent facial expression.
Somehow, then, the following secret messages were discovered eventually...
10. Triple H Has A Moment Of Madness On Twitter
The relationship between Triple H and Vince McMahon became fascinating, post-NXT.
Prior to that, it felt like they shared the same mind. Triple H did more to put over the hulking Batista than anybody else, he was bang up for burying Daniel Bryan in 2013, and he and Vince shared the same, puerile sense of humour.
And then Triple H committed the cardinal sin: in a bid to get over by osmosis, he started promoting shorter pro wrestlers and actually pleasing the marks.
Vince appeared to be more disgusted with his heir by the month as the 2010s faded; half-hearted debuts on the RAW after WrestleMania evolved into Vince carelessly plugging in a total of 10 wrestlers from NXT across January and February 2019. It was clear then that Vince had lost complete faith in the process. He didn't want stars - he didn't think Triple H was capable of building stars - he just wanted bodies under the pretence of refreshing a product so rotten that he had to apologise for how sh*tty it was in December '18.
Triple H must have been frustrated, we all thought. And he was; in May 2019, he was caught on Twitter liking posts critical of McMahon in a telling, passive-aggressive secret hint towards his frustration.
At this stage of his corporate career, he had been sent a grapefruit basket and was spitting out the seeds.