Grantland spoke with Triple H before last Sunday’s SummerSlam pay-per-view. Here are some highlights from the interview
Who decides to put him in storylines: “Yeah, it can come out of creative, but the ultimate sign-off is Vince. Technically, creative reports to Steph, but Steph is kind of the aggregator. Her office does everything from the magazine to digital to the shows, so it’s funny when people will say, ‘Oh, Steph and the creatives.’ She really doesn’t have anything to do with the day-to-day. I mean, she’ll weigh in on something if Vince asks or if the writers ask her what she thinks before they bring something to Vince.â€
Being able to spot a star even if they don’t know what they’re doing in the ring: “Well, is Ryback the most skilled guy in the ring? He’s doing pretty good, though. When we did the Nexus, obviously we already kind of saw Wade Barrett had it, but Ryback was the guy that stuck out. And it wasn’t just because he was the biggest guy — that’s what everybody thinks. But that physique is a blessing and a curse. If you look like him, when you walk out from behind that curtain, they go, ‘Whoa, look at this guy, he’d better impress me. Because if you stink, I’m going to crap on you right away.’ Then it’s “The big guy can’t move. The big guy is terrible.â€
If top stars have input on storylines: “Depends on the guy. You know, Austin — I don’t mean this in a disparaging way — Austin would look at something and go, ‘That sucks, I ain’t doing that. Come back when you get something better.’ But I would go, ‘Well, what are we trying to get out of this? What if we did this?’ And then Vince would be like, ‘That’s a decent idea, but what if we took that, but did this?’ I like that process. I think that was what worked with Vince.â€
The Reddit guy posting WWE pay-per-view results: “The night we brought Lesnar in, the fans were chanting his name, and Vince said to me, ‘How do they know we have Lesnar here?’ They didn’t! They’d heard rumors that Lesnar was a possibility. But if you watched that crowd, they were f-cking blown away when he walked out there. And that’s the difference. People think they know, but they really don’t know any of the inner mechanics of what we do. Every now and then there’s something in there that will be right on, and I think that’s because talent put it out there. Talent hear things and that’s fine. We don’t really put much thought into it, to be quite honest. We just dislike when people ruin stuff for fans. It’s like telling kids Santa Claus is fake. Why do it? It doesn’t benefit anybody other than the ego of the person who put it out there. I never understood that. Why would you tell people what’s going on? Isn’t that the whole point of what we do, to keep them on the edge of their seats? I mean, yeah, we see where the Internet is going. We’re giving fans more access now and doing shows like Total Divas. But I laugh, like, when writers say ‘Oh, CM Punk laid the pipe bomb and lifted the fourth wall in a promo.’ So let me get this straight, you think we put him out on TV, he broke f-cking everything we were supposed to do, and then sat down Indian-style and started blistering everybody, and we didn’t think ‘Let’s take him off the air?’ If that would’ve been a shoot, it would’ve been off the air the second he started.â€
