WWE COO Triple H was interviewed by ESPN’s Cheap Heat podcast to promote this Sunday’s WrestleMania 33 pay-per-view. Below are some of the highlights from the interview.
On working with Mick Foley on RAW again recently: “It’s funny. There [are] certain guys, or women, that you have a certain chemistry with, right? When you get onscreen with them, there’s just something that it just… whatever… everything clicks and you just have magic, kind of feel to whatever you’re doing and it’s that way with Mick. I think for both of us, we felt like it was a trip back 15 years in time to something that we haven’t done… He and I hadn’t been in the ring together in forever, not in anything meaningful. To have that moment was very cool.”
On the main differences between today’s WWE Superstars compared to those from the Attitude Era: “Part of it is just experience. I think that a lot of it, a lot of times, we… I’ll say this, Shawn and I, Shawn Michaels and I, have had this conversation because he [has] been helping out and doing a lot of things with us at the Performance Center here and there. And I’ve said to him, every now and then you’ve got to say to yourself, ‘these kids are learning – it’s developmental alright when you’re working with them on that level.’ We forget sometimes how brief a period of time some of these guys have been doing this. And because they’re at WrestleMania or because they’re on RAW, and it’s packed and it’s huge, you go, like, ‘but they’re the best in the world.’ Yeah, but they’ve been doing this for two years or they’ve been doing this for three years or sometimes you find guys who’ve been doing it for 15 years, but he [has] been doing it out in the independent circuit and nobody [has] been guiding him. He [has] been the best guy there forever and no one [has] been helping him get better.
“Like, they don’t do a lot of TV interviews. They don’t do a lot of character stuff, so it might have been physically in the ring and even then, guys say they’ve been in the business 10 years, but you’ve been working, what, a couple of days a month, sometimes? So the level of skill is different and I think when you break it down to today versus then, it’s a skill level because… I don’t want to say it’s a skill level because the guys are very skilled. But like, an experience level. You get to a point where you know what you’re doing, but the experience to just feel it and be in that moment without having to think or worry about ‘what do I do here? When he does this, how should I react to that?’ Do it, man. It’s a feel. It’s not a think. And I think that only comes with experience. In this job, you get better with the more reps you do.”
Check out the complete Triple H interview at ESPN.com.