10 Things WWE Wants You To Forget About Triple H
It's always been All About The Game in WWE. Now more than ever. As long as you forget about...
Triple H remains as divisive as he's ever been in his current role as WWE's Chief Content Officer.
Beloved as a creative force by the market leader's supremely satisfied hardcore base, he draws less enthusiasm from loud critics who can't quite fathom what exactly it is about his patient-but-milquetoast brand of booking that has connected since he took the job in 2022. The television product is but one small part of analysing WWE in the post-Vince McMahon era too.
The company are included in the sex trafficking lawsuit that brought about the (second) disgraced resignation of the former Chairman, and Paul Levesque sits front and centre of the operation. It's the role he's seemingly spent the bulk of his career working his way towards, but heavy is the head that wears the crown even if the throne is made of composite parts of his own big dumb logo.
To reach this point, he's become the industry's chief pariah more times than he's won World Titles, Sports Entertainment's creative saviour (twice), a saint and a sinner for WWE's developmental system, and pushed skeletons back into his closet as hard as he pushed himself throughout the much-maligned "Reign Of Terror".
About that, actually...
10. "AM I F*CKNG GOING OVER?!"
To the much-missed Power Slam magazine for a tidbit of life working under the thumb, or sledgehammer, of Triple H during his relentless stranglehold of Monday Night Raw between 2002 and 2005.
Speaking to respected writer Matthew Randazzo, an anonymous writer shared the tale of trying to get his creative green-lit by 'The Game', and it not going all that well for the man who wasn't wearing the title and/or bonded to the McMahons by marriage. The needlessly cruel process went as follows;
"[HHH] grabbed the script, flipped through it but did not read it, and asked me point-blank: 'Am I f*cking going over?’ This first time that I delivered the script to him, he did indeed win his match, so I said yes. Then he politely gave the script back to me without reading it and said, ‘That’s all I needed to know,’ and walked back into the McMahon locker room. A few months later...I delivered another RAW script to him...it was the same routine. He nonchalantly flipped through it and said, ‘Am I f*cking going over?’ This time, however, he was to lose his match via disqualification. He would keep his title. I said to him, ‘Well, sort of.’ Then Hunter froze. He said, ‘What do you f*cking mean, sort of?’ I said, ‘You lose the match via DQ, so you still keep the title.’, ‘What page?’ he growled. After I told Hunter the page number this occurred on, he ripped that page out, threw the rest of the script to the floor in a rage, and slammed the door in my face. Needless to say, the next day during the agents’ meeting, the script had somehow changed and now HHH won his match – cleanly. This was hardly an isolated incident.”
A truly terrible time to watch WWE weekly, it was all about 'The Game'. Just like it was nearly a decade later when a star emerged that was bright enough to boot him into retirement once and for all.
Well, unless he happened to be a skinny fat-*ss...