With WWEs recent movement to further give female wrestlers a chance to shine under the biggest spotlight in the industry creating the Mae Young Classic, Triple H sees the all-women tournament as an opportunity to create and groom the next generation of women wrestlers.
Triple H appeared on Uproxx’s “McMahonsplaining” podcast to talk about the Mae Young Classic, which recently concluded with Kairi Sane winning the tournament. Triple H said the tournament took “a lot of time and effort” but said WWE’s recent spike in women becoming top stars in WWE has been a great help to the cause of gender equality In pro wrestling. The former WWE Champion said the women of WWE have not been handed anything, but earned the opportunities presented to them.
“It really is just a lot of time and effort. Seeing an opportunity in athletics and entertaining of women kind of kicking down that door and just saying, ‘No, we can do anything,’ I sort of just ran with that. We hired the right people at the Performance Center and brought in the right talent to train them in different ways. It’s just been this evolution and it’s been this way and starting to slowly permeate its way to the main roster, slowly starting to change the business and [we’ve been] finding out that these women can do everything the men can do on every level. We’re not doing this because we’re just giving them this moment and that there’s this movement going on, no it’s because they deserve it. I don’t give them the main event. They take the main event. If the people have the most attention to it, it’s the main event,” Triple H said.
In the past couple of years, women in WWE have taken a far more prominent role as it pertains to getting the spotlight on them. Women like Charlotte, Sasha Banks and Bayley have main evented WWE pay-per-views and NXT TakeOver shows while other women such as Carmella became the first woman to hold the Money in the Bank contract.
But even with all the accomplishments that the current WWE and NXT women’s roster have earned, Triple H sees the Mae Young Classic as the next step to inspiring young women all over the world to lace up wrestling boots and have a career in professional wrestling.
“The thing that is awesome to me is that, today is the day I feel like women all over the globe 10 years from now, I’m going to be recruiting women and we’re going to working with them into the WWE and I’m going to say, ‘What was the moment you realized you wanted to be in sports entertainment and be in WWE?’ and they’ll say ‘The Mae Young Classic, the first Mae Young Classic. I watch Kairi Sane and Shayna Baszler and that is the moment I had to do this.’ That to me is cool. These women that are in this tournament are going to inspire generations to do what they do and what cooler thing to do than that?” Triple H said.
The podcast can be listened to at this link.
