While Paul “Triple H” Levesque may be the new EVP of Talent Relations for the WWE, at his heart, “The Game” is a showman.
In the ring, Levesque was a big game hunter always looking to get himself over, and in his 24-year in-ring tenure with The Fed, he accomplished that feat a ton. He was part of one of the most important factions in WWE history in DX, transitioned nicely to Evolution, and even when his in-ring days were starting to wind down, Levesque found even longer life as a member of The Authority, where he and his wife, Stephanie McMahon, commanded the top of the card with Seth Rollins doing their bidding.
So naturally, even as Levesque fully transitions to a back-of-house role due to his heart condition, the man sometimes known as Hunter Hearst Helmsley is going to yuck it up for the cameras when afforded an opportunity and drop a few, shall we say, incendiary quotes designed to get WWE fans talking and AEW fans fuming mad. I mean, why not, right? Whatever Levesque says is going to get aggregated; why not give folks something to really sink their teeth into?
Fortunately, that exact situation happened on the first Friday in September, when Levesque sat down with Ariel Helwani for BT Sport to have one heck of an on-camera interview. Though he didn't touch on every topic, Bobby Fish was unfortunately absent from the conversation, he said more than enough to get the rumor mills spinning and the fans fired up like only “The Game” can.
Triple H dropped the hammer on some major WWE news
Occasionally, when a journalist is granted a big-time interview with a person of note, they're given a list of topics they can't ask about – think Sammy Guevara calling Eddie Kingston fat on AEW. While this can make an interview feel overly generous and can leave fans rolling their eyes, unfortunately, that's just part of the business.
Fortunately, Helwani was not given such a mandate and threw an absolute scorcher right down the middle of the plate to test Levesque's mettle: what happened with the Wednesday Night Wars?
For those out of the know, when AEW secured their TV deal with TNT, WWE attempted to counter the move Worlds Collide-style by moving NXT to television on the very same night at the very same time. Though it was continually postured that this wasn't meant to compete with Tony Khan's company or to steal eyes away from AEW's product, that quickly became the consensus among fans of either company, who would wait patiently for Bryan Alvarez to tweet out the viewership numbers for the sake of bragging rights.
Did this fan-anointed war affect Levesque in the same way it affected the fans and presumably USA Network, who moved the show to Tuesdays in order to generate more viewers during contract negotiations? According to the man himself, the answer is a resounding no, as he detailed to Helwani as per a transcription from Wrestling News.
“No, look, people put so much pressure on this competitive wars, it never was that. Look, first of all, they beat our developmental system, good for them. Right? No, it was never that. There was never even a pressure of like ‘you have to beat that.' Like, it was never that. It's put on the best product we could. Like I said, it shifted over time, during the pandemic, all of that shifted over time. And the opportunity for us to change it back to what it truly was. Right? When you look at a lot of the stars that have come through that system, that had either started from zero, or very little exposure anywhere and then became massive stars with us. so many people. And we had lost the ability to take those people and groom them from the ground up. We really had, and it's the biggest change that's out there.”
“I'm proud of where Shawn and that team have taken that even under circumstances where the change happened and was massive and all at once. And they sort of kind of got this jumble thrown at him and had to go out there and take that and run with it. The job they've done is amazing. And now I think you're starting to see people begin to you know, they got a clean slate and all these athletes you'd never heard of and never seen before. And they're green and don't know what they're doing, and they're out there doing this, you're seeing it now start to pick up tempo again and start to become what it is, again. I truly believe in that brand. I think you'll see that here as well.
The decision to pull NXT UK back. It's the right decision for us, we had plans to do what we're going to do now right before the pandemic hit. And it took it all the way. So we weren't able to do that. Our partnership with BT allowed it to stay on the air the whole time. But the truth is, it was totally different from where we wanted it to go. We're pulling it off the air now so that we can get to NXT Europe because it's tough to do both at the exact same time to continue to operate a product but build a new product around it. We're gonna pull it off for a little bit, we're going to bring NXT Europe back in a bigger way than it ever was before. And the intent is hopefully, if we're successful at it to replicate that. So it's NXT Europe, it's NXT, India, it's NXT, South Africa, it's NXT Mexico. [And] be able to take those products, put them around everywhere and eventually over time to build brands in those markets locally and build World Cup scenarios around that where, you know, they're competing on that level, all over the globe. And that tide then feeds into Raw and Smackdown. If Raw and SmackDown are the NFL, NXT at all levels is collegiate football. It's amazing football. In some ways, same as the NFL, some people like it better. It becomes that, but it's all a feeder system to the overall picture.”
Goodness gracious, there's a lot to unpack in that one.
Is NXT a developmental system for WWE? Yes, much like college football, most wrestlers who enter the WWE system aren't looking to wrestle in NXT forever. As weeks turn into months, performers are supposed to get better, and the ones who should eventually find themselves drafted up to either RAW or SmackDown. Then again, if that was truly the case, why did Levesque and his DX/NXT partner in crime Shawn Michaels consistently rely on older talents like Adam Cole, Tommaso Ciampa, and even Finn Balor in an attempt to get ratings wins over AEW?
Did NXT get moved because they lost the war, or did WWE care about the show's ratings about as much as a Major League Baseball team cares about the record of their AA team? Only Triple H and a handful of others truly know the answer to that question, and they'll probably never tell either way.
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