long interview with triple h he answers the questions really well and can tell he knows the business
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id...view-wwe-superstar-corporate-officer-triple-h
So how's your job?
I'm in the office full-time. I work more now than I ever did. I'm not on the road full-time I'm at every TV, every pay-per-view, but not traveling, not making live events. I just do occasional [on-camera] stuff when it works for the story line.
Who decides to put you in a story line? Does it come from the creative team?
Yeah, it can come out of creative,1 but the ultimate sign-off is Vince.2 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.
So she's mainly big-picture?
Yeah. And because she's not on the road as much, she'll watch the shows from home and give us a completely different perspective. We say it all the time: It's the hardest thing to see everything. You're in the foxhole. We'll do Raw and I won't even see the whole show because from Gorilla Position, I'm that filter before it gets to Vince. So Vince sits in one seat and he talks to the truck and stuff, and I'm in the seat next to him talking to the truck and talking to the ring, and if something just changed in Segment 1, I've got to nip up and go get the change to everybody else, or I'll call a writer in and say, "This just went down, we gotta go here." It's live TV. But when you're at home watching it, it's a completely different perspective. Sometimes we don't see all the video packages or the commercials. You lose perspective. So Steph will see something and say "Hey, guys, I think you're losing the plot here."
But for the most part, she controls the gigantic entity that creative is so that there's continuity between the digital and the magazine, continuity between the domestic shows or the shows that run internationally, all of those components and those teams, which is a massive amount of people. But creatively, the final sign-off is Vince.
Some people might be amazed that he's still so involved. What is this, like, 35 years for him?
That's what he loves to do. It's funny. I often think to myself, he's a promoter and creative guy that somehow got caught up running a corporation. All the other stuff is like his day job, it's "This is the shit I gotta do" talk to finance people, see to this and that. But at the end of the day, he really likes to sit down in the room with the creative people and talk about creative.
Starting a year after I got to the WWF, Vince would say, "Hey, you have an opinion on this, what's your opinion?" And I'd give Vince my opinions. Sometimes he liked it, sometimes he didn't, but we kind of established that working relationship so that when Russo left in the middle of the night to go to WCW,8 I went to Vince and I just said, "I understand how creative works. You can't bounce ideas off yourself. So if you want to bounce ideas off me, I'm happy to just hear you out and give you my opinion. Not saying you need it, just saying it's there."
So two days later, my phone rang, and Vince said "Hey, pal, you got a minute? You talked to me about bouncing around some ideas. Can I run a couple things by you? See what you think?'' And that started it. Shortly thereafter, it was, "You want to start coming to production meetings? I could really use you in there." And I've been doing it since probably '98, '99.
All the best wrestlers in the company have input on some level, right?
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.
Did the other wrestlers get competitive? Like, why this guy and not me?
There were guys that looked at it like, "Well, that's bullshit." There were a few guys who went to Vince and said, "Hey, I'd like to be involved like that too." What they didn't get was I'm not trying to put myself over, but there's a level of additional work that comes with it. So when everyone else's call time is one o'clock, I'd be there at 10 o'clock. Even if we had to drive in from the last show and I got in at four in the morning, if I told Vince I'd be at that production meeting at 10 a.m., I was at that production meeting at 10 a.m., bleary-eyed but ready to go. And those other guys would do that once or twice and be like, "Well, I'm not doing that. I'm not making more money from that, no one's paying me extra." I never looked at it that way. I've heard this saying before: Success is not a destination, success is what happens along the way. I dig what I do every single day. Everything else takes care of itself.
There's been a lot written about you on the Internet over the years.
I wish I had the brainpower and the wherewithal and the drive to be as maniacal and devious as people fucking think I am. I'd be fucking Darth Vader. I'd run the Empire, and I guess maybe that's how some people see it, right? They'd say "Oh, he went in there and he buried29 this guy," and it's like, fuck, I had nothing to do with that. I didn't even know he was coming in until I saw him that day.
One of the biggest differences in today's programming versus 10 or 15 years ago is the TV-PG rating, and the end of the hard-core stuff. Was there a point after ECW, after Foley in Hell in a Cell, when you reached a point there where you were like, "All right, how much further can we take this?"
All that stuff is just special effects. It's crazy special effects that you've never seen before, but if the story's not good, it's still a crap movie it just has a bunch of stuff exploding. Visually, it's unbelievable, but you're bored 20 minutes in. At a certain point in time, those special effects just started to become all we were.
We were putting together a Hell in a Cell match once with Shawn and me against Vince and Shane and the Big Show. And Shane is the king of daredevils, and we were putting together all these crazy spots, and it's just bothering me.
Vince was like, "I can tell you don't like any of this. Why?" It was because all we're doing is putting together a bunch of special effects. And I said "People paid a lot of money to see Shawn and me stick your head up Big Show's ass, but we're jumping off a cage, landing on tables. Why?" And Vince said, "You're right. Start over." We could fall off all that stuff that day, but it's not what they wanted to see. It wasn't about the special effects; it was about the story line.
We reached a point where everything just became special effects. We had to pull back and go back to story lines.
People will look at the Attitude Era and they'll go, "Ahh, the golden age," but then they'll look back at the '80s with Crockett Promotions and the WWF and say, "Oh, that was the golden age, too!" So, which is it? Because they couldn't be more different. That's as PG36 as you can get.
A great example is the Undertaker-Michaels match at WrestleMania 26. That match, it breathed. It had a pace. It didn't have 40 bumps, but the story line itself was what made it great.
At the end of the day, it's all about the story, and it's not about the bumps. Mick Foley37 was the king of guys who would take chair shots with his hands down.38 I used to say to Mick all the time, "Let me get this straight: Reality-based, you turn around and you see a guy swing a bat at your head, you just put your hands down? Is that what you would do? Because that to me is bogus. You're just appeasing people who want to see you get hit in the head with a chair. You're not telling them a story, you're showing them it's crap." There's always going to be a certain group of people who like horror movies just for the special effects and the slasher stuff. It doesn't matter. That's why schlocky B-films work. They're terrible. The dialogue is horrible, the acting is bad, but there's a certain group of people that just love them because a guy killed a guy with a pencil through his neck. It's just crazy.
That's why we've had eight Saw movies.
That's why we're doing Leprechaun 7.39
The old ECW had so many great moments, but sometimes if you go back and watch a whole episode or a pay-per-view, it's like porn. It can get to be too much.
Bringing it back to the present day, you were talking about Heyman making stars out of guys. Now you're running the talent department, from signings all the way up.
Yeah, that's mine. Everything that has to do with talent, from the legends41 to the developmental system, to the live events and all of its operations and the towns we book, to where the pay-per-views are, all of it. Obviously I have a massive team that does all that, but they report to me.
I started in the office full-time a few years ago. Vince had been bugging me for a while, saying "When are you going to stop messing around in the ring and come get a real job?" So one time when I was injured, I shadowed him in the office for three months. I did everything he did. When I finally started full-time, he was like, "Take a few months. I want you to dig into everything. Have meetings with finance, dig into every part of this company and see what you think needs work." And the thing I came back to him with was we have this huge global marketing juggernaut, but we're a victim of our own success. We've shut down all the other territories. There's almost no place for guys to go learn, and when they do, they're learning how to work in a junior high in front of 50 people. It's a completely different thing than working in front of 10,000 or a million on TV with a camera in your face.
So I started this little division called talent development. It was basically to build a bridge between creative and the developmental wrestlers. Now, other than Vince saying, "OK, you can have that amount of money," he doesn't have anything to do with it. Honest to god, he hasn't even seen the Performance Center yet. He's supposed to go next week.
So now you can train guys from day one instead of recruiting all your guys from other companies.
You have to give talent the tools to succeed. First of all you have to find the right people, the right athletes. Sometimes for guys who have been in the indies for five or six years, it's harder to break them of bad habits than it is to start them fresh. Some guys won't have it. You say, "I know you worked someplace else, but that's just not how it really works. It might've worked there, but let me show you how it works in the real world." And no matter what you show them, they say, "Man, listen, I know how to do this. Don't show me that. I know how to do it."
There's a lot of pride in pro wrestling.
There is. One thing that kills me about the Internet is that if you look hard enough, you can find someone to love you. And you will find a website dedicated to you that will tell you that you are the greatest thing on the planet. And you go on Twitter and the people who say you suck, they get blocked. And pretty soon, everybody's telling you, "Dude, you are the greatest, why doesn't WWE hire you? You're the greatest thing in the world." And you start thinking, Yeah, why don't they hire me? Those guys are idiots. They don't know anything. That's where some guys get it in their heads and they can't get it out.
But it's also a business where you have to have a big ego to get in there in the first place.
You have to have a big ego, but asking questions is not a weakness. It's a strength. It's great to know that I'm really good at this, and I have all the faith in my ability to take that gamble every day. It doesn't mean I can't get better if somebody is willing to help me. That's why I went to Kowalski's school.43 When I looked at the schools that were available, I thought, Kowalski was a big star. He knows how to be a big star. He's been there, maybe he's figured it out. So you have to have a healthy ego, but you also have to be willing to learn and understand you don't know everything. Nobody does. Even Vince, he'll tell you he doesn't.
So in developmental, you give them all those tools, but they've got to be willing to use them. So you've got to find the right athletes, the right human beings, the right mental attitude, and then they have to be open to the creative process. And they need an inner charisma and an X factor to them. There's a lot of times you can look at a guy who doesn't know what he's doing in the ring but you can tell he's going to be a star.
Give me a recent example.
Well, is Ryback the most skilled guy in the ring?
No.
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."
