7. HHH And Harley Race Insinuate That Booker T's "People" Aren't Worthy Of Being Champion, Beats Him Anyway To Prove That Right
This was kind of the beginning of what has become "HHH Logic" in later years, in that there was always a bigger payoff to build up to, so he could never actually lose to a person he was facing at any given point. He couldn't lose to RVD in 2002 because it was building to the Kane match. He couldn't lose to Kane because it was building to losing the title to Shawn. He did lose to Shawn, but he knew Shawn was happy to drop the title back right away anyway. Probably the worst example of this sort of thing was the feud with Booker T leading up to Wrestlemania, where HHH was managed by Harley Race and the feud was built up with a series of vaguely-racist comments about how Booker wasn't good enough to win the title, due to being from an inferior race and all. It was never SAID outright, but with Race making comments about how in his day, guys like Booker would have been carrying his bags, you didn't have to be Damien Sandow to be smart enough to put that one together. So given that HHH was the big bad racist heel making those kind of comments and Booker was the wronged babyface leading up to a challenge for the title at Wrestlemania, you'd think the logical payoff would be Booker winning the title to prove them wrong. And you yourself would be proven wrong if you thought that, for DOUBLE IRONY. In fact, HHH instead went over Booker by pinning him clean with the Pedigree after making Booker lay on the mat like a jobber for 20 seconds or so, because the big Goldberg program was coming up. And you have to keep HHH strong for that program!