Why Vince McMahon Has Erased Triple H's Legacy
Schadenfreude can be an ugly thing, but anybody that lived through a number of the professional choices Triple H made that were to the detriment of wrestling fan enjoyment had to get a little kick out of his desperate state on the February 18th 2019 edition of Monday Night Raw.
WrestleMania 35 was on the horizon, with a sure-to-be-legendary NXT TakeOver: New York set to take place one night earlier. With a feud against Batista on the main roster to keep hot and an entire roster to carefully guide to his own brand's biggest ever event, 'The Game' was a busy boy. But he didn't want to be.
Out of absolutely nowhere and with no clear goal beyond getting through the evening, reigning NXT Champion Tommaso Ciampa was called up alongside Johnny Gargano, Aleister Black and Ricochet in what now appears in hindsight to be Vince McMahon's flailing final effort to fall in love with his son-in-law's pet project.
Was McMahon only half-a*sed? Was Hunter trying to play a bit of 4D chess to preserve what he loved the most? Whatever the motivations of the powerful promoters, the powerless performers got jack sh*t out of the deal. Sometimes worse - Ciampa's matches on Raw and on the following evening's SmackDown taping in particular were disastrous. Fine in execution, a couple of middling contests aggravated a neck injury that forced him to miss the planned title showdown with Gargano just over a month later.
It didn't go much better for the other three. McMahon had requested an elite tier four, got them, and presumably thought they were too small and shoved them all in tag teams anyway. Gargano escaped via a fire escape opened up by Ciampa's injury, whilst Black and Ricochet were lazily paired together in a quick-fix that turned out to be as good as it got for either of them.
It was a complete sh*tshow. And though you'd think McMahon would know a thing or two about that after booking every Raw and SmackDown for the last twenty years, it kicked off a period of fatal alienation that doomed what was for a time the safest desk in Titan Tower.
CONT'D...