Triple H worked closely with Vince McMahon for nearly thirty years, first as a talent and a key member of the roster during his days with D-Generation X and WWE Champion, and then more behind the scenes in a creative and executive position.
McMahon resigned from his position as WWE Chairman in January 2024 after a lawsuit was filed by former employee Janel Grant, who accused McMahon of sex trafficking and sexual assault.
With McMahon gone, Triple H has become the lead creative director in the company.
Appearing on the High Performance podcast, Triple H discussed sitting under the learning tree of Vince McMahon.
"When you learn, especially from mentors, you learn what to do and what not to do. There were things that bothered me about the way he did things. Certain things with his personality, he would run things totally different than I would, and we've talked about that before. Even when I was running NXT he would be like, 'Why are you doing it like that?' 'Because it's working for me,'" he said.
Asked to give an example, Triple H replied, "He was much more controlling, especially as he got older, much more controlling. When I first came in, when we started DX, we were just doing our own thing. Nobody was scripting anything. We were doing our own thing, most times we were coming back and he was mad at us and screaming at us, 'We're gonna get thrown off the air, goddamnit, don't do that again.' We were just like, 'Whatever,' and we'd go do it again the following week. Then there was a point where that started to work and we started to really get over and it started to do big business and ratings changed. Now, all of a sudden, we show up to TV one week and they hand us a script, 'What is this?' 'It's what Vince wants you to say tonight.' 'What? He doesn't tell us what to say.' 'He wants to start.' We'd go into his office, 'What is this?' 'It's a script. It's what I want you to say.' 'This is terrible. It's not funny. It's not us.' I was much newer. Shawn [Michaels] was Shawn at the time. We're sitting in the meeting, we read it a couple of times, we had the argument with him and he said, 'That's what I want you guys to do. Just go do it.' Shawn crumpled up the piece of paper and said, 'I ain't saying any of this shit.' Threw it at Vince and we walked out of the office. I was like, 'Wow, we're getting fired.' There were various points of time where he would become very controlling of things. Very specific to how he wanted it to be. It's his prerogative, he's the boss. We would all talk about it and be like, 'It would be better if we did this.' Even Pat Patterson would come to me, 'Vince wants to do this thing and it's so stupid. Let's do this instead.' 'Pat, I talked to him until I was blue in the face. You go talk to him.'"
Triple H was in charge of NXT until a health scare in September 2021 forced him to take a step back from his role. Shawn Michaels was put in charge of creative at the time. Triple H would begin leading WWE creative in June 2022 when McMahon initially retired after allegations of hush money and sexual misconduct.
Elsewhere during the interview, Triple H commented on working creatively with CM Punk. You can find his full comments by clicking here.
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