A recent episode of the Impaulsive podcast had Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque as the guest. One of the topics discussed included Levesque’s thoughts on Vince McMahon taking wrestling from being a “tiny little thing” held in bars to becoming a global sensation.
“I’ll say this about Vince, massive shoes that I couldn’t even dream of beginning to think I could fill. The gap there in this moment is massive but the opportunity to take it in a direction that it’s never gone before is massive. I’m thrilled for that opportunity. We have an unbelievable team. It’s never going to be one person, one person can’t even begin to fill his shoes, it’s going to take an entire team of people to jump in those shoes because without him, there’s none of this.
The vision to take this tiny, little thing happening in bars to this big global sensation like nothing else. WrestleMania is one of the most valuable sports franchises on the planet.”
Levesque also gave his thoughts on the differences between boxing and wrestling performances in front of a live crowd.
“You box a dude like Floyd [Mayweather] you have one focus.
You have one focus, an athletic event is different, one focus, it’s the person in front of you. You’re not so worried about fans, you’re not so worried about the reactions.
Our job is to make them go crazy. Your focus is on their reaction.”
Levesque also gave his thoughts on why wrestling matches should be more about creating drama than just focusing on moves.
“It’s not the moves. It’s like watching a movie, how many movies have you seen with crazy budgets and special effects and CGI that visually you go like, ‘holy s**t, that’s amazing’ and no one cares? The movie bombs, there’s no story, no one really fully cares because it’s not about the moves in what we do, it’s about what you do in between, it’s the characters and the story.
I can make a way longer list of terrible athletes that were incredibly over in this business than I can crazy athletes who were the be-all end-all. People that are fanatics about what we do go like ‘oh my god, that match was so good, those guys are so good,’ everybody else is like ‘meh’.”
Later in the interview, Levesque commented on the benefits of highlight-worthy wrestling moments for matches.
“The story has to be there but yeah the special effects got to be good when you get them and you’ve got to have the commercial moment to sell the movie because there are a million great movies out there that nobody gave a s**t about and/or watched because there was nothing that hooked them to go see it. You have to have that hook and you have to have those things.”
Transcript h/t: F4WOnline.com