10 Things I Hate About Triple H
3. He's Still Up To His Old Tricks
“Sir, the pigs have refused to find any more truffles until you leave.”
This is a man who, more than anyone else - more than Hogan, more than Michaels or Cena - is thought of as the ultimate burial artist. After all, he came up with the idea for the Montreal Screwjob in 1997, two years before he even had a main event spot.
Triple H’s reputation as a behind-the-scenes schemer has never quite left him.
However, supposedly now that he has actual power in the company (rather than politicking stroke backstage), Paul Levesque has mellowed. After all, his spot is secure, and he reports directly to Vince McMahon. What does he have to gain from any of those games now?
Simply put, it seems likely that Triple H’s insecurity extends beyond his full time career as a wrestler. It’s been remarked on several occasions that his various political machinations seem to have revolved around neutering those around him rather than protecting his own position.
At WrestleMania XXVII in April 2011, Triple H faced the Undertaker and lost - but was booked have pulverised the legend so brutally that he needed to be stretchered off.
The following year, the Undertaker, obsessing over the beating he’d received, challenged Triple H to a rematch - despite having won the previous year. This was an inversion of the Shawn Michaels story of the previous two years, in which HBK was obsessed over his 2009 loss to the Dead Man and demanded a rematch. In Triple H’s version, he was the one who got to condescendingly agree to a begged-for rematch.
In late 2011, having not wrestled a match since WrestleMania, Triple H came back to embroil himself in a convoluted babyface vs. babyface feud with rising megastar CM Punk.
During the feud, Triple H was written to be the no-nonsense badass hero and the powerful company executive, wrongfully accused of holding Punk back.
Winning their match at Night Of Champions and making Punk’s conspiracy theories look forced and childish in the meantime, he effectively derailed Punk’s momentum as the hot new main event star in town, momentum Punk never fully recovered even after regaining the WWE Championship.
In 2012 and 2013, he essentially booked himself into a feud with Brock Lesnar in which Lesnar won two out of three matches, but Triple H won the big one at WrestleMania (ie, the one most people would remember).
Last year, he created a storyline in which Sting’s appearance on WWE programming was a holdover from the Monday Night War, despite Sting maintaining that it was nothing to do with WCW and despite Triple H not being a factor in the WWF’s defeat of their competition in those days.
He’d go on to win their match at WrestleMania, Sting’s first ever match for the WWE.
And then there’s Roman Reigns...