10 Things I Hate About Triple H
He must love the little birdies to give them this to perch on.
Forget John Cena and forget Hulk Hogan - Triple H is genuinely the most polarising figure in professional wrestling.
Once someone from the shop floor enters management, they have a bullseye painted on them - that’s true of any industry. Yet few have found themselves as cordially loathed as Paul Levesque, who’s been accused of burying talent over and over and over again, to the extent that the running gag is that his weapon of choice should be the shovel, not the sledgehammer.
Weirdly, one of the biggest excuses people have given over the last fifteen years for despising Triple H is his relationship with and marriage to Stephanie McMahon, something that’s never made sense to me.
The man already had significant backstage clout before the relationship, and if you know anything about Vince McMahon - or fathers in general - you know that Levesque was actually putting his whole career in danger by dating the boss’ daughter.
Vince McMahon had been around wrestlers his whole life, and he knew very well how crappy most of them are to be in relationships with. From what everyone says, it was a well-known fact backstage in the late nineties that Stephanie was off-limits - so to bring their relationship up as a cynical power play on Levesque’s part is nonsensical.
Especially when there are plenty of legitimate things to hate about Triple H...
10. He Pretty Much Invented Those RAW Opening Promos
“Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Sneeze, and it’s goodbye Seattle.”
If Triple H wasn’t the guy that started the tradition of opening Monday Night RAW with a long, long, longwinded promo, then he was certainly the guy that took that ball and ran with it.
It’s been around for so long that, today, it’s a part of the structure of the show. People expect to turn RAW on and have to sit through twenty to thirty minutes of tedium, during which people will interrupt, arguments will be had and the main event of the show will be made as a result.
It does leave you wondering what on earth the main event was going to be before that opening twenty minutes took place, and why they think that it reflects well on the product to have people think that they’re making the card up as they go along every week.
Before Triple H came back in with the Authority, it would be John Cena, brrrappaddooooing his way to the ring to grin goofily at people and recap the last few weeks of whatever storyline he was involved in, so that he could be interrupted by his current dancing partner, he could invite them to fight right now and that the General Manager could then pop his head in and tell them they weren’t allowed right now but hey, here’s the main event tonight.
Jim Cornette once likened listening to Triple H’s promos to watching a dog lick its own balls, and although I’m a little concerned that he’s watched so many dogs clean their scrota that he can compare anything else to it, he’s not wrong.
There’s a special place in Hell for the person that instituted this teeth-grindingly irritating tradition in the WWE, and as the man most infamous for boring my entire !*$% off at the beginning of RAW every week while he lovingly stroked himself, I blame Triple H.